Slashdot Mirror
Tech Billionaire-Backed Charter School Under Fire In Chicago
theodp writes "'As a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm,' boasts the billionaire-backed NewSchools Venture Fund, 'we raise philanthropic capital from both individual and institutional investors, and then use those funds to support education entrepreneurs who are transforming public education.' One recipient of the NewSchools' largesse is The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which received a $5,300,000 NewSchools 'investment', as well as a $1,425,000 grant from NewSchools donor Bill Gates. One way that Noble Street College Prep has been transforming education, reports the Chicago Tribune, is by making students pay the price — literally — for breaking the smallest of rules (sample infractions). Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel defended Noble after a FOIA filing revealed the charter collected almost $190,000 in discipline 'fees' — not 'fines' — last year from its mostly low-income students, saying the ironically exempt-from-most-district-rules charter school gets 'incredible' results and parents don't have to send their children there. Beyond the Noble case, some are asking a bigger question: Should billionaires rule our schools?"
Should billionaires rule our schools?
No, but I don't think they are (well, at least no more than they rule everything else). The summary makes two HUGE jumps here. It starts by saying that the NewSchools Venture Fund is giving grants to charter schools. Then it attempts to smear the very idea by criticizing one particular practice of one particular group of charter schools in Chicago. Then it makes an even bigger jump by equating this with billionaires "ruling" our schools (as if individual donors to this fund created this one controversial policy, or even had any idea that it existed). I think that whoever wrote this summary is being unfairly critical of charter schools, and even more unfair to those rich donors who are actually *trying* to help (as opposed to those who just hoard their money and or just their wealth to buy new Ferraris).
In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S., I think that those who still CHOOSE to help our ailing schools should be praised, not chastised, for the policies of one particular charter school (and I don't even find their policy that egregious in the first place). It's nice to know that not *all* rich people are just greedy pricks who would say "fuck all" to the poor.
Ideally, the U.S. would have a system where this kind of charity isn't necessary in the first place. But until that day, I don't think we should turn away any help just because it comes from Bill Gates.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Chewing gum.
Carrying visible “flaming or hot chips.’’
Tardy to class more than 3 minutes.
Forgetting your belt.
Carrying a Sharpie or other permanent marker.
Forgetting to place quotation marks around another writer’s words.
Having visible Red Bull, other energy drinks or pop.
Not wearing dress pants or the school shirt.
What's the problem here? These seem pretty straightforward and hard to fuck up, less the Tardy to class one, but you know what? A lot of workplaces aren't cool with that either. I think it's not a bad thing.
If paying these fines is a problem, then make sure you don't get hit with them.
If you don't want your kid to be educated with a strict set of rules in the school, then choose a different school.
We've got enough problems in the US with the systems currently under corporate influence. Why give them another?
Govt and corps have merged, so all public schools are already under corporate dominance. The non-public schools aka private schools are also corporate controlled by definition. Not seeing the issue here.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
First off, are these fines working?
Seriously, gum chewing in schools is a big problem. It is disgusting finding your pants stuck to a desk because someone stuck their gum there.
What's wrong with teaching about plagiarism with a fine. In the real world, fine's are much more.
What are the penalties of not paying a fine? (Can it be sent to collection and ruin your credit rating? That might be too much.)
Are the kids learning? Is the learning environment better than the comparable city schools thanks to the discipline?
OH MY GOD!!!!!
Disciplining children. I mean we removed spanking. We removed yelling. Now we're having issue with financial penalties.
Would someone like to propose an alternative for keeping out classrooms from being like zoos?
Students at Noble schools receive demerits for various infractions -- four for having a cellphone or one for untied shoelaces. Four demerits within a two-week period earn them a detention and $5 fine. Students who get 12 detentions in a year must attend a summer behavior class that costs $140.
Five dollars for four demerits appears reasonable. Do the students get a warning and then a demerit?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I went to Missouri Military Academy. Although we didn't have to pay fines, sorry fees, there were a ton of different rules that would get you in trouble. Some demerits were worth more than others. For each point we got the joy and pleasure of marching in a square for 15 min/per demerit. Or 30 min of study hall, depending on the day, or holding an 8 lbs rife straight out for 5 min. The only thing we had to pay with was our free time. In a non boarding school situation money is the only thing you've got to work with, and it has the effect of getting the parent involved as well, since they are paying. I'm sure life isn't good for the kids when mom and dad get a bill for $X and the kid get to spend his time at home working it off. It's looks like the cost of the demerits are fairly cheap, less than a pack of off brand smokes. So it's not like people are getting saddled with huge costs. Sure the list of demerits seems pretty nit picky, but I've experienced worse. "Not sitting up straight, Running in front of the admin building, Gigline not straight." I'm glad some schools out there are trying something different, esp if it seems to be working.
I dislike the fines, but this is EXACTLY the way things like this should be tried out. Try things at relatively small scale and on a population that volunteers for it. This is exactly the way medical research is carried out. If you want the cancer treatment that looks promising, but might not actually work, you have to volunteer to get it and it's available to a limited number of people.
Contrast this with what we usually do: entire school districts, or worse, entire states, or MUCH worse, the whole country tries some harebrained scheme, or even some halfway decent sounding scheme, which turns out to have real problems. Take No Child Left Behind, for example. Testing to measure performance sounds like a really good idea. Could we perhaps have tried it out on a smaller group than the whole country in order to find out it doesn't work?
*I* don't like the idea, but my kids aren't going there. Leave them alone unless there's sufficient data to prove this performs worse than the default.
Incredibly good, I assume.
In evaluating the school, I think you have to first judge how well it is serving the students and families. Then things like the welfare of the teachers and the quality of the facilities. The billionaire connection is rather far down the list of things that I would be concerned about.
Certainly to the teacher's unions, any movement toward charter schools, homeschooling, vouchers, etc. is an "attack on public education". Fortunately, many people (read: parents) have the best interests of the students at heart and recognize when either public institutions or individuals within public institutions are failing to serve that prime objective. The cries of "racism" are typical of the left whenever the money isn't flowing their way, whether or not it has anything to do with race intrinsically.
We've got enough problems in the US with the systems currently under corporate influence. Why give them another?
Yeah and look at how great a job the government has done running those public schools! Some of the students might even be able to read by the time they graduate!
/sarcasm
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
The best correlation of student success is parental interest in their kids education. I come from immigrant family were this was a factor. I and my brothers all received at least one ivy league degree. I've seen poor immigrants from east Europe and Asia do well even when the family did not have a lot of money. Unfortunately the two largest minority groups in the USA do not have lots of family interest in education. They dont do as well even when their schools are well funded.
At least these schools give one a choice. Unfortunately, I bet that everybody still has to fund public schools whether their children go there or not--and while that's precisely analogous to the "Microsoft tax", I bet there will be slashdotters who will defend it.
In the real world, fine's are much more.
Improper use of an apostrophe. $50 fine and 20 points from Gryffindor.
Generally it's better to keep the child in school learning, however imperfectly, than having them running around the streets on suspension. You have to ensure that disruptive pupils don't impact on other children's learning, but the principle is a good one.
Pft. Considering the state of public education these days, fuck'em. And I say that in the nicest way possible. About 3/4's of the kids in the neighborhood where the wife and I are are either home schooled or go to a private school, simply because parents don't believe that they're being taught correctly. Then again this is Ontario, no the US. But the more flappyheadeness that comes from a teacher and unions over 'attacks on public education' the further I come to believe that there's something fundamentally broken.
I still remember the happy-go-lucky fun times of attempted indoctrination and pressuring, though I actually didn't understand it until I was much older. As far back as grade 5. When the teachers here would push students to pressure their parents to vote for political parties like the NDP or we wouldn't get paper and pencils.
Om, nomnomnom...
I think that some of the infractions are rather silly and over the top, but your hyperbole is unwarranted.
What the rest of the world does or does not earn in a day has absolutely no bearing on fines in a US school. Zero. Zilch, Nada.
Saying that some exist in America (too) is at least hitting closer to home, but also has no bearing here. The school is an optional alternative to public schools. If the parents cannot afford their children's fines, they may always move them (back) to the "free" public schools.
Actual, better pretty much any group than Public Sector Unions.
Fix the System:
1. Triple every teacher's salary
2. Eliminate Collective Bargaining and Tenure, replacing with individually negotiated Employment Contracts with a maximum 3-year term.
3. Teachers without Employment Contracts have their salaries available for merit-based increase biennially.
3. Eliminate Pensions.
In short, make teachers' jobs like most every other valued job for which you want constant strong competition among skilled employees and potential employees.
There is also http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/ and http://thelotteryfilm.com/ which is a look at charter schools in DC & NYC as well as the problems in the system itself.
Part of the problem is that people (such as yourself) keep framing the charter/voucher issue as an "attack" on public education when its nothing of the sort, people are not advocating for shutting down public schools and the only way charters & vouchers will "take money away" from public schools is if they perform better. What people are advocating for is choice, if the current system really is superior then it won't face any problems with charters or vouchers, if it is endemically broken then reform will be forced or the system will simply die.
For people who claim we can reform the current system what evidence is there that this will even happen? Reform has been promised for decades but every year the system gets more and more expensive while delivering poorer results, this is absolutely no evidence the system is even capable of being reformed. Administrative overheads in schools are absurd, and absurdities such as the fact it costs $300k and 11 months to fire a teacher in NYC (assuming it is not blocked by one of the dozens of boards and comities involved), to the extent that the average cost to send a child to a single year of K-12 is now $13.2k, the average private school costs $8.7k.
Since the politicians and unions who run the school systems are unwilling to fix the problems charters and vouchers are the best option.
Students have to be careful carrying a Sharpie, they could get cut!
If you have seen the sheer amount of graffiti in your average inner city school, you would understand that this rule is not as silly as it sounds. If you want to create a positive educational environment, one of the first steps is not having gang tags splayed on every open surface in your school.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So you're fine with private organizations imposing fines on a whim?
It is troubling that we have to get to this to impose discipline, and it sure raises a few eyebrows. But on a whim? They aren't. These are infractions. Yes, not having your shirt buttoned or chewing gum, those are behavioral infractions. Fining over them can be argued to be questionable, but flagging these kind of things as infractions is perfectly reasonable. You need to get off your cornbread boundaries and visit other countries with more successful education systems than ours - wearing a proper school uniform is typically one of their common features. There are many reasons why this is so, and it is not rocket science why it works and why it is necessary.
And that a school teaches its students to submit to such arbitrary authority?
It's called discipline, something that apparently you were never exposed to during your primary and secondary education.
My SO works in the DC office responsible for training the evaluators who assess teachers in the classroom. I don't know exactly how it worked under Rhee, but I do know the way it works now... about half of teacher evaluations are based on standardized test scores, and the other half is based on in-class observation by professional evaluators.
No one is going to argue that teachers can overcome the strong influences of parental involvement and other exogenous factors. However, of the things that can be dealt with in the school, teacher quality is likely the most important. If year after year you have a teacher whose students show no improvement at all and there are other teachers in the same school (and even same subject) who students do show improvement, what do you do?
There are in fact efforts to identify high quality teachers and disseminate their practices to the rest of the teaching population (this was my SO's last work project), so it's not as if there are no resources going into actually improving the quality of teachers in the classroom. However, the fact remains that in many cases you have teachers who may very well be veterans of the classroom but who frankly aren't all that good at their job. Tenure for primary and secondary teachers in this day and age doesn't make sense - you need to be able to fire poor performers.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Chicago has how many public schools in it? And this is ONE private school you have a problem with? As noted, sending your children there is a choice - something the vast majority of parents lack for their children.
BTW, Chicago teachers, after being forced to forgo this year's 4% pay raise are trying to negotiate a 25% raise next year, with another 4.5% the following year - based, in large part, on the extension of the school day. Apparently the teachers that used to argue they were salaried professionals are now arguing they are hourly workers.
This is also Chicago, where TVs are falling and killing small children at alarming rates.
This is Chicago, the city that was recently ranked the most corrupt city in America.
This is Chicago, where nearly 40% of all students dropped out before graduation LAST YEAR.
This is Chicago where almost 31% of students either meet or exceed standards on the PSAE examinations.
Did parents know about these "fees" when they enrolled? Were the reasons for them explained to the parents when they enrolled their children?
There must have been some reason these parents choose to enroll their children in this school.
Ken
What, as opposed to the 47% of citizens that now net zero federal taxes at all? That the top 1% already pays 40% of the national tax burden?
That's exactly the opposite of what the article said. Did you actually read the article you are linking to? If so, then you're deliberately misrepresenting it.
The actual headline is:
"Yes, 47% of Households Owe No Taxes. Look Closer."
The article says that's true only if you define "taxes" to exclude payroll taxes. It says:
"About three-quarters of households pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes."
I really get pissed off when people try to have an intelligent, informed conversation and you have to spend 15 minutes checking the conservative sources and have their facts turn out to be wrong. Deliberately distorting facts is the worst thing you can do, IMO. Negligently distorting facts is a pretty close second.
It's a waste of time to try to have an intelligent debate with conservatives. The time is better spent reading Paul Krugman http://www.playboy.com/magazine/playboy-interview-paul-krugman and going to Occupy Wall Street to figure out how to organize politically to stop them from destroying the country.
I think you're sort of on the right track. The problem is how much do we respect the students' ability and right to informed consent? Do the students' have a voice at all, do they deserve one, and for that matter, how informed are the parents going into these experiments? This is true of both large and small project, and solutions are hard to come by, which is part of the issue with the snails pace of educational reform.
NCLB isn't a new idea, in fact, that isn't even the real name. It is actually a set of additional rules for Title 1 funding from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act from 1965. Title 1 federal funds have had various stipulations through the years, and the current AYP goals on annual tests are just the latest. There are other sections, also, like Title 3, which deals with funds for language learners. The federal government can't influence educational policy directly, so they gather up as much money as they can, and then attach as many strings as they can, so that eventually federal policy becomes mandated at the local level. Who does this affect the most? The least funded schools in low socioeconomic areas. Wealthy school districts don't need Title 1 money, and have always been able to just tell the feds to screw off.
But since not all schools are funded the same way (in California, look at the "Basic aid" vs. "Revenue Limited" issue which ensures the disparity) the federal money is very, very important to some districts. In fact, my current position is funded entirely through federal funding sources. Some here (actually many, having read through the comments) would say I'm exactly the kind of person who is part of the problem with public education and spending. I work out of the district office as a technology coach for integration with curriculum and teacher training, as well as a bulk of the data collection and analysis for student performance. Here's a quick hint: if you make test scores and data more and more important to schools, they will hire more and more statisticians and administrative analysts.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. I get that people all over aren't happy with what schools are doing and how much they cost, but I also don't think people understand how complicated it all is, and how impossible it is to deliver on all the expectations with a fraction of the money. It wears me out a bit.
OK here's what perhaps people are missing about this scheme and what's really insidious
Researchers know that paying someone money to learn (or the reverse of this, fining them for not learning) has the effect of making learning uninteresting to the learner unless money is involved as an incentive / disincentive.
http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V72N6/0401_feature1.html
This of course perfectly describes the mind set known as "greedy" where all expenditure of mental effort is evaluated first and foremost on a transactional basis and is never its own reward.
The people who most fit the above description are of course just those billionaires funding these schemes.
So these schools become narcissistic projections of the funder's own egos and value systems.
But these personalities don't invent, they aren't creative, they aren't the source of technological progress.
Rather they're the specific personalities that fill the role of monopolist winners within a system that is guaranteed to produce such winners in any event. Given our system of deregulatory capitalism and pliable legislators and courts, someone was going to be Bill Gates and someone was going to be Larry Ellison. They're not unique in that sense.
Ellison himself characterized the early buggy database as a "roach motel for for information- data goes in, but it never comes out..." which is not surprising since he invented none of it and barely understood E F Codd's relational model to begin with. Nevertheless he's a business winner.
Gates famously invented nothing of note; he was good in his capacity as a narcissistic leader and good at surrounding himself with co-dependents who could be relied on to fiercely buy into the cult of personality and do actual work.
This is in marked contrast to the mindset of the lowly researcher who actually invents new technology and makes actual discoveries. This type of person is curious for curiosity's sake and feels wonder at things that motivates her towards knowledge for knowledge's sake. Some of them become entrepreneurs it's true but they're two different personality types- one is mercantile and transactional and fundamentally disinterested in anything that won't make her money and the other is more likely to seek out a position in life which will let her pursue her interests and be comfortable. All of academia is built on this basic fact.
they're self-selecting
Charter schools are not self-selecting, they have to accept everyone who applies up to the number of places available, if more people apply then there are places available then they are required to have a lottery to select students for places.
You don't know what self-selecting means, do you? If you have to apply for something it is, by definition, self-selecting.
There is no resolve to fix the system, they have had decades to do something about it and haven't. Asking us to continue sacrificing children to a system that fails them on the hopes that maybe someone will fix it is both repugnant and the opposite is suggested based on the history of attempted reform.
And relegating the public school system to a system of last resort for those who can't go somewhere else will make it into a veritable paradise, am I right?
Also on the issue of vouchers and private schools I consider it hugely advantageous to provide a mechanism for highly performing students to have a curriculum and environment that nurtures their abilities instead of one that seeks merely mediocrity.
As do I, however, if the mechanism is lottery or pay-through-the-nose then it's not going to be a very good system. The point isn't that charter schools or private schools are bad, it's that the public school system is going to fail and fail badly if the most promising students are routinely removed from the system. It's the expected consequence of vouchers that let parents take their tax money elsewhere. So, when people say it will weaken the system they're right, and in some cases it most certainly is a deliberately attack on the system.
Whether or not the consequences justify it is up to you. However, it seems to me that most voucher systems involve sacrificing some students for the benefit of others. The question becomes which students should be sacrificed and how?
Fanatically anti-fanatical