http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?pagination=false
OK a friend of mine who seems to have an intense hatred of libertarians and "randroids" whom he labels as "plutocrats" he linked me to this article ab out Charter Schools is there any truth ot this?
Reminds me of this #5 in this article: http://www.cracked.com/article_20585_6-famous-documentaries-that-were-shockingly-full-crap.html
That's where he got it fr om. I wanted to see citation that was more then just a cracked article which have a history of being hit or miss because I wanted to besu re of the legitimacy of the claims.
Natch. I've brought this article up with Shane at least 2-3 times, and I've not heard a word on it. Not sure if he either doesn't care, doesn't have a response, or doesn't want to comment because of a conflict of interest (I think one of his children goes to a Charter School), etc. :\ Some closure on that silence would be nice for me at the very least. :\
Haven't really bothered, to be honest. I don't see how it's relevant. What's relevant is the CHOICE. Maybe some charter schools are worse. Maybe some are better. Parents aren't concerned with what they do across the nation on average; they're concerned about which of their choices in their local area is best. This whole better-vs-worst nationally on average thing is just a distraction.
Quote from: MrBogosity on April 20, 2014, 12:53:33 PM
Haven't really bothered, to be honest. I don't see how it's relevant. What's relevant is the CHOICE. Maybe some charter schools are worse. Maybe some are better. Parents aren't concerned with what they do across the nation on average; they're concerned about which of their choices in their local area is best. This whole better-vs-worst nationally on average thing is just a distraction.
An excellent point. :) Thanks. :) While a lot of people would just say, "transfer to another public school that doesn't suck!!11" Based on the stuff I heard from John Stossel regarding school choice, it sounds like it's not that easy... I also wonder if these people recall that, back before govco got its hands into the education system, we had extremely cheap world class education. Hell, even the stuff they were doing in like, primary school was rather good practical and awesome compared to what's being done in schools today. And with IQs getting higher and technology (and parenting) getting more advanced, that means students are capable of vastly more than they were back then. Which only adds to the point.
Quote from: Travis Retriever on April 20, 2014, 01:08:25 PM
An excellent point. :) Thanks. :) While a lot of people would just say, "transfer to another public school that doesn't suck!!11" Based on the stuff I heard from John Stossel regarding school choice, it sounds like it's not that easy... I also wonder if these people recall that, back before govco got its hands into the education system, we had extremely cheap world class education. Hell, even the stuff they were doing in like, primary school was rather good practical and awesome compared to what's being done in schools today. And with IQs getting higher and technology (and parenting) getting more advanced, that means students are capable of vastly more than they were back then. Which only adds to the point.
In most places, about the only way to transfer to another government school is to move. And hope they don't redraw the districts on you.
Quote from: MrBogosity on April 20, 2014, 03:06:53 PM
In most places, about the only way to transfer to another government school is to move. And hope they don't redraw the districts on you.
I heard about something really nasty that happened in the UK in one instance where parents and the local government disagreed about which school the children should be in.
It turns out that in the UK just about any government official can get all that metadata they scoop up and hold for a year. The local government used it to gather info on the disputing parents. (In the UK, all use of the metadata is logged, and released later, which is how it came out.) It doesn't appear to have had any effect (other than the usual chilling police-state kind), but it seemed to impact discussion here in Canada of making such data collection here official.
(Our sigintel people are currently running wild and doing obviously illegal things, like somehow they were tracking mobile devices that passed through a commercial hotspot in one of our international airports, and kept tracking them when they entered other hotspots in the US. The agency that did this is explicitly prohibited from spying on anyone inside Canada or any Canadian anywhere, and insist that somehow this operation was legal, not to mention the problem of tracking devices in other people's hotspots. Then there's the little problem that the agency claims the airport and the hotspot operator cooperated with the program, but all the international airports and all the hotspot operators insist they didn't.)