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Charter Schools: Why Can’t Republicans Make This Issue A Winner?

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 27th, 2009 at 09:20 PM  | 

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Charter schools work – on so many levels. Charter schools educate kids. Charter schools promote local control and parental involvement. Charter schools succeed in stark contrast to the failed policies of the NEA and the Department of Education.

One New Orleans charter school changes the culture, sees the results

New Orleans’ corrupt, decrepit Orleans Parish School Board was mortally wounded before Katrina. The State-run Recovery School District had started to take over failed Orleans Parish schools, and the charter movement had a toe-hold.

Katrina wiped the slate clean. Charter schools led the comeback. Now, fully half of Orleans Parish’s public schools are charter schools, a higher percentage than any other city in the nation.

The conservative solution is demonstrably the better solution. And it doesn’t take a generation to prove it.

Republicans do a lot of hand wringing, trying to figure out how to make the Republican Party and conservative governance relevant to the minority community. (This is New Orleans, remember, and the public school system is 95% African-American.) Charter schools are a way to do it without pandering. People will notice when their children achieve in school. And rather than wasting taxpayer dollars, it just makes sense to spend it raising a more educated and more employable voter.

Sophie B. Wright Middle School was a typical Orleans Parish public school. It had failed utterly, to the point that the School Board was considering closing it and using the physical plant as an alternative high school.

But instead, in 2005, the school became Spohie B. Wright Charter School, headed by Principal Sharon Clark.

In many respects, Wright’s dramatic improvement since it became a charter — it now ranks among the city’s most promising public schools without admissions requirements — illustrates the charter model’s greatest strengths.

The middle school, which this fall added a high school program, earned local and national acclaim in 2008 when every single fourth-grader passed the high-stakes LEAP exam. This fall it narrowly missed earning recognition as a “two-star” school, a still-elite but growing group of open-enrollment charters in the city. [By contrast, two-thirds to three-quarters of the students in some schools fail the LEAP -- all the more remarkable because of Wright's non-selective admissions. - ed.]

With no district bureaucracy to support it — or meddle in its affairs — Clark and her staff have unprecedented control over Wright, and no one to blame but themselves for failures. Charter schools receive public money, but independent boards run them, and make nearly all the decisions about staffing, curriculum and schedules.

At Wright, the board usually supports Clark’s decisions wholeheartedly. So on a dime, school leaders can decide to add a new math class for struggling students, decide to buy its own buses and run transportation in house, dismiss low-performing teachers (what Clark calls “freeing up their futures”), or hire an impressive salesman at Office Depot to be the school’s administrative assistant — all of which Clark has done.

Clark, a New Orleans native, returned from Arizona to her hometown in 2001 and took the helm of the then-notorious Sophie B. Wright campus on Napoleon Avenue, one of dozens of failing schools run by the Orleans Parish School Board. From day one, Clark made it clear that old habits should die quickly.

“They say you’re not smart, that you’re not working on grade level! That you’re failing! Stand up if you think you’re failing! Stand up!” Wright barked at students during her first fall at Wright.

“Stand up if you’re big and bad and bold and you’re going to come here late every day. Stand up!… You’re not going to tell me you’re getting a free education and you’re not going to come to school? Free books, free buildings, free everything!”

The fundamental flaw of the old governance structure may have been that, because of bureaucracy, inconsistent leadership and politics, school leaders weren’t empowered to make decisions they felt were in the best interest of kids.

Do tell.

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  • http://charlemagne-the-hammer.blogspot.com/ DerKrieger

    The GOP is busy trying to come up with a theme to nationalize the 2010 mid-terms and I believe school choice should be one issue in the wider ‘Freedom Agenda’. The Freedom Agenda will usurp the Left’s favorite term “freedom of choice” and apply it to health care, education, and retirement, advocating returning to We the People our money and therefore the ability to make the best choices for our own lives.

    I’ve long believed if the GOP focused on economic issues that the social issues would take care of themselves. Financially secure people tend to be more conservative in their behaviors because they have something to lose.

    How hard would it be to position ourselves as the party of choice and the Democrats as the party against choice? Seems like it would be easy to run ads against the public school system and the NEA, against the Social Security system and against nationalized health care by promoting choice. After all, would we want the government to tell us what cars to drive, what music to listen to, what clothes to wear, where to live, etc? No, so why should they be allowed to make our lives most important decisions for us?

  • http://charlemagne-the-hammer.blogspot.com/ DerKrieger

    Republicans can’t make charter schools an issue for the simple reason that as a party they are simply not passionate about it.

    Conservatives however are and can make it an issue.

    This is they type of issue where the distinction between Republican and Conservative is important. Republicans who are not conservatives are aka moderates and as we all know, moderates lack passion because they are not emotionally invested in anything. Conservatives fight, moderates negotiate and their starting point is always, always, always from the Liberals position of strength.

  • bk

    Additional background since I grew up in New Orleans… Anybody there who can afford to do so and whose kids can score high enough on entrance exams sends their kids to private schools, almost all of which are Catholic. The public schools were virtually all cesspools that, if you were lucky, you might live long enough to get out of.

    As Vlad says, this is an issue (along with vouchers) that should absolutely resonate among poor black voters. The rich liberals like Obama want to be able to send their kids to schools that cost more than most in-state college tuitions, while telling the riff-raff they have no choice in where to send their kids. It’s absolutely shameful, but satisfying the NEA takes precedence over educating kids.

  • mbecker908

    seeing “minority” voters vote for Republicans at a 90% clip. I have about 1,000 words of snark to add, but I won’t.

  • bobojake

    to go to Helen Waite. We are sick of the democrats spend spend spend with NO results and NO ACCOUNTIBILITY. Teddy Kennedys’ NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS ANOTHER NO ACCOUNTIBILITY THE DEMOCRATS PUSHED. It is time to speak up for what works and the democrats sure the L doesn’t work but Baucus gave a drunk speak for healthcare that don’t work.
    Why is obamas kids in private schools and obama takes away the voucher program in Washington , DC . Call a spade a spade.

  • jeffreywturner

    The reason Republicans don’t really focus on charter schools, vouchers, etc., is that the people who would benefit most from these types of things are not swing voters.

    The people who benefit most from these types of initiatives are lockstep Democrats, and will not deviate from their support of Democrats, because the Democrats promise (and deliver) more generous entitlements.

    Think about it.

    Rich white folks – have plenty of money to send their kids to private school anyway, and besides, they make up a tiny % of the total population.

    Middle-income white folks (ie: swing-voters) – live mainly out in the burbs, where the public schools are already pretty good, or at least decent.

    Black voters – live mainly in urban areas (or rural areas down South) where the public schools are the worst, standing to gain the most from these types of initiatives, but pacified into voting en-bloc for Democrats by programs designed to make them poor but comfortable.

    • aesthete

      Though school choice and charter schools are generally better than public schools in middle class areas.

    • mom2oneson

      children need to be literate. Not just to get votes..that is kind of sneaky.

      • edwlstr

        1) Poor choices are the result often of uninformed decisions.
        2) Self government requires an informed, educated population.
        3) Poverty is usually the offspring of ignorance.
        4) Education inspires a striving toward excellence.
        5) A people who strive for excellence will achieve economic independence.
        6) It is a moral imperative that the young be instructed.

        Behind these thoughts lies a truth. It is that if we have the means and do not educate our young for sucess we are enemies to their independence and deny them freedom. Also, your children are my children, in this instance. This society is absolutely dependent upon talented, literate, educated adults. Where will we get them if we do not stop dithering and start educating.

    • JadedByPolitics

      Republicans are because IF they could break up those teachers unions by pushing charter schools EVERYONE is a winner. The kids first off but also the ability of teachers unions to gather ALL OF THAT CASH together to spend on D candidates. I of course am starting to believe that R’s cannot see the forest through the trees on ANY ISSUE!

      • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

        It is unfortune that the left is able to put together a 5 year plan or even a 50 year plan but the right cannot seem to develop a 5 minute plan.

        The destruction of education in favor of a “trained” and malleable population has been the purpose of the public school system since its inception. It can no more be reformed than Social Security can be diverted from its inevitable collapse. These systems are fundamentally flawed.

        While I support vouchers as a first step, we should not forget the corrupting influence federal money has had on higher education. A long term voucher program would inevitably result in the destruction of many good private schools as they gradually found the money tied to various government strings.

        We don’t need church vouchers and we wouldn’t want them. Separation of school and state is no less important.

    • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

      …because this is a POLICY question, not a POLITICAL one.

      If you focus on expanding freedom, you will create political constituencies.

      The Left is willing to get killed in 2010 and 2012, because they know this health care bill they forced through the House and Senate will expand their power over the long term. For Republicans to fail to think in such terms is to abdicate their birthright.

      A free-market educational system gives parents the ability to put their kids in the schools which work best for them, and by doing so it will automatically get the parents involved. And such a system will break the teachers’ unions in the process, because it will lead to the professionalization of that field.

      But if you see this as failing to further a Republican constituency, then all you’re doing is creating electoral defeat down the line.

    • ZootSuit

      That Blacks are the strongest supporters of vouchers, parochiaid and school choice. And, I would argue, they are among the strongest supporters for almost precisely the reasons you state above.

      From everything I have seen and read — let alone personal experience even from many of my liberal Black friends — support for vouchers, etc. ranges from +70% to over 90%. In the general population, supprt seems to range only from about 50% to maybe, maybe 70%.

      By the way, there is a lot of stereotyping going on in this thread. The meme seems to be that the poor (yes, mostly Black and other Minority) parents of poor children — the modern “underclass” — do not care about their children’s eductaion. With rare exceptions, that is categorically not</b true.

      The problem is that they do not know what a good eductaion consists. As someone who has done some (community-based) work in this area, I am utterly astonished at the number of parents who do not know and grasp the importance of reading to their children before the age of three is a great help and predictor to their child’s success in school and later in life. It is truly amazing!

      However, it is very, very, very rare that I have run across a poor, uneducated (and yes, Black) parent that was not wanting to improve their child’s success in school and later in life.

  • drfredc

    The reason the GOP can’t get any traction on education, health care, energy, housing, etc, etc, is the GOP is all about ‘small government’. Small government is not an answer to much of anything as far as the general public goes. However, properly designed and implemented individually driven social marketplaces will, by definition, result in an effective and compassionate small government.

    Social Marketplaces are one thing the Democrats really do understand. By design and philosophy, their Social Marketplaces are centralized, big government/union visions — the result is uncompassionate big government.

    In the middle, you’ve to the moderates who basically want power with love… They’ve typically never heard any contemporary effective small government Social Marketplace conservative message — it’s not the moderates fault. Their ignorance on small government social marketplace solutions is related to the ineptness of conservative leadership understanding and marketing of individually driven social marketplaces.

    One can expect the GOPs problems with all of these various social marketplaces (charter schools, health care, energy, housing, and more), to persist until the conservatives get a coherent core understanding of individually driven social marketplaces as their core message.

  • mom2oneson

    where are these charter schools getting thier money from? If the gets are low income as the qualify for free lunch they are probably getting even more from federal funds per student than the well off kids in the suburbs.

    I don’t like the way those students were spoken to either. Is that they way to speak to kids? I’m sorry that isn’t how you talk to a child respectfully. They are not men in a halfway house. The whole free free free was wrong too.

    This is just a temporary fix, vouchers and charter schools are still gov funded and unfortunately they will lead to private schools having less freedom.
    I will never understand why conservatives support birth-12 tax funded education and GWB expanded that funding from the fed gov even more.

    I agree education is where we should reach out into the black community. There are a lot of sterotypes of the parents being illiterate but I’ve found the moms and grandmas are SO supportive of any educational achievements. Amazingly supportive.
    I saw we tutor reading and support real private education like homeschooling or small parent operated or church based schools that do not accept vouchers or gov $. Set up libraries in churches or donate good books to the libraries. Try to get libraries to have more homeschooling resources. Contribute to organizations that have homeschool scholarships. Why not help them towards more independence- they don’t need to just accept what the gov has to offer to educate their kids. It really saddens me when I see words like “forced” or “no choice” coming from conservatives. We shouldn’t view people like that at the mercy of the govenrment when they do have a choice…it’s like viewing them as animals or something. Just because something might be harder for one group than another does not mean they do not have a choice to take that action.

    • Martin Knight

      I don?t like the way those students were spoken to either. Is that they way to speak to kids?

      But apparently it worked, and these children’s futures are, from all indications the brighter for it. I’d much prefer to have my kid scoring As with a tough talking teacher than Fs with a teacher that constantly whispers sweet nothings into his ears.

      Kids in military schools get spoken in much much harsher language.

      One of the major reasons public schools, even in well-to-do suburbs underperform is not just the teachers unions but parents who are more insistent on their kids being treated like little delicate princesses than their actually getting an education.

      I?m sorry that isn?t how you talk to a child respectfully.

      And quite frankly, I find the entire idea that an adult should speak to a child “respectfully” boneheaded. I literally cringe every time I see some punk teenager calling his parents or his parents’ friends by their first names while the adults are tip-toeing around trying to show how much they “respect” the kid’s “opinions.”

      And as for your opposition to vouchers and school choice, is it federal government involvement you’re opposed to, or simply any government involvement?

      My understanding of your position right now is that you want an end to all public schools and everyone (including single parents who have to work more than two jobs to keep a roof over her head) to homeschool their children instead – if the kid ends up illiterate (because his teacher is equally as illiterate) and unable to function in society, it’s the parent’s fault and tough luck to the kid.

      • mom2oneson

        As far as your last example not all things in life are fair. You know I am a single parent too believe me I understand, I’m not a widow with a paid off mortgage with a life insurance fund and getting social security that the homeschool books always mention when they talk about single parent homeschooling. I understand how hard it is to keep rent paid. I laugh at the 30% budget figures, it’s more like all pay goes to housing, it’s never enough and am constantly faced with will we be evicted and making plans where to go if I can’t pay all the rent. That doesn’t mean my kid needs to attend a gov school to get an adequate education. He has even won awards, sure some we could not even go to get at a ceremony because of transportation and I’ve just had to ask the to mail it, but I’m just saying becuase I struggle to keep a roof over our head doesn’t mean he is not getting a good education. What gets me is this is the same type of arguments that liberals use for things, we oppose it for others things but not for public schools. If the gov doesn’t do it for them then it won’t get done so the gov needs to do it. I’m against it though because I think gov funded schools and complusory attendance laws are wrong.

        I do not believe that a child will be illiterate because his mother is. All it takes is about $20 in materials to teach a child to read. That is private market individual buying, if big purchase was made I bet it would only be $10 or $12. They both can learn to read. The materials are also not consumable so they could be used by other children. Children can teach other relatives (cousins, younger siblings) once they learn.

        I amfor churches and private citizens donating towards private education though. Many people that can afford to do so are very generous with wanting to help children get a private education. Also doesn’t take the current level of funding and activities to provide a basic education. For a long time churches have had even mixed grade classrooms that meet in Sunday School rooms. They didn’t have sports or layer after layer of administration like public schools have. Homeschooling is more the trend now and there are a lot of kids getting a descent education in living rooms,

        For the respect thing I am a strict parent and have believe parents should teach Leviticus 19:32 to their children, it basically says to respect the aged. Of course since I have a son I stress a lot about respecting women including his future wife and daughters. Children deserve respect too, not all are hardened criminals needing military style instruction, that would frighten many young women. It would frighten me and I’m 33.

        • mom2oneson

          If more children were not in public schools for 12 or 13 years.

        • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics
        • Martin Knight

          This magic world of yours where children teach themselves (and their illiterate parents!) how to read and write, and then go on to learn and teach the rest of their family stuff like long division, how to solve quadratic equations, understand photosynthesis, etc. is the most ridiculous compilation of nonsense with regard to education that I’ve ever heard.

          It’s obvious you’re confused about Conservative beliefs and the role of government because you seem to have absorbed this idea that being a Conservative must automatically make you opposed to public education at any level. Every attempt to get you to comprehend that federal involvement in education is viewed as significantly different from state/local government involvement has fallen on deaf ears.

          Quite frankly there’s no logic, rhyme or reason to your arguments (on most stuff) and to be brutally honest I cannot imagine anyone here would trust that you are capable of gauging what will constitute a decent level of education for a child. You claim to work a 9 to 5 job as a single mother and yet have the time to teach your child everything he should know at his grade/age level – Math, English, Science, Social Studies, etc.? How?

          I actually am very curious. How?

          And even if your fantastical tale of leaving your child alone at home with a $20 worth of books without any instruction or supervision and he somehow figured out how to read and write by osmosis is true, please, I implore you, try to comprehend that not every child is an Einstein like yours. Most children, maybe not yours, but most, do need guidance and supervision to learn things and understand them.

          To be even more brutally honest, your ideas are impractical, unrealistic and downright insane; and anyone who advocates for them would not win more than your vote and everybody else’s pity in any election. I can’t help but think that they stem more from an inability to be apart from your child than anything to do with education.

          • mom2oneson

            You should read a book called Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington. He was a teenager in a coal mine and his mother was illiterate but she bought him a book. He learned to read and went on to do a lot for this country especially here in the south where there was not a lot of higher education especially for blacks. A lot of our nation’s leaders were independent learners too.

            The only part of your post I agree with is being confused about conservative ideas. The views on public schools have surprised me. I understand the difference between federal and state and local invovlement. I see conservatives expanding federal money though towards public schools like GWB did with NCLB which reauthorized a lot of funding for low income students. It’s just a small part of the districts budget but it’s still there.

            My point in sharing what I did wasn’t for you to insult me. I was trying I say I understood the realties of keeping a roof over my head without any support because that is the example you gave. My point was I know first hand how hard that struggle is and how much stress it is.

            Martin you should have more confidence in children’s ability to learn. They have amazing brains and are full of potentional. Unfortunately a lot of potentional is wasted by popular media, games and public schools. There is so much printed material easily accessible that they can learn just about anything from once they know how to read.

          • Martin Knight

            But he didn’t just look at the book and boom! he could read. He got a taught how to read, and not by his illiterate mother – she enrolled him in a school.

            By the way, I’m not trying to insult you. I’m just being blunt; the idea that you can just leave a child with $20 worth of books and come back home to find him able to compose an essay, balance chemical equations, differentiate and integrate, etc. is beyond idiotic. To base an entire education system, like you suggest, on the idea that the bulk of children will learn without instruction or supervision is a sign of someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

            All you repeatedly whine is public education and compulsory attendance “is wrong.” With absolutely nothing but your opinion and unrealistic theories that will get you laughed out of every venue you try to push it to back you up.

            Even your Booker T. Washington anecdote is laughably wrong.

            Which is why, quite frankly, I seriously doubt your story, especially considering your ridiculous ideas, that you’re holding a 9-5 job as a single parent and are still able to get your child educated to grade/age level. I ask again, how?

            PS: I do have a lot of confidence and faith in children’s ability to learn – in fact, I dare say that my confidence is no less than yours, because mine is actually based on reality. It’s exactly the reason why I am in support of vouchers and school choice.

          • mom2oneson

            I never said children did not need supervision either. I would never be OK with a child left without adult or at least a very responsible teenager girl supervision. You are inserting a lot of ideas I never wrote.

          • mom2oneson
          • Martin Knight

            Leaving a child at home with a babysitter (not a tutor) and $20 worth of books and expecting the child to master the subject matter all by himself is idiotic fairytale thinking.

          • mom2oneson

            It’s not idiotic fairytale thinking.

            I said the $20 worth of material was for an illiterate mother to purchase so her child can learn to read. Again you are writing things I did not write.

          • Martin Knight

            Are you saying all I need to do is give him a copy of “Aircraft Design and Construction” and he’ll be able to build me a plane twenty days from now?

          • mom2oneson

            then give him a good set self instructional of math books from about 3rd grade through calculus and he could take two more semesters of calculus at the community college and then go to enginerring school.

            Although he might really enjoy a book like The Paper Air Plane Book by Blackburn & Lammers to learn about drag and lift weight and thrust. :) There are other paper airplane books that requiring measuring and cutting where he would learn measuring too. :) He would have a lot of fun with that first book.

          • Uma Richie

            the schools provide a lousy education and expose children to drugs, violence and liberal agendas, I believe that homeschooling by illiterate mothers may be the best and most realistic alternative, considering the stranglehold the left has on the education system.

            I have serious concerns about the current incarnation of the public school system. I lament the amalgamation of small schools into larger districts, where children can get lost in the shuffle. I look at the abandoned one-room schoolhouses in my area and suspect that for grades 1-8, they might have been the better option, making one or two teachers directly accountable to the community that hired them. I worry about the constraints Catholic schools might bring upon themselves by accepting vouchers. I think that all faith communities are making a huge mistake by not offering affordable schools for the children in their congregations.

            It is a telling sign about our country that we even have to debate the role of the local, state, and federal government in educating the children of people who apparently don’t care. If we had a pro-business environment, companies would have a long-term interest in establishing and maintaining effective schools at the local level, as they did in the beginning of the 20th century. If there weren’t so many government safety nets for individuals, perhaps upward mobility would become desirable again, and more parents would be involved in ensuring their children’s success in school.

            Martin, on a personal note, not to denigrate mom’s awesome work with her son, but most homeschoolers I know are large families with frequently deployed dads. They get the job done by lunchtime and then spend the next eight hours on a flurry of other activities. Once the children reach literacy, they are able to teach themselves, with gentle guidance. Bottom line: A single woman can very realistically hold down a job and homeschool one child.

          • Martin Knight

            I have never heard of someone who cannot read teaching someone else how to read. But one has to agree with you that when it comes to many inner city schools, the child might end up learning more watching an educational DVD at home than in the classroom. Certainly the child would be physically much safer at home.

            But mom2oneson’s hare-brained ideas are simply that, hare-brained. The idea that all public funded education should be ended on the theory that just giving a child a book and some magic fairy would come down wave her magic wand and all of a sudden the kid would be able to read that book is simply idiotic.

            That this “everyone should homeschool because public education is just wrong” idea is mom2oneson’s solution to the task of adequately educating America’s over 100 million children for the 21st Century shows that she hasn’t thought this through beyond stage one and is thoroughly incapable of putting herself in others’ shoes.

            But I do share all your concerns, especially about schools being forced to compromise themselves (curriculum and standards) by union owned bureaucrats if they participate in voucher programmes. And yes, Federal and State regulations, not to mention the unions’ influence have restricted many of the options parents could exercise in getting their children educated, including teaching at home.

            Personally, I don’t care how a child gets educated, so long as the child is educated. I’d love to see government policies encouraging private companies to set up schools in local communities to be supervised at the local community level. I’d love to see more private providers of education, whether it be for-profit or non-profits, sectarian or non-sectarian competing with the public system. If a bunch of Harley riding Hindu priests decide to set up a one-room school, I’d be the first to send my kid over if their students are getting the education they need.

            And when it comes to homeschooling, I know one very lucky guy whose Mom used to be a teacher in Ghana. His kids constantly top the class because of the coaching they, their cousins and a few neighbors’ kids get from Grandma during the holidays and weekends – her methods would probably cause the NEA to suffer heart attacks. She has them well ahead of their classmates on almost every subject.

            Now that’s homeschooling I can believe in – not mom2oneson’s “close the schools and leave them with a book” approach.

          • Uma Richie

            My take on her argument above is that homeschooling should be the default option. Church-based schools should be the back-up. Local co-ops should be third. I can see her point about the public school option sucking up tax dollars, leaving no one with a real choice, and not producing intended results, but delivering on political items for liberal groups. It is like the public health insurance option we are fighting against.

            Frankly, I don’t see much difference between her position and yours. I think that she is trying to convey that homeschooling is much easier than people make it out to be. Your example of the grandmother who taught in Ghana is similar to points mom2 has made in the past about there being a woman in every family who is capable of directing small group learning.

            Should an illiterate mom homeschool? I’d say yes, if sending her children to a traditional school would result in a poor education and a drug habit. I did not previously know how to read music, but I got my son through basic piano by using a $5.95 book. A year later, I started him with a piano teacher, but the piano lesson series was well-illustrated, and we could have kept going together if I had chosen to, and in my opinion, learning to read is a lot easier than learning to play an instrument. Sadly, since my son started with a piano teacher, I stopped learning.

          • Martin Knight

            … would disabuse you of the notion that that prescription (end all public education) has any relationship with common sense.

          • Uma Richie

            From a policy perspective:
            1. Reiterate the role of parents in education. Reiterate the role of local communities in education. Make all education policy at the lowest possible level.
            2. Bring education back to the state level and below. Roll back the US Dept of Education through a thirty year plan of drawdowns so that the bean counters don’t revolt.
            3. At the local level, refund school tax money to parents of school-aged children to apply to the education of their own children. If school taxes are based on real estate values, calculate a school tax refund for renters. Make it abundantly clear that the parents are getting back their OWN money and nobody else’s.
            4. At the state and local level, pilot homeschooling programs in high crime/drug/absentee areas.
            5. At the federal, state, and local levels, make this country attractive to business again. Reduce taxes and red tape. Give companies and small businesses regulatory stability so that they can plan to stay in a city long enough to want to invest in local education, to have some input into the curriculum of their future employees, and to wield enough power to hold schools accountable for lack of performance.

            From a culture war perspective:
            1. Support faith based schools in your own congregation.
            2. Support faith based schools in poor congregations.
            3. Homeschoolers with grown children could volunteer as mentors to the next generation. They might consider getting paid to teach “How to Homeschool 101″ at their local community colleges.

          • ZootSuit

            HOWEVER, public schools can and should work within that framework and policy prescription, too.

            By the way, how do you “pilot homeschooling programs in high crime/drug/absentee areas”?

            Since we are talking about policy prescriptions, does that mean that you want “government” — maybe not the Federal but state and local — to get more involved in homeschooling?

            Maybe your’re to the Left of noth Martin and me! :-)

          • Uma Richie

            I think that the homeschool pilot programs would necessarily rely on mentors drawn from the population of homeschool veterans whose children have all grown. I think the initiative and funding should come from foundations, churches or individuals, but for the trial to be useful, the local school board would have to consent (or be bought off??) so that control group data could be collected for comparison to the intervention group.

            FTR, I did not advocate shutting down all public schools and giving kids $20 in books to teach themselves. I don’t think Mom did either. What I did say is that I have serious concerns about public schools in their current incarnation, and that I saw Mom’s point [about conservatives looking for conservative solutions].

            I am quite sure that I am to the left of you and Martin : ).

          • mom2oneson

            It’s not homeschooling on paper, but the kids are registered with the district and doing an online program from home. That could be one example where it’s sort of blended. :) The computer, printer and reimbursement for ISP is all provided for. They meet with a teacher over the phone and go to testing at a local school once a year or so. K12 and Connections Academy are two of the most used ones. Also different states have different definitions for homeschooling, but the above is not private school or homeschool on paper, it’s through the disctrict, just to be clear. :)

            Apart from using the state, I say libraries or city or churches and materials would be very important. Also set up scholarship programs at curriculum vendors for parents or guardians to pick books from. The library is awesome and I know when we lived in projects the bookmobile came right there. I think some type of instruction on, how to use the online card catalog could be the most important thing taught to all invovled, parents/guardians and kids.

            End of my 2 cents that wasn’t asked for. :)

          • ZootSuit

            And for the record, I think your argument that compulsary attendance laws by state and local jurisdictions are “wrong” is an interesting and thought-provoking one. Within limits, I can probably even agree with you: in the sense that I would oppose laws that said I had to send my children to a particular public school. Or even any public school, for that matter.

            However, it does seem that you are arguing more than that. You do seem to be arguing for the abolition of public schools because the government, not even state and local governments, have an interest compelling enough to provide that service. With that, I disagree.

            And yes, I am still very interested in your ultimate response to my inquiry below. Thank you for thinking about it.

          • mom2oneson

            The exemption from compulsory attendance at a public school in some states areas isn’t based on educational freedom but religious freedom. There is private schooling and/or homeschooling but it’s under religious freedom. States are very with ed laws. In PA where the homeschooling paperwork is very burdensome to families it isn’t under that and I believe for several years there have been families that volunteered to basically be truant to challenge the law and bring it up throguh the courts so people could be under freedom of religion. Also private schools often have a lot of freedom. I see vouchers and any gov paying for private education even through reciepts or tax credits as a huge threat to that.

            That was really interesting about if counties should provide schools. Even though they have an interest in educated young adults the parents can do it or pay for it and there are so many dangers to gov run schools even if it’s 100% controlled by a county or neighborhood.

            I believe those that passed compulsory attendance laws had ill intentions, but times have changed a lot since then too. I could see the need even for any type of school – private or public to have a real life teacher that comes to class and the students that show up to attend when there wasn’t mass publication of educational media. How much of today’s school is basically a function of the family (childcare, meals, social activity, recreations) vs a child learning basic academic skills? Even cutting those things out and just teaching basic skills, those same skills could be learned at home no matter who is funding it especially with all the media and mass publishing that is done now.

            I’m not cutting off the compulsory attendance discussion but I want to be clear too that I didn’t start posting on this because of my views on compuslory education laws. I started this issue on the dc voucher threads. It is my reaction to words like “forced” into the bad schools – basically viewing people like they have to take what the government gives them. It’s viewing people like animals or something not like humans like the liberals do. The parents can keep them home and provide them with an education in a safer environment. I think we should do what we can to assist with that when the schools are so bad instead of saying they are forced to do attend those schools like they are animals without a choice. I’m think it’s offensive to people to support them to rally to get more from the government (and doubly bad in this situation when the disctrict is scamming them for cash they get for their kids being enrolled and then not teaching them) instead of helping them what they can do independently but since so most on here are for “better” public schools, a consequence of moms keeping them home would that the districts would be at least partially defunded. Another small thing would be not turning in the school lunch forms in poor areas to get the extra fed money for having poor students. I guarantee those withdrawls and no school lunch forms would get the districts attention and they would court the parents to provide what they wanted.

          • mom2oneson

            for the second paragraph, to be clearer :) I say no they states and counties should not set up public schools. I don’t understand the reasons for supporting county/state public schools instead of parents paying for it themselves or doing it themselves. Is it just to redistribute the money from people that wouldn’t be involved in primary education to supposedly have more education money available? I agree with the interest but don’t understand the states or county doing it themselves vs parents or the private community providing the education.

          • ZootSuit

            Through their local tax dollars and (hopefully but unfortunately not always) personal participation.

            Indeed, despite some conservative exagerations to the contrary, not all public schools discourage parental participation even from highly religious and conservative parents. Indeed, not all public schools, even public schools in poor and Minority neighborhoods, are bad. These things I know from personal experience.

            And I am a stalwart supporter of homeschooling!

            Again, I find your arguments against compulsory attendance laws compelling but all in all, I am more in agreement with Vladimir, Martin Knight and Achance.

          • Martin Knight
          • Vladimir

            Probably the best thing that can be said for any public school system for these kids is that it gets them out of their home environments.

            Studies have shown that the parameter that is the greatest predictor of educational success across class & racial lines is the number of books in the home.

            These inner-city N.O. kids come from homes with no books. Many of them are being raised (?) by a grandma or an aunt because mommy’s in jail or on crack.

            The traditional schools have failed largely because they’re staffed with teachers that are products of the same system and are barely literate themselves.

            The success of the charter school in the OP is due in large part ot the skill & training of the principal. To think that you’ll get any results other than a generation of absolutely unemployable illiterates from sending them home with a $20 reading kit is laughable.

            And this fear of public schools being liberal indoctrination centers for these kids is beyond irrational. If, at the end of the day, we have a generation of literate, thinking, employable high school graduates with a tendency to vote for Democrats, that is an improvement of light years beyond the mess of a system we have today.

          • Martin Knight
          • mom2oneson

            I know all about inner-city schools, homes and about the aunts and grandmas. If you read other things I wrote I always speak so highly about these Aunts and grandmas that are raising other peoples kids and how supportive they usually are of eductional or vocational achievements. They can homeschool too.
            The best thing is that it gets them out of the home? You sound like a total liberal here ignoring the good things parents or guardians give to children. Because they aren’t middle class or blue collar or live in projects they don’t get those things from their relatives? How do you know the child does not feel love and secure with his grandma or aunt or mother? All the academic knowledge and higher math won’t make a child feel secure and love and make them responsible. The female relatives in these communities is one of the great resources these families have, that will enable these children to achieve anything they want because they are there for them, that is wrong for you to degrade that.

          • mom2oneson
          • Vladimir

            I wish that the child-rearing wonderland you describe existed, but it simply does not.

            PTA chapters are non-existent at these schools. No room mothers. A teacher of my acquaintance used to sit around & play solitaire for most of Parent-Teacher Conference Day BECAUSE NO PARENTS SHOWED UP.

            I am sure the moms and aunties and grandmas love their babies, but they are themselves products of five generations of welfare, illiteracy, poverty, lack of role models, &etc. They’ve been conditioned to believe that educating their children is somebody else’s job, IF they put any value on education in the first place.

            If the power of maternal love were as strong as you suggest it is, maybe it should first be directed to keeping kids out of gangs, off drugs & out of trouble with the law.

          • Uma Richie

            People have been conditioned to believe that educating their children is someone else’s job. Thank you for understanding.
            I hope that you agree that such a belief is incompatible with academic success and that fostering a greater parental role in education is a good thing.

            As for your big IF — If parents don’t put any value on education in the first place, I don’t see how any form of schooling is going to be successful in the long run.

            And again, if attending school contributes to children using drugs, joining gangs, and getting into trouble with the law, then homeschooling is a good thing. If the kids are at home with a drugged-up parent, obviously, there is a more immediate problem than education; however, if the mother or guardian is clean and sober, I think homeschooling can work.

            I am going to reply above to Martin with a summary of my position as it relates to general education policy.

          • Vladimir

            It took 60 years of welfare state set the stage.

            You’re going to change that by closing the schools 7 sending each kid home with a $20 book?

            First, get 75% participation in PTA & parent/teacher conferences.

            Just like in the ‘burbs.

            Then we can talk.

          • Uma Richie

            Martin put words in Mom’s mouth and mine. I specifically said that I have concerns about public schools in their current incarnation. I said that I could see Mom’s point. I did not advocate closing all public schools. I did not advocate a $20 universal homeschooling program.

            REPEAT: I took the time to type out some policy related conclusions on the matter as a response to Martin above . I would appreciate your taking the time to read them.

          • Vladimir

            This approach has a much better chance of working.

            Note that parental involvement is mandatory.

            I didn’t send my kids to the School for the Blind to learn how to drive.

            I don’t advocate giving a generation of illiterates the responsibility of teaching kids to read.

          • Martin Knight

            Seriously, read what she’s written in all her posts and comments on the subject. $20 is the amount she says (and she may actually be right) is enough to buy materials to teach the child how to read and then … that’s it.

            The kid should then be left to his own devices and he would learn social studies, math, science, geography, etc. all by himself. That’s what I call idiotic fairytale thinking that has taken leave of reality.

          • mom2oneson

            are interested in education or not. You just wrote a high percent lives with relatives. They may not be comfortable doing anything without legal custody of the child and many do not have full custody and are walking on egg shells fearing CPS hauling the kid off to foster care after battling with them to keep the child living with them instead of in the states care. Try to get and maintain custody of a relative’s kid when your fighting CPS that gains to profit form keeping him or her in the system and we can talk again about showing up for something when your fighting for custody of the child without a lawyer or money to pay for one. I will say this too that blacks are treated unfairly against when dealing with anything with the child custody system. I’ve seen it in another setting where CPS is called in much faster on black families than white families for basically the same situation of where are the parents are absent. So they gave good reason to be cautious IMO.

            I hate to use this statement of cultural differences this or that because it’s very often misused but I believe some of it is cultural – no PTA or no parent teacher conferences it is not necessarily no interest. It could be something as simple as transportation. Maybe something like a conference call would be better for those that home phone service or some way for the teachers to meet with the students guardians closer to home. They might busy having to prepare meals, work or clean or having other young children in their care or an elderly parent to get to a conference. I don’t know what the answer is but an appointed time may not be the best thing. When you have to use a cab to take the child to the dr or emergency room they may not have the money to take one to school or the time to do it on public transportation.
            I’ve seen it with my own friends, they are well meaning but they really do not understand no transportation. They grew up with two parents and always had a car of some sort, even if they “paid” for their first care, they still had parents providing them with shelter and food while they saved their money.
            I wrote above about awards my son won above, am I a disinterested mother that doesn’t care about her son’s education because we didn’t go to the ceremonies? I am sure when most of those kids bring back some kind of good report or anything most those aunts and grandmas and moms greatly encourage them and possibly reward them.

          • mom2oneson

            I also agree so much with the church schools. Another nice thing now a few of the homeschools have accredidation – I know both Seton (Catholic) and School of Tomorrow (protestant) have it. So the small church schools could enroll the children in these homeschools and they would have a transcript from a regionally accredited school. They are publishing the materials many of these schools would use anyway so the cost is not that much more for enrollment.

    • Vladimir

      School funding is local.

      We don’t need a big, beneficent government bureaucracy to manage education.

      And the NEA is the Democrats’ biggest constituency. I remember at one of the Dem conventions 20 yrs or so ago, 1 in 6 of the delegates was a card-carrying NEA member.

      • mom2oneson

        and funding from the the state that isn’t local. The federal funding might be a low number like 8 or 10 percent but it’s going to be higher than more affluent kids if most of the kids are poor, special needs or qualified for tutoring and seperately before and after school care from childcare funding.

        I know you don’t have counties there but here taxes from the more affluent parts of the county go to support the schools in the more economically depressed parts. There is no way they are collecting enough revenue from those areas to even support the % the county pays to keep the schools going with all the layers of administration they have, the % the county pays might be local as far as the county but there is still a lot of transfer going in fro more affluent parts to depressed parts.

        I agree with you, the NEA is big and awful.

        • Vladimir

          Taxes are allocated at the state level.

          • mom2oneson

            Don’t you think more affluent residents of the state are paying and supporting the schools in the more economically depressed parts?

      • monstermom

        One of the primary reasons our kids aren’t literate is because they’re being taught by teachers who don’t understand or care much for the topic they’re expected to teach. The net effect is a teacher who never got long division teaching long division or a teacher who couldn’t find Iowa on a map teaching geography. Even worse is a teach who doesn’t care whether his / her students know long division or can find Iowa because he / she thinks such topics are unimportant.

        The education professionals keep cobbling together instructional programs designed to make up for the teachers lack of expertise or concern. These programs keep getting funded by the NSF EHR. Unfortunately, many of these programs just lower the bar further.

        I agree – we need to get the federal government out of public education. We need to get the federal government out of funding “research” for education program development through the NSF EHR. We need to put the pressure on the local officials to give parents a choice in how their children are educated and with what materials.

        The control shouldn’t be with the government, and what its bureaucrats deem worthy but with what the parents deem important to their children.

  • http://www.scottbomb.com scottbomb

    Our so-called “leadership” has no guts. They can’t make ANY issue a winner until they take off the gloves and fight the way Democrats do.

    FORGET the “high road”. It doesn’t win elections OR issues.

  • bigredone

    The Constitution is silent about education. States have that responsibility and the feds have no authority except that which the feds have usurped.

    I advocate school choice with members of my state’s senate. I will be speaking with my state representative about soon.

    If we want a Conservative movement, it must be based on Constitutional solutions.

    Sorry to seem a bit miffed by this, but education is not a battle to be fought on the Federal level except to get the Feds out of it. Pulling teeth anyone???

    The only possible way for the Feds to be involved in Education is outlined in the final paragraph of Article I, Section 8 where the Constitution speaks of Departments or Officers of the United States, but that really doesn’t speak to the point because it is prefaced by exclusionary language, imo.

    I guess I have come full circle in one post…I do that sometimes.

    • mom2oneson

      It all starts there

      • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

        I don’t have a problem with compulsory attendance laws. Where we can win is making sure parents have a choice how their children are educated, whether it be public, charter, private or home-schooled.

        • mom2oneson

          and giving gov money to private schools in the long term will end the real choice parents have right now. I’m sure it will come down to private schools being forced to accept funds with the gov strings or close or the gov changing the laws giving private schools less and less freedom. In some states parents really will be forced into their kids attending gov funding schools or not register at all and be criminals breaking the law.

          • mom2oneson

            I shouldn’t post on less than 4 hours sleep :)

          • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

            The government does have legitimate functions, and one of those is to ensure an educated populace. This function belongs to the States, and should be implemented at the local level (local School Board).

            You could use the same argument to say the federal government funding the military is a form of socialism. It wouldn’t be true in that case either.

          • jyalai

            None of our founding fathers were state educated, and they, on whole, were a lot more knowledgeable than the kids graduating today. True, these people studied stuffy books like Plato, Aristotle, Blackstone, and mostly the Bible. I’m sure it isn’t as interesting a some fo the classes they take in high school today.

            I am not against public education, in as far as the government understands it is a service to parents. I like to believe there is a value to the community. However, when public schools are forced to jettison any value that smacks of Biblical origin, and rushes to defend a capricious set of mixed moral values built on some nebulous idea of “consensus,” I tend to believe we may be better with out it.

          • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

            Read what I said again.

            The government has a moral obligation to ensure and educated populace.

            Nowhere did I say that State must do the educating. As a matter of fact, I gave several examples of how they could be educated. Some examples are by the government. Others are not. Feel free to mix & match at the local level as you see fit.

          • mom2oneson

            is the issue. It’s still the state having control even if the majority of the education is not privately. Children belong to their parents, not the state. The states interest in having educated adults does not mean we should have compusory attedance laws. Those laws do not belong in a free country.

          • Martin Knight

            And yes, the state has an interest in ensuring an educated populace. It’s the child that suffers if he does not get an education. And when he grows up, the rest of us suffer because you’ve left him to nothing but a life of crime and vagrancy because he cannot read and write.

            This isn’t the 1800s – even the most blue collar physical job requires literacy.

            Compulsory Attendance laws for children who are not being educated at home, and mandatory tests to ensure that they are being adequately educated for those who are being educated at home are all legitimate to that effect.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            Children do not belong to their parents but parents are their God appointed guardians. Nobody else, including the state, has a right to insert themselves into that relationship except in the most extreme cases.
            As guardians, parents are responsible for not only ensuring their childrens education but also defining what an education is.
            Public education is not only a failure when it comes to teaching core subjects but it is also a failure in choosing what those core subjects must be. Therefore your “options” which include a government overlord dictating what an education means would still be a failure since it would eventually, inevitably, feature the GLSEN and Al Ghore agenda more prominently than math or science. A public education system will always be a political indoctrination system.

            Parents must decide and direct the eduction of their children just as they are responsible for teaching their children what to eat and how to work. A failure in any of these areas could have negative consequences for society but as has long been recognized nobody has a more legitimate or overarching interest in their children than do parents.
            It is a practical impossiblity to expect government to do a better job raising children than parents.
            Using the military as an example doesn’t fly because adults, not children, volunteer to join the military.
            Compulsory and/or publicly funded education were almost unheard of rare exceptions when the US was founded. Somehow they muddled through.

            Give liberty a chance.

          • Martin Knight

            Compulsory and/or publicly funded education were almost unheard of rare exceptions when the US was founded.

            Yep … and two hundred and thirty three years have passed since then.

            Somehow they muddled through.

            Literacy rates above 10% represent progress to me. What about you? In 1776, a man could earn what would qualify as a good living even without knowing how to read and write. It’s about to hit 2010. Times have changed.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            A good education is a beautiful thing.

            A poor, propagandized education is more dangerous than no education.

            There’s a reason every modern dictator has gone straight to the school system.

            “When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
            - Adolph Hitler

            or

            Stalin “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

            I would rather have parents holding the “weapon” because it is strains the intelligence to believe that we will never have our Goebbels.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            A good education is a beautiful thing.

            A poor, propagandized education is more dangerous than no education.

            There’s a reason every modern dictator has gone straight to the school system.

            “When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
            - Adolph Hitler

            or

            Stalin “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

            I would rather have parents holding the “weapon” because it is strains the intelligence to believe that we will never have our Goebbels.

          • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister
          • ZootSuit

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            here I was educated and it didn’t cost the taxpayers anything.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            They get old and worn out. Doesn’t mean they aren’t valid, just old and worn out.

            I guess now according Godwin’s law I automatically lose the debate unless of course the comparison is valid.

            Mm, mmm, mm!
            Barack Hussein Obama

            He said that all must lend a hand
            To make this country strong again
            Mmm, mmm, mm!
            Barack Hussein Obama

            He said we must be fair today
            Equal work means equal pay
            Mmm, mmm, mm!
            Barack Hussein Obama

            He said that we must take a stand
            To make sure everyone gets a chance
            Mmm, mmm, mm!
            Barack Hussein Obama

            He said red, yellow, black or white
            All are equal in his sight
            Mmm, mmm, mm!
            Barack Hussein Obama

            Yes!
            Mmm, mmm, mm
            Barack Hussein Obama

          • mom2oneson
          • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister
          • Achance

            I grew up in a semi-literate society. Until Brown v. The Board, if somebody in America was talking about degeneracy, illigitimacy, illiteracy, or poverty, they were talking about Appalachia and the Rural South. Some of my classmates had illiterate parents, many had illiteral grandparents, and frankly, your farm animals weren’t safe with some of them. A free, public education was a rising tide that raised all boats. It enabled my generation of white Southerners to get off the north end of southbound mules and not wind up in some latter day Hooverville filled with people with no education, not skills, and no hope.

            The greatest disservice ever done to a People was the failure of racial integration in America. It has been worse than slavery because in slavery people had hopes and dreams. In the miasma of the welfare-dependent black and white underclass in America, there is no hope and there are no dreams of betterment. The theory of integration was that integrating the schools, especially, would give Blacks the same access to a quality education as Whites seemed to have. At first it worked when those Blacks “integrating” the White schools were the “few, proud, and brave” who were willing and able to walk in the doors of a place where everyone hated them. And don’t tell me it wasn’t that way; I saw it happen and will freely admit that I did some of the hating.

            But then as it became a mass exercise, the racial tensions eased with familiarity but it soon became apparent that getting school on the hind teat had left the Black students far, far behind the White students. At one time both Black and White civil rights leaders knew this to be the case and accepted it; they knew that the Black students would be behind and would have to work very hard to even keep up. Read C. Vann Woodward’s “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” a book that greatly influenced the Brown Court. But then the test scores started coming in.

            Instead of biting the bullet and devoting the resources to educating these students AND accepting the fact that it might be a generation or more before the mass of the then largely rural Southern Blacks would perform at the same level as White students, the poverty pimps, the Educrats, and the Left just attacked the curriculum and the tests. The public schools began a Death Spiral in the early ’70s as curriculae and tests were “progressively” dumbed down to make it look like Black students were not just passing but succeeding. Having come through all that and having worked for and with more than a few affirmative action hires, I can tell you authorittative that few things are more tragic than the guy who thinks he’s actually doing his job – and one of them is the guy who has the job and KNOWS he’s not really doing it.

            Our modern schools are a graphic example of the coincidence of good intentions and bad motives. The Civil Rights leaders, Black and White, were good-intentioned and I think they were right; Black kids were being horribly educated and the idea of integration was a good one. Then it got hijacked by the left and became the darling of the poverty pimps, the ACLU, and Democrat politicians. I just wish the Black kids that I grew up with had had the same opportunity for a decent free public education that I did.

          • Leopard1996

            The more and more my disdain and utmost hatred of the democrat/liberal/progressive/commie becomes. Yes I am glad that we had the civil rights movement, but more and more I can see that the movement was allowed to be hijacked by progressivism/communism.

            Although, from someone that was there, I do have a question. What was the major opposition to the school integration in the south anyhow. Was it just a racism, or was there something more, that we aren’t necessarily taught in schools.

          • Achance

            White Supremacy was something you both took in and took for granted like the air you breathed and the water you drank. If you were my age, b.1949, you were opposed to integration because your parents were, your preacher was, all your relatives were, Hell, everybody you knew was; you didn’t need to know why. And, I say that as someone who quite literally spent at least as much time with Blacks as with Whites and it was “equal” time. We still farmed until the mid-’60s and had a long-held symbiotic relationship with a couple of Black families; they had labor, we had land. Most of my playmates in the growing and harvesting seasons were Black; I worked beside them though what passed for work for me was not really the work that they did. Probably only second to my grandfather as an influence on me was “Old Martin,” an elderly Black man who lived in “Price’s Quarter” across the the Branch from our place. All those words are very carefully chosen and if you don’t know what they mean, there’s probably a lot of this you don’t understand and I’ll explain if that’s the case. Old Martin took care of the place and I followed him around. Most of what I know that’s useful I either learned from my grandfather or him. But, Old Martin never came in the front door and he always called me Mister. That’s just the way it was.

          • janis

            my early years and my education in public schools were as much about white supremacy as yours were. I didn’t attend a school with black students until I was a junior in high school and, out of a student body of some 1300 kids, that first year there were only 8 black students who attended. My parents moved from our first home when I was 12 because they knew that integration was coming and they feared that it would mean a loss of quality in educational standards.

            Looking back on it, they were right, but probably for the wrong reasons. And yet, for all their fear, they moved beyond the way they were raised and the culture they had absorbed and came to see people for what they were, not what they looked like. If I were to ask them now if they were right to have wanted to keep the races separate, they would be ashamed to even consider that.

            And now, the left has managed to take away all that bright promise and the hope that went with it and twist it to their advantage. Now we all pay the price for their actions by having public schools that are no more than social experiments.

          • CincoSolas_del_Bronx

            please comment on the flavor of All God’s Dangers. I’ve always sensed he captures the totality of that life better than anyone before or since–right or wrong?

          • Achance

            My Dad or Grandad could have wrote it, too. There wasn’t much difference in the life experiences of land-owning poor Blacks and poor Whites. The non-landowners had a much tougher life; tenant farming and share-cropping were worse than slavery except as an idea. Freedom don’t mean much if you don’t have the means to exercise it.

            From the viewpoint of that book as I imperfectly remember it, if you were a Black man and the only White man you had to deal with was my Dad, it is a pretty accurate view. If you were a Black man and had to deal with some of my uncles, your view of White men might have been less charitable than “Nate Shaw’s”

            So, it has been too long since I read it for me to be an authoritative critic but as I recall Nate Shaw was what Flannery O’Connor described as “Good Country People.” There wasn’t much difference between the Black and White ones.

          • CincoSolas_del_Bronx

            With his phonographic memory of every spoken word across many decades, Old Nate (Ned) certainly wasn’t shy about distinguishing between the righteous and the wicked, whichever side of the tree they were growing on; I have no doubt your Dad would have been on his short list of trusted neighbors.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            Which is one more reason to eradicate public schools. Today the gays and greens control the agenda, yesterday it was the Klan. Tomorrow it may be the ONE or the UN. It will always be controlled by the political whimsy of the day.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            Which is one more reason to eradicate public schools. Today the gays and greens control the agenda, yesterday it was the Klan. Tomorrow it may be the ONE or the UN. It will always be controlled by the political whimsy of the day.

          • Achance

            Racial segregation permeated every aspect of life in The South; school was just a part of it as was lunch counters, drinking fountains, which door you went in,and what part of the movie theatre you sat in.

            Now you can come tell me that I’m not a proper conservative or Republican because I believe in public schools. And I can tell you that Neanderthals like you are among the reasons that conservatives and Republicans are irrelevant in National politics.

          • http://dreamsfrommyforefathers.com RoguePolitics

            The segregation part is relevant to show that government will force whatever is politically correct into the schools as long as they control them. And as long as they provide the money they will control them.

            The signs are there to warn you.

            You are free to feed the beast if it pleases you.

          • Leopard1996

            I read earlier down thread with was Zootsuit said, and I do agree with him to the point, that it does seem that if there was more of a pusth for equal access to resources instead of putting blacks in the same classes as whites, that would have probably been a better solution .

          • ZootSuit

            In the context of this discussion, we must make a clear distinction between de-segregation and integration. De-segregation is the dismantling of especially de jure barriers prohibiting access to resources because of one’s race or ethnicity. And for the record, I personally wholeheartedly support that.

            Integration, on the other hand, is the mistaken belief that Black kids somehow benefit from sitting in classrooms next to White kids. I personally think that idea is “horse-hockey” and, dare I say, racist. For an opinion almost identical to my own, please see Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Missourri v. Jenkins.

            In fact, despite the rhetoric and “remembrance” of many, Brown v. Board of Education was not a universally lauded decision within the Black community at the time. Brown v. Board of Education was a very controversial decision within the Black community. For while almost unanimously the Black community applauded the end of de jure segregation, many felt, correctly in my opinion, that the reasoning behind the decision was wrong and even racist, and the ultimate result would be to hasten the destruction of supporting institutions within the Black community. Again, unfortunately, they were correct.

            Integration was itself the major cause (after de jure segregation itself) of the “mis-education” of many Black children. One of the the things that “integration” did was destroy the familial and community infrastructure that is necesssary for children (regardless of race, class or whatnot) need to succeed. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., the “great integrationist,” recongnized this fact towards the end of his life and began to lament the damage the integration was doing.

            Indeed, Thomas Sowell has addressed this phenomena in some of his works and when considering his own experiences at Dunbar in Washington, DC. Even more and on a personal note, my father-in-law, an educator in the southern Georgia in the 1950′s and 1960′s, often talks about how integration destroyed many of the schools he taught in and dedicated his life to. Yes, they often had substandard books and other facilities: but when they did, they very often had bake sales and used other means to purchase and improve their resources themselves and improve the education of their own children.

            Unfortunately, when these Black children were then integrated into “White” schools, many times they were simply relegated to the “back of the class” so to speak and given inferior resources within the school. After all, with rare exceptions, the administrators and teachers of these Black students in these integrated schools were the same White administrators and educators with their ideas of “White Supremacy” (your words) that they had when the schools were all White.

            And when the parents of these Black children — who before were having bake sales and doing auto drives and whatnot to provide the resources for their children previously — would attempt to do many of the same things, they were either actively discouraged (to put it politely) or found that their efforts were indeed helping the Whites students in these integrated schools but very little of it was reaching the Black students.

            So while I agree that state and local governments (and not the Federal government) have an interest in the education of their populace — and that by means that include vouchers, charter schools, public schools, private schools, home schools and whatnot — I do not agree that integration was part of the solution. The failure of racial integration is that, in actuality, it “worked.”

          • Achance

            The net result has been that the integrated schools are far worse for both Blacks and Whites than were the segregated schools. It may well have been that the right course was to make the revenue distribution truly equal and let them remain separate, but any White who said that out loud was branded a racist and any Black who said it was branded a militant.

          • ZootSuit

            I will confess, however, to a psychological need to correct a common misconception that Black kids somehow learn better by sitting next to White kids and even more, that Blacks as a whole were just so overjoyed that they could finally, post Brown v. Board of Education, sit next to Whites that very many did not express serious misgivings about the reasoning and results of the decision. Misgivings that, in my opinion, have unfortunately proven to be prescient.

            I’m not even saying that you suffer from that misconception. Just that I have a need to correct it.

            And as for being a “militant,” I see nothing wrong with that. Just look at my signature below.

            :-)

          • Leopard1996

            I am agreeing with your take on how a true black nationalist would have to be conservative by nature. My original turn to my more Libertarian beliefs starts from the premise of how I can trust a government that allowed things like segregation, slavery, etc. Until it became a good political stand to get elected to be against those things. So the less government is involved with my life the better.

          • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

            Before integration we had three years of desegregation in my little hometown. The black kids who lived close to me started attending our school and there was no real friction.

            But when the school district was forced to integrate everything fell to pieces. We were bussed way across town, A very good black high school was turned into a middle school and all the black and white kids were herded into a new high school where no one got along.

            everyone suffered for at least a generation.

          • ZootSuit

            Then I understand and can possibly even agree with you. Gaurdians should have the option to educate their charges/children as they best see fit.

            But if you are saying that the government — that is, not even the state and local governments — have no interest in education, then I must agree with Martin Knight.

            To take your argument to an extreme but the logical conclusion, you could say that the government has no interest in keeping your child alive and reasonably heathy. Taking your argument, should state and local governments interfere if you look your child in a room, literally never letting them go outside and never providing them with clean clothes or a clean environment, and give them only jelly beans and peanut butter to eat?

            After all, according to you, children “belong” to their parents and the government has no interest.

            And if you say that the government can protect the “welfare” of the child, I would counter that in this day and age, “education” is a vital and necessary element of an individual’s “welfare (which is a point that I think Martin was trying to make but he is more than well able to speak for himself).

          • mom2oneson

            There is a difference between interest and passing a law. The state has an interest but having compulsory attendance laws are wrong.

            I need to think about it some more but right now don’t think I would put basic education on the same level as other child welfare things as far as not providing an education a crime. I say that but at the same time I think we all as private citizens should do a lot to support those that need it as far as basic needs like food, clothing, diapers and educational materials and even psychological support for providing that education. Good question I have to think more about it.

      • Richard Mullins

        We need an educated populace and having them go to school is best way to have it. Where we’ve gone wrong, is limiting the choice of schools that preform well.

        • mom2oneson

          poor Vladimir’s thread after this post but I don’t agree. We need educated kids but compulsory attendance laws and gov funded schools (either federal, local or state or a mix like we have now) are wrong. Two areas, child welfare and education has really shocked me to learn conservative views on.
          .

        • jyalai

          The state of the public education system today is a testimony to the fallacy.
          1) The government does a great job educating the populace to be good subjects who pay taxes and do what the government says.
          2) The government does a terrible job educating the populace to be free thinking, upstanding, members of the noble class called American citizens.

          I use the word noble class, because that is what we are supposed to be. We run our own lives. We are not subjects of a king, or a government. The government works for us. This is different than in the feudal democracies of Europe, where the national government just took the place of the king. We live in a society of peers. Mark Levin calls it “civil society.” However, since the government has created an almost monopoly over education, I believe the civil society has become less civil.

    • monstermom

      The feds are involved in so many levels that you peel back one layer a million more are exposed. Just eliminating the US Dept of Education won’t crush the onion.

      Unfortunately for conservatives, we’re at the bottom of a very large hill which has opposition forces massed at the top and dug in. And, while I hate to admit it, some of the federal mandates aren’t necessarily bad.

      While I agree that we need to get the Feds out of education, we need to make sure that when we peel back the layers of the onion we do so without getting acid in our eyes.

  • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

    So much so, that the Boulder Valley School District tried to shut them down. They took it all the way to the CO Supreme Court but lost, spending nearly half a million dollars doing it. Funny thing about that? Charter schools are chartered by each school district. There aren’t any in the BVSD area, because they don’t allow them.

    Typical Democrats, they don’t want something and have to try to make sure nobody else does it either.

  • hunter4

    The same week that the President signed his daughters up at Sidwell Friends the ended the D.C. voucher program to stop poor kids from going to his daughters school. If a white republican president did that he’d be run out of town by sundown. President Obama got away with so much without press scrutiny.

    This should not be too surprising from the family that brought patient dumping to poor neighborhoods from Mrs. Obama’s hospital. How many sick and injured were sent away from the UC hospital to wait at other nearby clinics while the sick became sicker?

  • Richard Mullins

    after then Governor Bush let Charter Schools be created. There good but it seems that the Leftists that run the Teachers union and to an extent the TEA(Texas Education Authority) have demonizing them down. They have success but we need to have the unions out of the way so we a can have some choice. That’s the one thing that we need.

  • Achance

    more than anything else accounts for their “success.” The only people that care are people that care. Parents with a family culture that cares about education will manage to impart some education to their children no matter what bad schools and popular culture try to do to them. The kid may turn out to be a horrible disappointment, do all the wrong things, but s/he will do so with at least a somewhat educated habit of mind.

    The people served by those God-awful urban schools mostly don’t know or care that the schools are God-awful; they didn’t finish school, nobody they’re related to finished school, nobody they know finished school. Likewise the mother and father(s) of the child(ren) are not married, do not live together, and may not even be known. You are not going to make such people vote for you by offering them charter schools or better schools of any sort; they don’t care, school is just another hassle at best viewed as a babysitter that you don’t have to pay for.

    As a purely political question, the issue is whether you can get more support from suburbanites by offering them some improved education for their kids than the increased opposition you’ll get from teachers and other unionized employees. My guess is that it depends on the state. In non-union states, you can probably make a winning issue of better schools. In union states, “better schools” will be seen as code for non-union schools and school boards not hand-picked by teachers’ unions so you’ll get the vehement and total opposition of all unions and their Democrat running dogs.

    • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

      …more about destroying the teachers’ unions than raising the quality of education on a lowest-common-denominator basis. The worst schools in a market-based education system are still going to be lousy even if they do improve a little; it’s the good students currently trapped in crappy schools who win. And in neither case are traditional Republican constituencies served.

      But if you can further a free-market educational system you’ll see teachers’ unions go away. And that is a massive source of Democrat funding. It’s a dagger in the throat of the Democrat Party. Not to mention the fact that you can break the educational monopoly the Left has if you have competition within the schools; if you’re teaching sex-ed to kindergartners in your school, you’ll find it’s bad for market share when the parents can put their kids in a different school.

      • Achance

        all you have to do at the state and local level is have a Republican AG and go after their dues structures. There’s hardly a union of any sort in the Country that has an adequate record keeping system to appropriately charge fee objectors and almost none of them really make an attempt to maintain a constitutionally permissible dues and fees schems.

        While the doing of it is relatively easy, it does provoke an existential battle with the unions – all of them in the whole Country because they all band together to oppose anyone doing this – even the ones that hate each other become frieds over dues.

        • mom2oneson

          I say keep the kids home too. That would defund the districts big time. :)
          Didn’t you say Gov S in CA stood up to the unions before? Maybe he would be our best hope?

          • Achance

            I think that exercise is why he turned so much to the left. CA has an elected AG who is a Democrat; Democrats don’t cross unions.

        • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

          …which will be painted as a “mean-spirited Republican dirty trick.”

          Promoting educational competition is a lot harder to pin down as an assault on the unions. But it has a similar effect; so long as your charter schools can be non-union if they choose, they’ll beat the hell out of the union schools and win in the marketplace.

          How are the teachers’ unions going to assault charter schools? All of their BS falls flat on this score.

          • Achance

            charter schools and I think if you look around the Country, you’ll find that there really are more groovy, lefty charter schools than conservative, academically rigorous charter schools. Unions are lots of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. You don’t fool them by trying to use charter schools as an indirect assault on them; they see what you’re doing.

            I’m not against charter schools; I’m for anything that improves school choice, but I do believe that they are merely a compromise and a deflection from a true school choice program such as vouchers.

  • sacody

    Yes, as was stated several times above, charter schools often only cater to demographics that frequently vote Democratic anyways, but you must understand to what extent teacher unions dislike charter schools and school choice. Unions oppose school choice because it simply makes union power grabs look bad in comparison. For example, let us compare a unionized state like Minnesota to a right-to-work state like South Dakota. In Minnesota, I was required to be affiliated with a teacher’s union in our district. Our union had weekly meetings that you were required to be at. These meetings consisted of little more than endless complaining about seniority and benefits. Never once were the concerns of making our school environment better for learning ever brought up. It was always about “me” and what “I” could get from the school district. Our teachers? union bragged about how well paid our senior salaried teachers were. This was true, but it came at a great expense to our students and infrastructure. Our school district literally did not have a single computer available to students that could reliably save a document and print it or had reliable internet access. In fact, the teachers? union was counter productive to such an extent toward a good education environment that according to our contracts we were in working agreement violation if we stayed after school to help students with their work because it was supposedly a violation of our salaried agreement. Let us now contrast this with South Dakota where I currently work. I am currently president of our “teacher’s association,” which is strictly a collective bargaining association for contracts. Not a single member of our school district is associated with a teachers? union. We meet roughly twice a year to discuss negotiations, minus the politics. Yes, we make less money than teachers in Minnesota, but our class sizes are less than half that in Minnesota, and we are infinitely more technologically advanced on the classroom level than Minnesota school districts. Our school district provides tablets to all of its high school students, and our entire campus is wireless accessible. All of our classrooms are equipped with Promethean boards or various other interactive projector setups. Now if a charter school would set up shop next to my old Minnesota district or next to my current South Dakota district, which district do you think would lose more students and teachers? Unionized schools cannot compete very well with charter schools and nonunionized schools because they still have the freedom to adapt to student and parental needs and concerns. You need to look at how school choice undermines unions at the district level to understand its national implications and why it should be pushed nationally as an issue for the GOP in 2010 and beyond. It serves as the corrosive agent that eats away at the power of these corrupt and greedy unions, and it gives teachers an opportunity to get out, which is something the unions dread.

    • redohio

      you talk about the difference in pay b/t Minnesota and South Dakota. However, you don’t address the fact that the unions perpetuate the pay scale that currently exists all over the country. In such systems, teachers are guaranteed a raise year after year, despite poor performance by their students. Does the system you belong to in SD change this? Have you negotiated contracts that allow teachers to be based on merit and performance? Therein lies one of my biggest problems with the unions. My girlfriend is a teacher in Baltimore, MD and my mother was one in Massachusetts. The unions keep the teachers fat and happy with good salaries and GREAT benefits.

      I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

      • sacody

        We do not have any type of merti-based pay in our district, but lacking a strong union presence has prevented teacher salaries and benefits from robbing other needs in the school district like infrastructure and student expenses. The point was that these runaway benefits take funding from somewhere, and the unions pushing for them seem to have little regard for those who suffer from the unbalanced funding.

  • Swamp_Yankee

    I’m still thinking this issue through.

    First I support charter schools. But I have some reservations about them.

    For one, charter schools are still state controlled. While I support charter schools as an alternative to failed traditional public schools, I also support private, parochial and home schooling. They must be packaged to together. There is strength in numbers and we the other three must be considered.

    In Boston, of course, and perahps other places, the unionization of charter schools has begun. Im not privy to the actual school charter and the union rules. But the independence of charters is somewhat illusory and something to consider. State controlled is state controlled, no matter how its packaged.

    Liberals can use charters to co-opt conservative ground. They did this with school choice. They stole the issue, with the caveat that the “choice” had to be with other public schools. I wonder if charter schools are going to be used in a similar manner to co-opt choice and vouchers to the detriment of private or parochial schools. (I’m not sure I want vouchers to be used for parochial schools though, as I worry about the strings that may be attched).

    I’m still trying to figure out the union takeover of CLCS charter school in Boston and what it means in the long run.

    • Achance

      for financial and employment purposes. If the school district is the employer for purposes of the state’s collective bargaining law, then the charter school would be withing the union’s jurisdiction unless there was some specific legislative exemption. I’m not a fan of them because I see the Ed Schools and the Educrats as more of a problem than the teachers and their unions. You want some control over schools? Pay some attention to who gets elected to school boards. Pay some attention to who gets appointed to State Boards of Education and Regents. Even when we have a Republican administration, there’s nobody much on the R side of the ditch that knows anything about running schools, so we just ask the “education community” to suggest appointees or we appoint one of our rich buddies who just wants it on his resume that he was on the Board. Then we wonder why the curriculae are so liberal, the discipline so lax, and the management so groovy.

      • Swamp_Yankee

        and controlled directly by some alternate state structure. The devil is in the details of the actual school charter. I hate the teachers unions with a passion. They are the front line soldiers pushing everything from the deification of mother nature to the ethic balkanization of America. I support charter schools from a short term, Republican, tactical perspective, but the long term culture warrior in me beleives its a short term solution. They infiltrate charter school curriculum sooner or later.

        • aesthete

          I think that any government intervention short of a generalized tax exemption for schools should be a tactical choice for Republicans. I include vouchers, simply because direct government funding provides more potential governmental interference in private schooling than would an indirect method of funding, such as tax exemptions. Anything else is a short-term stopgap, fix, or increment towards the final goal of no government interference in schools.

        • Achance

          depends on where you are, but whatever governing body there is would still be subject to state or local bargaining law unless there was a specific express exemption.

          As to the pushing agendae piece; they’ll push whatever agenda they’re allowed to push or whatever agenda they’re told to push. They don’t have any freedom of speech or academic freedom unless it is given to them by management. Like all other public employees, they check their freedom of speech at the door when they come to work unless they’ve been given specific rights – and many teachers have in either contract or law. If you don’t want them deifying nature, you have to take away their so-called academic freedom and that takes controlling a school board.

      • mom2oneson

        How do we find out about the State Board of Education and Regent elections? How do we find out about changing the election dates like you wrote about before so people know when these elections are?
        Now it makes sense with child welfare, I bet it’s the same thing, no Rs know anything about it so they left it to the feminist. Nancy Schaffer in GA is the only former senator I think that has spent time to understand what goes on. I sure could not understand how conservatives have funded these anti-family anti-human laws in child welfare for so long.

        • Achance

          Some states elect them, usually in the General Election ballot, other states appoint them. In the appointee states, you have to go through whatever process is there to be known to be interested in appointment; writing large checks is the most surefire method.

          • mom2oneson

            online info says Jeb Bush did away with the board or regents but someone else made a board of govenors and all 17 are appointed. No big checks here maybe I could take up a collection. :D

      • aesthete

        I’ll point out that most charter schools are outside of the scope of the local school districts, or when they are, they are typically given special preference for “firings” (i.e., reassigning incompetent teachers to another school). That said, vouchers are the preferable option, as it means less direct governmental control over curricula.

        • mom2oneson

          teachers can be anywhere in the country as long as they are certified in that state. CA has a lot of those charter-quasi homeschools. The state gives the schoosl cash for each head count and mom and school split the loot, mom meets with the teacher once a month or so. Anyway the movement in charter schools now is virutal schools.

      • aesthete

        What do you know about the Interior Distance Education of Alaska (IDEA) program (http://www.ideafamilies.org/)? It seems like a good fit for AK’s decentralized population, and having been homeschooled for part of my life, it seems like a novel idea (no pun intended), but I have no idea as to the sucess or inception of the program. Do you know anything about it?

        • Achance

          and college. I’ve taught a lot of classes on collective bargaining and labor issues from Juneau to people taking college business or public administration classes all over the State. It’s a little strange to do when you’re all alone talking to a camera and microphone but fun when you have a live class and the distance classes. It’s all networked so they can just type their questions in from wherever the are or use the microphones and ask you questions or engage in discussion.

          There are a couple of charter correspondence and virtual schools that also serve students all over the State but mostly those living in very remote places where there are fewer than 25 K-12 students. Any place with more than 25 has a State provided school.

          • aesthete
    • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

      …and most if not all would be contract jobs run by private companies. And those schools would compete against private and parochial schools for education dollars made available either through refundable tax credits or vouchers in a free-market system.

      • Swamp_Yankee

        In theory all that stuff sounds good, but those in control of the process are still the liberal education establishment, beaurocrats and statists.

        Its a good short term solution and better than the alternative, but I think it will end up being just another branch off the same rotten trunk. I have morethan a few concerns that I briefly touched upon here

        http://www.redstate.com/swamp_yankee/2009/12/28/the-illusory-independence-of-charter-schools/

        • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

          …as possible.

          Push for vouchers, push for charters. Push for alternative curriculum choices. Push for tax credits for educational expenses. Push to remove barriers to home-schooling. Push to allow kids to go for a GED at 15 or 16 years old and use that plus an ACT or SAT to get into college.

          Push for as many ways as possible for children to escape the Left’s education gulag, and highlight their efforts to run barbed wire around the school system.

          You’ve never seen the precedent of a free-market school system because the Progressive movement established a command-economics system in the late 19th century and glorified it as some sort of achievement. The fact is, American education was developing nicely long before that happened. It’s another of the Left’s famous lies.

          • Swamp_Yankee

            That’s exactly what I wrote, but be careful who you get in bed with. Charters are a short term political solution. In the long term, they pose their own set of problems. Be careful what you wish for.

  • jayburd

    Are the choice compromise that some districts begrudgingly allowed to deflect full choice. Maintaining funding and union involvement is the reason. Gotta keep that headcount. Many charter schools either failed or preformed no better than public schools because they were still state run. They were used to quell the voucher movement. But somewhere along the line it ran out of steam. Everyone knows that private and home schools are vastly more successful and that is what should be emphasized. Not the charter school deflection.

    • josephinerose

      in my opinion, because of cirriculum choice. There are liberal/leftist feel-good cirriculums like experiential learning that *will* fail and produce miserable state test grades. Core Knowledge cirriculum charter schools are the way to go. Like Nightwister, I live in Colorado where we have Core Knowledge cirriculum charters schools that have smokin’ hot state test scores. I can’t verbalize the political side of things very well, but charter schools with the freedom from regular public school regulations and unions along with the Core Knowledge cirriculum is the recipe for success in producing well-educated minds full of mush!!:)

      • jayburd

        so admin and unions could point and say “look, choice doesn’t work”. The average joe knows that private/home ed. is almost always superior. Then you hear that dysfunctional socialization crap for home schooled.
        I have:
        1 niece, home schooled up to college, and she is a music major and expert pianist with a full ride at a private university.
        1 niece, home schooled up to college, who is a computer graphics design major at a public university.
        1 niece, home/church schooled to college and degreed full ride from a major university in foreign languages, works for N.S.A.
        1 nephew, home/church schooled to college with an engineering degree from a major university, now working for the U.S. Patent Office.

  • AceInTX

    as such…the establishment won’t champion the issue because they don’t want to be associated with SoCons…We’re an embarassment to the establishment and giving us what we want…even if it’s a good and right thing has the effect of making the establishment look like they are pandering to us…this is something to be avoided at ALL costs!

  • skorrent1

    Gives wide results across the country. Here in NC, there are about 1800 public schools, somewhere near 800 (smaller) private and parochial schools, and the state has set a limit of 100 charters. A sop to the NEA, and a trivial impact on education in the state. Whenever someone mentions “vouchers” or “school choice” the Dems say: “But, we have a Charter School program!”

    Also, the state has structured Charters so that anyone with any experience in a private school (anyone who actually knows how to RUN an independent school) can’t start a charter school. And the charter schools have to fight to be included in each of the myriad different funding sources– sometimes they win, sometimes not.

    • http://www.thehayride.com MacAoidh

      Read your Alinsky. You erode the enemy’s system from within. Sure, we’d like to break his system down in one fell swoop with vouchers, but charter schools are a camel’s nose under the tent. Start ‘em, get some initial successes, use those to highlight the need for more of them to replace the failed Soviet-style schools, and eventually you’ve made the Left’s educational monopoly unworkable.

      • Swamp_Yankee

        The nose is in the tent alright. The statists have their nose in the tent of real reform and are manipulating charter schools for their traditional ends.

  • Common_Cents

    It is time to get into education. Take a page out of the left’s playbook.

    We have proven that it is much tougher to de-program someone as it is to indoctrinate them with the truth right out of the gate.

    ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

  • avgamerican

    Because knowing the truth doesn’t prevent the intellectually challenged sheep from voting differently. Remember the post of the documentary on Detroit? Since 1961 (48 years) dominated by democrat/socialist dogma, the sheep still haven’t figured it out. Add to that the most brainwashed / no common sense generation of voters we have ever had in histor,y and what do you get? Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.