I'd rather focus on something independent rather than on something released by whatever is being examined.
We'll see how things are in a couple of years: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/29/19nccharters.h33.html
School Daze
- Thread starter dbphoenix
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I'd rather focus on something independent rather than on something released by whatever is being examined.
We'll see how things are in a couple of years: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/29/19nccharters.h33.html
I don't know how many times I need to post this. I got it from the author of the book "I Got Schooled."
If you just tested all white suburban schools the USA would rank first in the world by a large margin. Making Finland look like just some average European county.
If you only test black inner city schools, they rank lowest in the world, behind most third world countries.
We don't have an education crisis in the USA. We have a race problem. And that is the point of the author's book. And he gives some solutions to fixing our black inner city schools.
The website I provided is the North Carolina Public Instruction government website. It holds rating information for all public and charter schools in North Carolina including results of all testing and demographic information. It does not come more independent than this. All states are required to provide similar statistical information for both public and charter schools to meet federal requirements.
Your article outlines that that their are some educators opposed to charters because it takes $6800 per student from the public school coffers and places it in the charter school. I will note that the article does not address the superior academic results from charter schools.
I am most greatly amused by the comments by Chrissy Pearson, a spokeswoman for the Durham district at the bottom of the article. Durham (which has some of the most under-performing violent public schools in the state) public school administrators have strongly opposed the opening of Research Triangle Charter Academy - a charter school in Durham that has primarily minority enrollment. This charter school is run by the same organization which runs Raleigh Charter which is ranked 29th in the top high schools in the United States.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/08/27/4101036_nc-school-of-science-and-math.html?rh=1
This many be a good time to note that over 400 minority parents showed up at a Durham public school board meeting and told the school board members to "go to hell" and stop opposing the opening of Research Triangle Charter Academy. After this we never heard anything further out of the failed Durham public school board.
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In these circumstances I wouldn't call a North Carolina government website "independent". Nonetheless, while North Carolina may provide an example to the nation at some point, I'd rather wait to see how it all shakes out.
I feel the same about global warming
How Public Education Dollars Are Flowing Into For-Profit Companies
ProPublica | By Marian Wang
Posted: 10/15/2014 12:11 pm EDT Updated: 3 hours ago
In late February, the North Carolina chapter of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — a group co-founded by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers — embarked on what it billed as a statewide tour of charter schools, a cornerstone of the group's education agenda. The first — and it turns out, only — stop was Douglass Academy, a new charter school in downtown Wilmington.
Douglass Academy was an unusual choice. A few weeks before, the school had beenwarned by the state about low enrollment. It had just 35 students, roughly half the state's minimum. And a month earlier, a local newspaper had reported that federal regulators were investigating the school's operations.
But the school has other attributes that may have appealed to the Koch group. The school's founder, a politically active North Carolina businessman named Baker Mitchell, shares the Kochs' free-market ideals. His model for success embraces decreased government regulation, increased privatization and, if all goes well, healthy corporate profits.
In that regard, Mitchell, 74, appears to be thriving. Every year, millions of public education dollars flow through Mitchell's chain of four nonprofit charter schools to for-profit companies he controls. more . . .
ProPublica | By Marian Wang
Posted: 10/15/2014 12:11 pm EDT Updated: 3 hours ago
In late February, the North Carolina chapter of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — a group co-founded by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers — embarked on what it billed as a statewide tour of charter schools, a cornerstone of the group's education agenda. The first — and it turns out, only — stop was Douglass Academy, a new charter school in downtown Wilmington.
Douglass Academy was an unusual choice. A few weeks before, the school had beenwarned by the state about low enrollment. It had just 35 students, roughly half the state's minimum. And a month earlier, a local newspaper had reported that federal regulators were investigating the school's operations.
But the school has other attributes that may have appealed to the Koch group. The school's founder, a politically active North Carolina businessman named Baker Mitchell, shares the Kochs' free-market ideals. His model for success embraces decreased government regulation, increased privatization and, if all goes well, healthy corporate profits.
In that regard, Mitchell, 74, appears to be thriving. Every year, millions of public education dollars flow through Mitchell's chain of four nonprofit charter schools to for-profit companies he controls. more . . .
By Ewan McMurry
Thanks to Right-Wing Lobbying, We're Teaching a Generation of Kids to Doubt Science and History
Textbooks are one of the most vulnerable battlegrounds of the right-wing culture wars.
When high school students in Scottsdale’s Gilbert Public Schools open their biology textbooks this year, they may find something missing: an entire page on pregnancy options.
Such was the decision of the Gilbert Public School Board, which voted 3-2 last week to “edit” an Honors biology textbook to bring it into accordance with a two-year old law requiring all education materials in the state to " promot[e] childbirth and adoption over elective abortion." The biology textbook in question isn’t a sex-ed coursebook, and it actually presented a survey of options from abstinence to abortofacients, but lawmakers didn’t seem too bothered by the details: the purpose of Arizona’s textbook law was to create situations just like this one, and the joy at finally being able to implement it was palpable.
"Since the change in this law was relatively recent, we are likely the first school board to proactively ensure that the legislative intent is being enforced," the board’s president said.
The ease with which a school board in Arizona edited student’s biology education, with the blessing of a state legislature, highlights textbooks as one of the most vulnerable battlegrounds of the right-wing culture wars. Allergic to controversy, school districts are extraordinarily susceptible to complaints, just a few of which can come to seem like a deluge. School boards members are often elected in dismally low-turnout elections, ceding control to a tiny sliver of the local populace, which places them at the mercy of right wing advocacy groups like the one that pushed the Arizona changes.
Students have few ways to fight back. Most of the time either the decision-making is too remote or the changes are too obscure to compel action against the school boards. Moreover student advocacy tends to focus much more on the fiscal and economic sides of higher education, namely the price tag of a college education and the crushing debt that results. Even when the discussion is narrowed to textbooks, their exorbitant costs are often more of an issue than the content being paid for. The result is a select and extreme portion can tamper with textbooks with next to no resistance.
In one town in Colorado this fall, however, that changed, when a nexus of students, teachers, and parents protested changes to the AP history curriculum in Columbine High School, and achieved results.
The contretemps came after College Board's Advanced Placement Program released new guidelines for the AP History exam that enraged conservatives who thought it was anti-American. The changes were lambasted by the Republican National Committee and conservative upstart Ben Carson warned, with characteristic hyperbole, they would make students " sign up for ISIS."
The Jefferson County School Board finally took the talking-point bait, approving instead curriculum guidelines that emphasized “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage,” including “benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and didn’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Teachers and students across the entire school district rebelled, accusing the school board of censorship and revisionism. Several hundred students and an overwhelming majority of teachers in two high schools staged two separate walkouts to protest the changes, causing the school district to cancel classes. (As more than one person pointed out, they were very much enacting the civil disobedience the school board was trying to erase.)
The protests drew widespread attention to the school board’s actions, which began to seem retrograde in the harsh light of the national media. It also got the attention of the College Board itself, which publicly supported the protests, saying in a statement that any course that “censors essential concepts from an Advanced Placement course, that course can no longer bear the ‘AP’ designation.” more . . .
Thanks to Right-Wing Lobbying, We're Teaching a Generation of Kids to Doubt Science and History
Textbooks are one of the most vulnerable battlegrounds of the right-wing culture wars.
When high school students in Scottsdale’s Gilbert Public Schools open their biology textbooks this year, they may find something missing: an entire page on pregnancy options.
Such was the decision of the Gilbert Public School Board, which voted 3-2 last week to “edit” an Honors biology textbook to bring it into accordance with a two-year old law requiring all education materials in the state to " promot[e] childbirth and adoption over elective abortion." The biology textbook in question isn’t a sex-ed coursebook, and it actually presented a survey of options from abstinence to abortofacients, but lawmakers didn’t seem too bothered by the details: the purpose of Arizona’s textbook law was to create situations just like this one, and the joy at finally being able to implement it was palpable.
"Since the change in this law was relatively recent, we are likely the first school board to proactively ensure that the legislative intent is being enforced," the board’s president said.
The ease with which a school board in Arizona edited student’s biology education, with the blessing of a state legislature, highlights textbooks as one of the most vulnerable battlegrounds of the right-wing culture wars. Allergic to controversy, school districts are extraordinarily susceptible to complaints, just a few of which can come to seem like a deluge. School boards members are often elected in dismally low-turnout elections, ceding control to a tiny sliver of the local populace, which places them at the mercy of right wing advocacy groups like the one that pushed the Arizona changes.
Students have few ways to fight back. Most of the time either the decision-making is too remote or the changes are too obscure to compel action against the school boards. Moreover student advocacy tends to focus much more on the fiscal and economic sides of higher education, namely the price tag of a college education and the crushing debt that results. Even when the discussion is narrowed to textbooks, their exorbitant costs are often more of an issue than the content being paid for. The result is a select and extreme portion can tamper with textbooks with next to no resistance.
In one town in Colorado this fall, however, that changed, when a nexus of students, teachers, and parents protested changes to the AP history curriculum in Columbine High School, and achieved results.
The contretemps came after College Board's Advanced Placement Program released new guidelines for the AP History exam that enraged conservatives who thought it was anti-American. The changes were lambasted by the Republican National Committee and conservative upstart Ben Carson warned, with characteristic hyperbole, they would make students " sign up for ISIS."
The Jefferson County School Board finally took the talking-point bait, approving instead curriculum guidelines that emphasized “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage,” including “benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and didn’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Teachers and students across the entire school district rebelled, accusing the school board of censorship and revisionism. Several hundred students and an overwhelming majority of teachers in two high schools staged two separate walkouts to protest the changes, causing the school district to cancel classes. (As more than one person pointed out, they were very much enacting the civil disobedience the school board was trying to erase.)
The protests drew widespread attention to the school board’s actions, which began to seem retrograde in the harsh light of the national media. It also got the attention of the College Board itself, which publicly supported the protests, saying in a statement that any course that “censors essential concepts from an Advanced Placement course, that course can no longer bear the ‘AP’ designation.” more . . .
It is interesting that you post this article - while failing to note that the curriculum of the U.S AP History course has totally changed over the past 35 years. When I was in high school (and I still have the book), AP US History was focused on traditional U.S. History with George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln
prominently covered in the text. Now these two major figures in U.S. History are barely mentioned in my daughter's text book. The modern text is all about the oppression of others by white man during U.S. history and their struggles. There are lengthy chapters about slavery and women's suffrage - and George Washington is only mentioned twice.
Has U.S. history changed over the past 35 years, or is it simply being re-written by liberals?
It is not difficult to figure out why many school boards are outraged by this change in U.S. History education.
Should I also mention that the teaching of comparative religions in U.S. text books now only covers Islam, Hinduism, Buddists, etc. but no longer has any mention of Christianity in the text.
BULLSHIT
This is the story the media prefer to ignore when they go on these hystrical campaigns about the "right wingers" interfering in school curricula.
Like on so many other issues, they don't object to interference and political control, provided they are the ones doing it.