Free Republic

HEADLINE: Few charter school grads earn degrees (On my USA Today newspaper) FACTS> (from article): Statistics for charter schools as a whole are hard to come by, but the best estimate puts charters’ college persistence rates at around 23%. To be fair, the rate overall for low-income students – the kind of students typically served by charters – is even worse: just 9%.

Michigan charter schools are among the most regulated schools in the country, according to the Michigan Association of Public School Academies. Here are 13 rules and laws the association says charter schools in this state must follow: Michigan law requires a charter school to be closed if it is in the bottom 5 percent of state public schools in academic achievement three years in a row. Charter school authorizers hold charter schools accountable to the requirements spelled out in a legally binding contract. The contract covers expectations and goals for the school. Charter schools can limit enrollment based only on...

I'll be honest: I'm the result of a private school education, Kindergarten through Law School. My wife, however, is the exact opposite—a product of only public school. My mother-in-law is the product of public school, and was a public school elementary teacher and administrator for over 30 years. My parents went to public schools K-12. I think all of us turned out just fine. There are some excellent public schools in this country, just like there are some excellent private schools. I'm thankful for the education I received and thankful my parents could afford the choices they made for my...

One of the painful realities of our time is that most public schools in most low-income, inner-city neighborhoods produce educational outcomes that are far below the outcomes in other neighborhoods, and especially in more affluent neighborhoods. Attempts to assign blame are too numerous to name, much less explore. But as someone who has, for more than 40 years, been researching those particular minority schools that have been successful, I am struck both by their success and by how varied are the ways that success has been achieved. In doing research for a 1976 article, "Patterns of Black Excellence," I discovered...

America's socialists -- I mean, progressives, are enraged that President-elect Trump chose Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education. "Not a good appointment," yelled Al Sharpton. A "proponent of a for-profit institution! She does not believe in the public school system!" complained CNN's Bakari Sellers. Wait. Is your for-profit local supermarket less "public" than your kid's school? No! For-profit institutions serve the public and usually do it better than governments do. Let's stop calling government schools "public." Call them what they are: "government-run" schools. Anyway, the charter schools DeVos supports are public. They're just not controlled by the usual...

(Download Link to entire article) The charter school deception is rooted in the shared beliefs of its founders. Corporate titans like the Walmart-creating Walton family, Bill Gates, and other very wealthy individuals have collectively spent billions seeding and sustaining this movement until states and the federal government passed laws and regulations sanctioning and subsidizing charter schools.

The liberal media continues to lie on behalf of lazy bum teachers in the Massachusetts schools. The schools that have let down our children for decades and have made them into brainwashed zombies, underachieving socialists and have destroyed their desire to make any accomplishment, destroyed their self esteem and have made them into automatrons who believe what the media, pop culture and government says without question The biggest lie fed to the public is that question 2 would take money out of public schools and make them fail more. This is a lie... FACT: The funding of schools in...

In Massachusetts, the only other New England state that's the left of Maine and Rhode island, there is a popular ballot measure that needs every patriotic American's support. That is question 2, the measure that would remove the cap on charter schools in the state of Massachusetts and give 32,000 struggling students in failing and dangerous schools (and there are many of them) an opportunity to learn in schools that are efficient, safe and wholesome. But the liberals and the teachers union bums would not have any of it. The only ones who oppose question 2 besides the usual cadre...

Ten years since Massachusetts passed an education reform bill known as the Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA), Phoenix Academies has tried to bridge the gap for those who drop out of school or those who underperform. According to 2006 statistics, almost 11,000 students dropped out of high school, and by 2015, that number was 5,000 dropouts. Graduation rates in 2015 did not go beyond 72% and in one immigrant-heavy part of Massachusetts known as Chelsea, the graduation rate was 63% in 2015. According to the Pioneer Institute, "between 2008 and 2011…In all but one of those years, 100 percent of...

Ordinarily, it is not a good idea to base how you vote on just one issue. But if black lives really matter, as they should matter like all other lives, then it is hard to see any racial issue that matters as much as education. The government could double the amount of money it spends on food stamps or triple the amount it spends on housing subsidies, and it will mean very little if the next generation of young blacks goes out into the world as adults without a decent education. Many things that are supposed to help blacks actually...

It’s so great to be here tonight. I am honored to also be joined this evening by Governor Scott Walker, Chairman Reince Priebus, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani. We are at a decisive moment in this election. Last week, I laid out my plan to bring jobs back to our country. Yesterday, I laid out my plan to defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism. Tonight, I am going to talk about how to make our communities safe again from crime and lawlessness. Let me begin by thanking the law enforcement officers here in this city, and across this country, for their service and...

We keep hearing that "black lives matter," but they seem to matter only when that helps politicians to get votes, or when that slogan helps demagogues demonize the police. The other 99 percent of black lives destroyed by people who are not police do not seem to attract nearly as much attention in the media. What about black success? Does that matter? Apparently not so much. We have heard a lot about black students failing to meet academic standards. So you might think that it would be front-page news when some whole ghetto schools not only meet, but exceed, the...

Wednesday afternoon the story broke in Baton Rouge media that the Kenilworth Science & Technology School had been raided by the FBI. The FBI indicated that the raid, which evidently was conducted to gather material evidence in the form of documents and computers, was not a matter of public safety. As a result, it probably was not related to a report earlier this year that a teacher at the school was accused of having inappropriate pictures of children on his cell phone. Had those charges stuck, that would have been the second scandal of a sexual nature involving a Gulenist...

WORLD’S “MOST DANGEROUS ISLAMIST” ALIVE, WELL, AND LIVING IN PENNSYLVANIA FEDS TURN BLIND EYE TO MOUNTING HOMELAND SECURITY THREAT by Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. The most dangerous Islamist in the world is neither Afghani nor Arab. He comes from neither Sudan nor Somalia. And he resides in neither the mountains of Pakistan nor the deserts of the Palestinian territories. This individual has toppled the secular government of Turkey and established madrassahs throughout the world. His schools indoctrinate children in the tenets of radical Islam and prepare adolescents for the Islamization of the world. More than 90 of these madrassahs have...

A newly-released email and lobbying documents filed with Congress reveals new ties between Clintonworld and members of a network operated by a mysterious Islamic cleric from Turkey. Connections between Clinton and acolytes of the imam, Fethullah Gulen, could muddle the complex relationship between the U.S. and Turkey, a key NATO ally, if the former secretary of state wins the White House. TurkeyÂ’s president, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, has mounted an aggressive crackdown against Gulen and his followers, known as Gulenists. ErdoÄŸan, who was once allied with Gulen, has even personally asked President Obama to extradite the 74-year-old guru, who has lived...

Urban school districts from Los Angeles to Philadelphia are experiencing declining enrollment in traditional public schools as more parents enroll their children in charters, depleting millions in per-pupil funding from district budgets. In states experiencing population growth, such as Arizona, charter schools help relieve overcrowding. But for districts that are struggling financially, the student flight is costly. …

At the heart of the current debate over the future of public schooling in Detroit is a proposed entity called the Detroit Education Commission, various forms of which appear in different proposals. The most recent version is included in a Detroit Public Schools bailout bill passed by the state Senate. Half the Republicans and all but three of the Democrats in the Michigan Senate voted to approve a seven-member commission appointed by the Detroit mayor. Among its powers, the commission would be able to veto any new public school from opening in the city. Critics say the veto would apply...

A secretive Islamic movement is trying to infiltrate the U.S. military by establishing and operating publicly-funded charter schools targeted toward children of American service personnel. That charge may sound like a conspiracy theory from the lunatic fringe, but it is real and it is happening right now. The most immediate threat is in Nevada, where Coral Academy of Science Las Vegas (CASLV) is currently negotiating with the United States Air Force to locate a charter school at Nellis Air Force Base, with classes starting this fall. What is not widely known is that CASLV is part of a nationwide organization...

Aside from defrauding American taxpayers, the Gülen organization has an even more ominous objective in the United States. The organization is one of the country’s largest recipients of H1-B “specialty occupation” visas, which it uses to import Turkish teachers into its charter schools, supposedly because local U.S. talent is not available to fill math and science teaching positions in its charter schools. The Gülen organization illegally threatens to revoke these visas unless the Turkish teachers agree to kick back part of their salary to the organization. More importantly, the Turkish teachers in Gülen organization charter schools are evaluated not on...

At least one form of very productive education disruption is growing exponentially. "Parents can choose public schools for their children in 55 percent of the nation's largest school districts, more than double the percent of such districts that offered school choice 15 years ago," Grover (Russ) Whitehurst writes in the Education Choice and Competition Index for 2015 compiled by the Brookings Institution, for which he toils. "In addition, programs that allow students to enroll in public schools outside their home district are available in about 20 percent of the states. Additions to the menu of school choice in many locales...