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Thanks for your efforts as a teacher. You are to be commended.

There are charter schools / voucher schools with amazing track records with 100% black students doing a great job. Freedom for the educators, getting past the route memory now encouraged by these standardized tests, and bonuses for teachers that deliver results (considering where the students start) are ways to get out of this cycle.

If someone is as cynical as the author of this article, they need to find a new job.

Thanks for your efforts as a teacher. You are to be commended.

Thank you. But the commendation should go to the majority of students in such schools, the ones that are just trying to get an education.

Freedom for the educators, getting past the route memory now encouraged by these standardized tests...

Very true. And let me add one more thing. Principals need to have the freedom to remove disruptive students. Get disruptive students away from the students who want to learn.

If someone is as cynical as the author of this article, they need to find a new job.

I would not describe the author as cynical. I would describe him/her as a filthy propagandist, as bad as Goebbels ever was.

Perhaps you don't know, but charter schools are highly selective about who gets in. They cherry-pick. And if anyone messes up, academically or behaviorally, they're out the back door back to a regular public school. So comparing the two is like comparing an apple to an orange.

It has never been proven that bonus pay motivates teachers to "teach harder". The vast majority of teachers that I know work their rear ends off as a matter of fact.

I challenge YOU to kill yourself enthusiastically researching and writing lessons, acquiring "props" (videos, hands-on materials, interesting projects), etc. and then, not being able to even utilize these materials as you are shouted down in your own classroom or witness any of the behaviors cited here over a course of months or years, not become cynical. You know there's a better life out there through education, and the students in your classroom could not care less. Your message falls on deaf ears. It's like a moth repeatedly banging itself against a storm door.

Your statements ("Freedom for the educators, getting past the route memory now encouraged by these standardized tests...") sound like someone whose knowledge of the educational system comes from reading the liberal media. Statistics are easily manipulated to serve agendas. There is no clear evidence of superior results for charter schools. There is no "freedom" for educators; they must follow the curriculum (and now, with Common Core, there will even less freedom) and the students must still take state-mandated standardized tests. You are in la-la land if you think differently.

I was also a young and idealistic liberal once. I was even convinced of my white privilege, and that it was my Christian responsibility to help poor black people.

So I set out to get an expensive 4 year degree in a field where I could help blacks.

THEN I spent my years after college striving in low paying jobs, and getting laid off myself- but tolerating it because I was going to someday help some poor black person.

I have seen the corruption and the oppression and filth.

THEN frustrated at not being able to help these poor black people understand how to get and keep jobs or how to be responsible citizens, I decided to have a street ministry, just praying for them, feeding them and ministering to them.

AND all of those wasted years are reflected back to me in this author’s essay.

I have had to accept that I was manipulated, lied to and led astray. People are not honest about the reasons blacks are poor and uneducated. It is NOT the white man’s fault. It is their impossible, tribal culture and we have ZERO power or control over their environment. THEY like this tribal way of life! They just bullshit, that they want to assimilate, us to keep the money flowing.

There is a reason people start to accept reality, about the high percentage of black who are using us and our country, and I am sick of people saying it is cynical.

I don’t want to live in a fantasy world anymore, or accept any further guilt about the plight of the black man- is my God given right.

I am sick of them. (Most of them) Sick to death of the excuses. White liberal guilt could very well destroy America like it destroyed South Africa- so shut the hell up trying to shame people who are coming into reality and waking up.

Many of us have worked our butts off, and given our own resources and our time- trying to help these people assimilate and have gotten screwed.