Posted on 03/01/2008 1:09:47 PM PST by Dawnsblood
Vikki Reyes has had it with Locke High, the school her daughters attend in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She walked in on class one day and recalls “the place was just like a zoo!” Students had taken control, while the teacher sat quietly with a book.
Frank Wells has also had it with Locke High. When he became principal he says gangs ruled the campus. He tried to turn things around but ran into a “brick wall” of resistance from the school district and teachers union.
Locke seemed destined to languish in high crime and low test scores until Wells, Reyes, and many reform-minded teachers joined with a maverick named Steve Barr in an attempt to break free from the status quo. Their battle is just one example of the charter school education revolt that’s erupting across the nation.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.tv ...
Bump for later viewing
“brick wall” of resistance from the school district and teachers union.
Another union showing off it’s great skills.
NEA needs to be disbanded.
Dept. of Education turned into a condo in D.C.
ping
The sad thing is , in education, and other areas of life also, the most liberal places have some of the worst living conditions. Most of our big cities which have terrible school systems, high crime, high numbers of people in poverty, etc. also have been run by liberals for many years.
If liberal policies and liberals in charge of things were the answer, then places like Detroit, Newark, Washington, DC, East St. Louis, Camden, NJ, Gary, IN, would be meccas of the good life. They would be places where crime was low, jobs and business activity plentiful, housing in good condition and affordable, and with world class K-12 education systems. Instead these places have some of the worst conditions for their residents. I will never understand why this is.
from another article at the link:
Charter schools are tax-funded, tuition-free public schools with some of the freedoms of private schools. Instead of regulating how charters teach, states are supposed to judge by results: Are students learning?
The first charter school opened in 1992 in Minnesota. Now, more than 2,000 charter schools are educating half a million students in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Most are started by teachers, parents, universities, community groups, and other nonprofits.
Typically, these schools are underfunded, thin on management, and dependent on donated legal services. However, about 10 percent are run by school management companies that are — in theory, if not in fact — for-profit businesses. They are run by professional managers, staffed by lawyers, and much harder to bully. Their pitch is simple: If we succeed in running good schools, we’ll attract students and make a profit. If we fail, take back the school and try something else. That’s not the way things are usually done in the public school system. Traditionally, nothing succeeds like failure. Failure is rewarded with more money for more programs, more specialists, and, of course, more failure. Success, on the other hand, is a risky business. It destroys excuses. It raises expectations. It’s even worse when a profit-seeking business succeeds with high-risk students. If customer-serving, bottom-line-adding businesses can run schools, that opens the door to a host of market evils: Independently run charter schools staffed by non-unionized teachers. Voucher-empowered parents shopping for their schools of choice. Teachers deprived of political power and turned from selfless public servants to soulless corporate employees.
Over the last 40 years the left has been re-engineering society so that traditional authority figures (teachers, parents) have been rendered impotent by crimminalizing corporal punishment and feminizing teacher training in the name of making a “better” and “gentler” society. Will they ever admit how tragically they got it wrong?
“Democrat stronghold”
Hey, they can take over and the whole country will be like this.
I personally know how bad Locke High School is/was. I graduated from Compton High School in the early 70’s and had a good many friends and some relatives attend Locke.
Believe it or not, in my day, Compton High was practically a model school (my, how things have changed). Locke, on the other hand, faltered and failed its students even in my day. In the succeeding decades, it got even worse.
I remember going to pick up my niece one day at that school. It resembled an armed prison camp more than a school. I immediately pressured my sister to take her daughter out of there.
‘If we succeed in running good schools, we’ll attract students and make a profit...’
i luv me some of that profit motive.
Funny how profit and the market seem to pop up as solutions to problems TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME.....I DON’T GET IT>....wait a minute...I GET IT.
So did AYN RAND and Friedrich Hayek:
i wonder how many pointy headed edu. administrators and school boards have read their works?
Liberal cancer has infected all walks of life.
Administrators want only to present to their superiors a set of statistics showing they have very few expulsions and very few transfers. It makes them look like they are in control.
What it really does is trap the teachers in a room with 32 kids, 9 or 10 of whom are full-fledged criminals by the age of 14. Then they tell us that the key is "classroom management." Well, yes. It is a management job, essentially.
So here's a little mental exercise. Imagine managing a team from whom you cannot fire anyone, no matter what they do. No matter if they waltz in late every day, disrupt the proceedings, curse at you right to your face, throw their work on the floor, vandalize the property, vandalize YOUR property, steal from other students, steal from you, push you out of their way as they walk out, hit others in the room.... no matter what they do, you cannot fire them. And you can't dock their pay more than, say, 5%.
Try managing THAT team.
So did AYN RAND and Friedrich Hayek:
i wonder how many pointy headed edu. administrators and school boards have read their works?
Every student in this country should be FORCED to read Atlas Shrugged, and as soon as they’re done with that, Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell! Talk about opening ones mind....
vouchers
Anothe example of "When Keepin' It Real Goes Real Wrong."
"If liberal policies were the answer to society's problems then everyone would want to live in Detroit" -- that's too long but you get my drift. Or your drift. Wouldn't want to plagarize.
Anyway, parents rose up in revolt against the policy and the board hung him out to dry.
The lesson was clear to anyone who dared to challenge the "business as usual" attitude in the system.
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