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Common Dreams reports
Public schools are outperforming charter schools in Minnesota, in some cases "dramatically," according to a new analysis by the state's Star-Tribune newspaper.
In addition, many charter schools fail to adequately support minority students, close examination of the data revealed.
[...]Education analyst Diane Ravitch notes: "Minnesota was the home of the charter movement, which began with high expectations as a progressive experiment but has turned into a favorite mechanism in many states to promote privatization of public education and to generate profits for charter corporations like Imagine, Charter Schools USA, and K12. Today, charter advocates claim that their privately managed charters will 'save low-income students from failing public schools,' but the Minnesota experience suggests that charters face the same challenges as public schools, which is magnified by high teacher turnover in charter schools."
The findings back up a report (PDF) put out last fall by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, which examined the success and failures of the charter school system in Chicago, Illinois.
That study concluded:
Sadly, the [charter] schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker.
Further, charters, which are even more likely to be single-race schools than the already hyper-segregated Chicago school system, have not increased interracial contact, an often-stated goal of charter systems.
Finally, the fact that Chicago charters use expulsion far more often that public schools deserves further study. In the end, it is unlikely that the Chicago charter school experience provides a model for improving urban education in other big city school districts.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:42PM
I'm older than most here. I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in America. Back then America suffered from a poverty that you couldn't even imagine. The big cities were dirty places, with sweatshops and heavy industry. The rural were abysmally poor, with many families just barely managing to survive on the crops that they grew. There was little infrastructure. Aside from small pockets of Detroit and Camden, the type of real poverty that was widespread back then just does not exist in modern America. We no longer see people in the southwestern desert states distil their drinking water from their own urine and that of their livestock, for instance.
Yet out of this extreme poverty grew the successful America of the 1950s and 1960s. The blacks today, with all of the social assistance they now get from various levels of government, are absolutely rich relative to the average white American in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on your faulty reasoning, America should never have become the superpower that it did because of this poverty. But the exact opposite just happened. This poverty drove entire generations to succeed beyond everybody's wildest dreams and expectations.
Poverty isn't the problem. It doesn't even exist today. The problem is modern African-American culture, which promotes a lot of really negative things, while promoting nothing that will truly help these people improve their lives.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:25PM
EVERYONE was poor then.[1]
Would you be happier with the word "inequality".
When some folks need to have 3 jobs to get by, they don't have a lot of time/energy left over to help their kids with homework or to check that their kids are keeping up with the others.
Contrast this with the folks whose biggest challenge in a day is "a tee time of 10AM or 11AM?".
Now add in poor nutrition (food deserts), industrial pollution that affects the nervous system (brain development), a neighborhood|ward with no cultural events, no books in the home, no library for miles and miles, etc.
[1] ...and in those years, the Roosevelt administration actually found jobs for people to get them out of poverty.
Ronnie Reagan's family would have starved to death if it wasn't for his dad's New Deal job.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:54PM
Enough with the excuses.
People worked just as long and hard in the 1930s and 1940s as they do today. In fact, it was generally harder work, with longer hours. Agricultural and industrial work is much more physically taxing than working the cash register at a shop, or preparing hamburgers, or working in an office. A typical workday was 12 or more hours long.
It wasn't just the parents who were working. The kids were often working, too. In rural areas, by the time a child had gotten to school for the day, he had probably put in 3 to 5 hours working on the family's farm. Then he'd put in several more hours after getting home from school, too. Again, this was typically hard manual labor. And you really think the nutrition there was better? It wasn't. If beets were the only crop that grew well one season, you'd be eating nothing but beets for months. In the best case, you'd occasionally be able to trade some of your beets for some of your neighbor's onions.
Yet despite having conditions far worse than children today, the youth of that era went on to become the most productive Americans ever. They managed to build a great nation out of nearly nothing. There's no reason why the youth of today shouldn't be able to do the same, except for them it should be much easier to do. They aren't milking cows and pitchforking hay at 4 am every morning.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lars on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:36PM
I know the post you're replying to didn't mention it much, but inequality is where the focus needs to be. Back then, it was fine to have minimal education, to have grown up truly poor, because that described the majority of people. These days, expectations are much higher, and jobs require much more education. If parents are working long hours and barely getting by, it's not like their kids will starve or anything, but the jobs they will end up with will be more along the lines of retail clerk than marketing analyst. When employees have a choice between kid A from crappy neighbourhood and kid B from decent neighbourhood, who do you think they pick? Even if they have the same skills, the fact is that there is huge inequality just in different neighbourhoods now that there wasn't before when everyone was equally bad off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @05:30PM
Employers don't give a fuck about what neighborhood their employees are from. They'll hire whoever can get the work done most efficiently, which includes who can offer the most productivity for the lowest pay.
The inequality between neighborhoods is irrelevant. If poor people in the past could elevate their social standing, they can do it today, too.
Your thinking is clearly flawed. You're basically saying that a place like China could never raise is standard of living (even though it has, and at an astounding pace), because other countries like the United States and those of Europe were wealthier.
If the Chinese could collectively raise their standard of living on a global scale, then some African Americans living in Chicago could do the same on a local scale. It just takes hard work.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Saturday February 28 2015, @11:56PM
There was one highly artificial factor in the late 40s, the 50s, and 60s -- most of the world's industrial infrastructure had been severely damaged or destroyed while that existing in the US was both large as a result of building stuff for WWII, and totally intact. America was also the Saudi Arabia of the world in that time frame, so, we had a huge influx of money for natural resources as well as a not-bombed-out infrastructure. For America to not have excelled in that time would have been extremely difficult.
These factors don't exist today. We have real competition and we'll never be a major natural resource exporter again on the scale we were back then. To make matters worse, we have a political and educational system that discourages good wage manufacturing by belittling such workers and shipping their jobs off to foreign lands. And of course, once we've re-educated everyone to do some office job, our political and financial rulers outsource or offshore that work -- there is complete lack of economic patriotism today.
So, given a world in which workers do not have a huge advantage because the competition is literally in ruins, where natural resources can't be relied on for an influx of new money, and political/financial class who couldn't give a flying fuck, the fact that today is not like that strange period from 1946-1965 is totally unsurprising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:43PM
Per worker output is going up 2% per year compounding. After inflation it is even more. Children of the '30's and '40's did not achieve such immaculate returns, they used war and the destruction of every other economy except the United Sates to achieve their gains. Things are harder than ever to meet parity with competitors yet the current generation is surpassing them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @05:34PM
Today's growth is only possible thanks to the massive technological innovation and discovery made by pre-Boomers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @11:45PM
You're 100 percent correct.
There has been absolutely no innovation since 1945.
/sarc
Do you wingnuts even THINK about what you're saying before you type it in?
The question is, of course, completely rhetorical.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:48PM
You do know that people still work 12+ hour days right? You do know that hard physical labor still exists yes? If not, get out of your bubble and talk to people. Construction workers, industrial workers, farmers, and professional drivers will tell you how the world really is for the majority of the population without a bachelors degree.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:16PM
What's with the modding here? Why is an insightful, informative comment like that at "0, Flamebait"?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:41PM
Blaming everything on minorities is practically flamebait by definition. The majority of the comment may have been fine, but as soon as it became "Everythings the fault of them niggers!" it lost any insightfulness it may have had.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @05:22PM
Nobody is blaming minorities. We've seen many non-white minority groups prosper in the United States, often in a very short period of time, and often when they came from situations much worse than the typical black American comes from.
We've seen Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and others from war-torn areas come to the United States with absolutely nothing (no money, limited education, limited employable skills, etc.), yet within a generation or two them and their children are living at least middle-class lifestyles, and have become important members of their local communities. Often this is done with absolutely no social assistance of any kind from the government.
Let's address this issue directly. Why do we see so many other groups prospering, but not black Americans, even when these black Americans have access to education, along with a huge amount of other social assistance from the government?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:05AM
Maybe it something to do with racism. See for example racism intrinsic in your post, specifically, the sentiment you express that all Asians excel and all African Americans don't -- between a set of different minority applicants, just who do you think is going to get an interview and a chance to excel when you approach the world with that type of racism?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:50AM
There are some burnout, anti-education kids in every group, it is not limited exclusively to the black community.
What is exclusive though, is the self-perception among black people that the system is out to get them to the point they can not achieve success. At one point this was true, but the nation has greatly changed in the last few decades. Still the negative attitude stands; because they believe success to be unattainable they do not make the same level of attempts. Other minority groups are unaffected by this self-crippling attitude. There are exceptions. This is why there are handfuls of successful IT guys and programmers who are black; They didn't listen to the negative self-perception.
Black people tend to see racism where other groups, especially white people, would not. Check out the comments on any black-focused news site like NewsOne. [newsone.com] The echo chamber reinforces this group victimization and self-pitying excuses.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:06PM
I'm older than most here. I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in America.
You would have done better to tell us to get off the lawn of your Charter School.
Poverty isn't the problem. It doesn't even exist today. The problem is modern African-American culture
This is absolutely incorrrect, and I will tell you why. The real problem is Caucasian-American culture from the period before the Civil Rights movement, or to put it bluntly, racism. And the second real problem is that racists still don't understand that they are racist. This is America, get off our lawn.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @10:49PM
Let me understand this properly. So it was some Confederate soldiers born in the 1830s who, well over 170 years, made young Jamal and Shaneeeqwa skip class, join the Crips, smoke crack, and engage in a drive-by shooting last week? Riiiiiiiight.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:02AM
Some topics:
Slavery in North America
Jamestown began the practice in 1619; the Spanish started enslaving people of color the day Columbus arrived.
The practice wasn't outlawed until 1865.
The de facto end didn't come for another century.
See "Jim Crow", below.
Dred Scott decision (1854)
"A black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect."
Jim Crow (Institutionalized racism that began after the election of 1876 and lasted more than 80 years. Social exclusion; false imprisonment and renting out of prisoners to the wealth; lynching)
Plessy v Ferguson (1896)
"separate but equal"
Half a century later it was declared "separate is inherently unequal".
Red-lining (Prejudicial housing practices)
A century of segregated public schools.
The breadth of your ignorance is enormous.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:21AM
My mistake. I didn't realize that it was actually the Jamestown settlers from 1619 who, 396 years later, made young Jamal and Shaneeeqwa skip class, join the Crips, smoke crack, and engage in a drive-by shooting last week. And here I was, incorrectly blaming the Confederate soldiers from the 1830s!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @01:19AM
You missed it the 1st time. Here it is again:
Institutionalized racism
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Saturday February 28 2015, @11:29PM
I'm older than most here. I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in America. Back then America suffered from a poverty that you couldn't even imagine.
And the illiteracy rate back then reflected it. [ed.gov]
As you say, poverty improved and so did literacy. I think that supports the poverty-education link.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:56PM
Your mistake is presuming that "rich" and "poor" are absolute terms rather than relative. (Extreme poverty *can* be absolute, but you're right, just about nobody experiences that in the US today.) When you aren't exposed much to images of people wealthier than you, you don't see yourself as poor...and chronically seeing yourself as poor is profoundly distressing.
So much of today's problems stem from TV and the images it projects. (Not TV in the absolute, but TV in the context of what is shown.) I'd be more explicit, but after noticing that most things shown on TV are designed to make most people unhappy, I got stopped watching, so I'm actually talking about TV of a few decades ago, but based on internet commentary, I believe it's gotten worse.
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