Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/25/f-rated-schools.html
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Four other F-rated schools had already closed by the time the grades came out.
Holy guacamole.
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It took me entirely too long to work out that was a dunce cap.
Big sail? Like a giant map marker pin?
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Get rid of “charters”. Get rid of vouchers for private “sky wizard” schools.
Let every kid experience the absolute wonder it is to share the same learning experience with other kids who may not be just like you, but who end up just liking you.
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Wait. You mean there are problems that the free market can’t solve? You mean most of these charter schools are nothing more than neo-cons getting rich off the very system they claim they want to destroy?
Hell, next you’ll tell me that socialist grocery stores can actually work.
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Can’t really expect students to strive for A’s when their schools are bringing home D’s.
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Bobby Jindal. Remember him? He was a GOP rising star, part Ivy League, part Bible thumper. 100% phony. He was a champion of charter schools, a faithful Republican public education basher. Now he’s gone, and his charter schools have failed as most predicted they would. Too bad that Louisianans can’t drag him back and make him pay the price for his ideological idiocy.
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I thought it was a new, google maps compass arrow thingy.
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I’m a proud product of the New Orleans Public Schools (K-12). It is and has been a terrible situation for long before the charters came to town. After integration, there was a major white flight to the sububs and there is a large number of Catholic schools. The result was almost complete re-segregation. The NOPS school students were close to 100% black, and almost all white kids in NOLA went to private or Catholic school. This was followed by decades of underfunding public schools and white people complaining about having to pay anything for schools their kids didn’t attend.
A few academic magnet schools were created allowing for a few students like me to go to a top school (my high school is consistently the best in LA and often nationally ranked). These schools of course can pick students, so those those that went to lousy elementary schools have little chance of getting in and less of staying.
Now, after Katrina there are no more city run schools. All are either charter or state-run. Little has changed though. The schools are still segregated, those that can afford it mostly send their kids to Catholic school (which are also lousy, but “good”), and the public schools are still criminally under-supported
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I was thinking maybe it was a Church steeple or an Oast House.
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How hard is it, really, to provide adequate education for a city’s population? I am accustomed to thinking of it in a similar way to efficient sewer service, healthy drinking water, prompt, efficient mail delivery and solid waste disposal.
Bottom line, these are well understood technologies that don’t usually benefit from a bunch of bleeding edge fashions that blow through the minds of carpricious managers.
It seems more likely to me that these services need to be deliberately downgraded neighborhood by neighborhood, just to remind people at the bottom that they arent as important as those in the next rung up.
We could bring every school in America up to a decent standard of education, all it would take is scaling back the prison budget, the military budget, and the institutional bigotry budget.
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When I was in South America (Argentina and Uruguay) a couple years ago, I was pleasantly shocked to see all the rich and poor kids go to the same school. It was so different from home in that regard.
I really don’t think there would be anything better for NOLA (or society generally) than all students attending public schools with a diverse cross-section of the broader community
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They should do what they did with failing mortgages.
Shuffle all the below average students around until they’re all at one big charter school. Then when it defaults on their education, declare that the school is too big to fail, and demand a bailout.
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Unfortunately every discussion of public schools devolves into a heated argument of how to present creationism and further devolves into how to shield our precious innocent children from any mention of our naughty bits. Actual education is left behind.
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Sure they can, it just requires cognitive dissonance and avoiding inconvenient facts. Something the Republicans have had a lot of practice with the last few years.
This sucks for the kids the most. They can’t get that time back. How come the GOP is never “thinking of the children” when shit storms like this pop up? Oh, right. It’s not their agenda. Children only matter when they can be used as a prop for a platform, and better education isn’t a key goal. And they don’t matter at all when it comes to things like gun control. See? Cognitive dissonance and fact avoidance ftw.
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The charters were so incompetent that they couldn’t even juke the stats.
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Cory, don’t you think it’s disingenuous to call charter vouchers neoliberal? It may be the model for subsidizing nouveau riche but it has never been a proper answer to the education of our youth. A makerspace high school teaching trade arts and modern technical applications is the real answer. Graduating high school should qualify you for the majority of careers available, like it used to.
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Change what it means to go to school. Today’s youth don’t need rote doldrums, they need valuable life skills. The college atmosphere can and has started at grade 6, and that should be the norrm.
Electives and personalized curriculum can start at grade 6.
It depends, does the populace actually want it. We don’t talk about it enough, but a lot of the apparent policy failures of the US in the 20th and 21st century were actually success when you look at the actual rather than the stated goals. When white families take their resources out of cities, then actively defund the districts they left behind, they are getting the policy outcome they want, punishing minorities. Its the same reason public housing was such a fiasco in the post war era, the program was structured to punish the undesirable.
I think charters are one of the better examples of neoliberalism. We transitioned a service traditionally considered a core governmental function to a market entity.
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