I consider myself liberal, I am a public school teacher, I am opposed to Charter schools in general… and I have sent my two youngest children to a Charter school. I think, particularly here in Minnesota, a way to get liberals on board with Charter schools was to promise, and provide, experimentation and niche schools. The school my children attend is a performing arts magnet, and there are not really public options in our district that would provide that particular kind of experience. Once upon a time the Minneapolis public schools had magnet schools with more specialized foci and there was a public performing arts school, but that’s gone as the student composition throughout the district became more racially homogeneous and bussing has become more expensive. If I were queen of the universe I would have each public highschool pick a focus, STEM, Arts, etc. allow all students to pick the fit that’s right for them, and to solve the bussing (and start time) issues I would transition from school busses to having all students use public transportation which would probably improve both the bussing experience for students and the financial efficiency of both public transportation and school transportation. But in the mean time, I’m just the anti-charter hypocrite who wants what’s best for her kids.
Yea… I mean maybe it plummeted from 25% to 10% or something? Still, a sentence that attempts to divide the left by creating an artificial sameness between part of the left and the right.
Probably because there is no such thing. Unless you are talking about our history as immigrants…
I was always jealous of my friends that got to go to the specialized public schools in Kansas City for these very reasons. I would have given anything to go to a school that was able to foster my talents as opposed to paring them off to fit me into the square hole.
I don’t think that there is any duality in both rejecting the obviously nefarious intent of stripping public school funding in favor of privatization and taking advantage of better options for your own child. I hate petrol, but still have to drive a car. And until I can afford that Tesla…
I can definitely understand your concerns and the concept. But almost every story I read about charter schools are horror filled, like reading a Stephen King novel. How has your experience been?
I was always down on the genitalia assignment… down, meaning up. 
From my experience, charter schools have the same problem as public schools. the advantage of a charter school is that it can be specialized and not bound to some of the bad constraints public schools have to deal with, the disadvantage is that a charter school can be for profit (i.e. ONLY looking for profit) or suspect in their teaching (heavy on religion, light on problem solving). it’s a mixed bag.
Example: We have great Montessori and STEM schools in my area, and we have some fly-by-night “classical” schools that all fit in that charter category.
If you don’t think America is exceptional, talk to someone who grew up in a country where children don’t have the opportunity to die for their parents’ gun rights.
There’s so much we take for granted.
United States Parents Involved in Education released a statement condemning students who want to be safe from mass shootings, blaming this view on “children are not being taught accurate history of the United States and the reasons for American exceptionalism.”
I have the boggle that people still say this with a straight face and un-ironically.
And if there’s one guy who epitomizes moral uprightness and American pride, it’s a dude who covered himself in shit to dodge the draft and became the legal guardian of a 17 year old girl to hump her.
IMO “charter” has come to mean a very specific sort of sociopathic institution, when there’s actually much more variety out there. My kids attended a Bank Street model K-8 nonprofit charter with an open to all entry lottery and a union contract. It’s a tremendously successful school by any metric, there’s so many applicants the odds of getting in are better at Harvard. The district should be modeling it rather than trying to kill it. I also believe for profit charters should not exist. Most of the charters here are non-profit.
I thought that “American exceptionalism” was used exclusively to describe something as a logical fallacy. I’ve never heard someone use it to describe their own position before.
“American Exceptionalism is true and good” has been the mainstream position of both Democratic and Republican establishments ever since the term was coined.
This all has me sold on public schools.
And I don’t know what “genitalia assignment” is supposed to be, but I like the sound of it.
I thought it was because of the unmatched health system.
A school whose success can be attributed to being able to pick their students is a poor model for public education on a widescale level. Public education has a mandate to teach all children in a given community. To remove that mandate is to defeat the intent and effect of public education in general.
Best I can tell it’s mainly because of slavery and our unmatched record of genocide.
Oh, we have a hellish amount of genocide in our history… but unmatched? I don’t think the US has been around long enough to even be considered for that title.
As I said, the school is purely lottery entry, the only filter being a parent bothering to enter the child in the lottery. They also do not eject poorly performing or special needs kids. This is exactly the kind of misperception I was talking about.
