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Dear Editor;
One provision that Common Core endorses is Charter Schools. When the public and private schools start failing because of the inclusion of special needs students (race, disability and poor students), the State will shut down these schools and open up Charter Schools. The one fact about Charter Schools that is unfair is that they can discriminate in who they admit to these schools while public schools have to take everybody that applies. Doing so, guarantees that the grades will go up in Charter Schools, but the public schools will continue to fail. So the end result will be what do we do with the special needs kids.
These teachers in these Charter Schools are forced to teach in draconian practices like kids will not be allowed to talk, they will have to obey and their self esteem will be left at the door. The teacher salaries are so low that most teachers are hired right out of college and will only stay for 2 years. The teachers are literally burned out after 2 years. They will continue to hire teachers right out of college because it is easier on their budgets.
The students receive their tuition from the state and pay the Charter School. Charter schools are private/public partnerships. That means that they are owned by large corporations, big companies or rich individuals. The state will not have any control over how the students are taught because they will not be answerable to any school boards anymore. There is no oversight and these schools will be able to spend their money as they see fit. They already have one charter school shutdown because they sold the program to an ex-felon. This ex-felon abscombed with the tuition of these students so now the school is shutdown and the students are caught in limbo. They already paid the tuition and now they have no funds to go to another Charter School. So they will probably have to wait until the next fall season and lose a whole year of education.
Rahm Emmanuel, the mayor of Chicago shut down 50% of the public schools in one year. You can bet he already had these charter schools lined up, probably to his friends and relatives. These schools will have good grades and provide extra income to the owners. When you have no oversight you have no idea of how the funds are spent, you only have to make sure the grades go up. When Obama was a Senator in Illinois, he got these grants to fix up apartment buildings to his relatives and friends. None of these buildings were kept up, they abscombed with the money again and the State of Illinois did nothing to these scoundrels. That's why nothing will get any better until we have oversight!
Diane Ravitch was the Secretary of Education during George H W Bush's term. At first, she was for Common Core and Charter Schools. The more experience she had, she was convinced it was a total failure. This article is provided in part by Diane Ravitch who has been working toward education for the last 20-30 years. You can also see her videos on the internet under No Child Left Behind.
The best educational programs are in Finland. I think we should be looking at what Finland has accomplished in their schools. I also think we should get rid of all these programs (No Child Left Behind, OBE, And Common Core) that we know now are dumbing down our kids and destroying our schools. The time has come for all out Educational reform in the United States.
Mary Finley
Mineral Point