He must be losing his marbles . . .
Created by Dan from an image on Wikimedia Commons
Your daily Letter to the Columnist — March 8, 2013
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Dan,
I must be losing my marbles. I must be a few fries short of a happy meal. It’s unbelievable that I would agree with you twice in about a weeks time.
I’m referring to the nutty reasoning of a school teacher kicking a kid out for a few days because he bit a pop tart in the shape of a gun and Roanoke city schools not allowing anything that resembles a gun in a school play.
I apologize for agreeing with you so often. It probably won’t happen again.
Fred Landis
ROANOKE
March 8, 2013 - 1:30 PM
Dan, I won’t quote the ol’ saying about how a broken clock is even right twice a day. Instead, I’ll give you credit where credit is due. Your article/blog about the ridiculous decision Patrick Henry High made regarding replacing muskets with foam rocks in their school play is spot on! Looks like guns are joining God and common sense on the list of forbidden subjects in public schools. That puts pretty much all of Western Civ off limits. Can you see why us crazy conservatives are in favor of school vouchers?
Come on over Fred, the water’s fine on our side.
#1 “guns are joining God and common sense on the list of forbidden subjects in public schools…” The subject of deities aren’t “forbidden subjects in public schools” at all, Paddy. That subject is perfectly fine to bring up during a class on religions.
I think you’re just bitter that public school officials don’t get to endorse your particular brand of religion on people who don’t subscribe to your brand of religiosity while on the job. Sorry, but government and religion don’t mix. If you don’t like that, you can always find a private school or resort to home schooling.
Paddy, as a conservative you no doubt disdain over extending governmental influence. If you don’t like the public school system I sure as heck do not want to pay for your kid to go to a private school. You want a private school, pay for it.
Go see the play anyway. The students are very talented and the theater department puts on impressive productions in spite of very little support from the school administration or school board.
Scott whitaker,
Given that your comment is likely shared by many of your ilk, I guess you are in favor of school vouchers, so that your kids could go to private schools? There are several to chose from in the Roanoke Valley.
More jackassery from barnyard Frank .
Hey Wayne,
Please explain your most recent cerebral comment. What’s that you say? Oh, you haven’t made any cerebral comments? Oops, my bad.
Keep braying, Wayne. It becomes you.
Are you in favor of school vouchers, Wayne?
My comment needs no explanation Frank .. it is plain and straight to the point ..And. no I don’t believe. In schpol vouchers generally.
Ok, Wayne, thanks. No further questions about schools…..
Frank brought up vouchers. It’s probably best that we explain that game, and some recent developments in it.
Conservatives have long admired private schools for many reasons. Historically, the biggest reason is that, with the exception of Catholic schools in big cities, the private schools had almost no black kids. They also had very few poor white kids. Conservatives liked this because it meant their kids could go to school in a less homogenized environment. Private-school kids tend to come from wealthier families, have less strife in their homes, and their parents’ expectations are higher. (Of course, I’m not arguing that in every case all three of those are true; but in general terms they are). Given all that, it’s little wonder that on average, the students perform better. The other thing conservatives liked about their private schools is that usually the teachers earned a lot less than public school teachers, and they weren’t unionized. They tended to be meeker and more easily bent to a parent’s will.
The vouchers for private schools thingy started in the early 1990s, when some conservatives who were sending their kids to private schools talked themselves into the fact that it was unfair that they had to pay not only property taxes that supported public education, but ALSO private school tuition. They began whining about this back then. They had elected to forgo the “free” public education, now they wanted taxpayers to subsidize the tuition at the private schools. They cloaked it under a “guise” of “competition,” and argued that public schools would improve if they had to “compete” for students with private schools. They promised all the same miraculous effects that Apco did back in the 1990s when it sought electric deregulation (which we now know with hindsight was a complete and utter disaster).
But they weren’t seeking 100-percent vouchers, which would cover all the private-school tuition costs. It was more like, 55- or 60-percent vouchers. This was part of the game, you see. The vast majority of the poor kids’ parents wouldn’t be able to afford the discounted (w/vouchers) private-school tuition. So the wealthy people had little to fear from their kids mixing in school with those kids. At best, they end up rubbing shoulder with some middle-class kids. That was a trade-off the wealthy were willing to take, for all the extra taxpayer money it would put in their pockets.
There was an added benefit to picking off some of those higher-performing middle-class kids, too. They would get them out of the public schools, where, without those kids, the metrics would drop even lower, which would allow the RWers who hated public schools to scream even louder about how badly they were failing, which they could blame all on the evil teachers unions. So the side benefit to the RWers was they would have another stick with which to beat public employee unions over the head.
Now that is all the history leading up to where we are now. Because with this movement, things have taken a much more ominous turn recently.
There are big-money companies out there, funded by private investors. They are pushing online education. Some counties in Virginia already are experimenting with this. The overhead with such “schools” is miniscule compared to bricks and mortar institutions. It’s so low that they can easily “enroll” and “educate” a student for much less than the what taxpayers pay now, if you combine state and local per-pupil payments. Of course, they’ll do it for the combined state and local payments, or maybe a bit less. And they will make enormous profits this way. ALL of the revenue, btw, will come from taxpayers.
That’s why there’s such a push right now to “grade” public schools, and identify the failing ones. (ALL the “failing” ones, btw, tend to be in very low-income neighborhoods that are rife with all kinds of socio-economic problems). The online schools will first go after theses, and they will be an affordable alternative (no out-of-pocket costs) to those lower-income kids in the “failing” schools. But they won’t necessarily get a better education at these online private schools. EVERYBODY GETS A WORSE education with online learning.
But, closing schools in those poor neighborhoods, and denying school systems the money they were getting for those schools, will put additional strain on school system budgets. They will have to increase class sizes, cut extracurricular activities and courses like art and theater and home ec and shop. And soon, schools that weren’t failing but were on the bubble before this all started will be failing. And then the online education vultures can swoop in on them and start picking up some more taxpayer dollars for their very high-profit margin enterprises.
That’s the game. It’s a nasty one. It’s a rob-the-taxpayers blind game. Something similar, though not identical, has been going on at so-called “online universities” for some time now. Those students get degrees that are laughed at. I know — my daughter worked for a time as a salary + commission recruiter at one of the largest ones. She quit when she realized her employers was cheating both the students and the taxpayers, because the whole thing was a scam, and she was helping them dow that. She couldn’t sleep at night, so she found another job.
Coming to a public school system near you, and soon. And Frank is all for that.
Yes, they are that anti-government.
Dan Casey | March 8, 2013 at 11:17 pm
Frank brought up vouchers. It’s probably best that we explain that game, and some recent developments in it.
\Dan, that’s as well written an explanation of the school voucher racket that I have seen. The only part you left out is the evangelical religious right who
want to run their own schools where they can propagandize the kids with their religious doctrine which includes denying evolution and climate change,
makes the Bible the center of their curriculum, ignores the other great religions of the world and eliminates all sex education except for abstinence. And they want the taxpayers to fund it.
Excellent summary of the unfolding effort to cash in by encouraging a flight from public education, Dan.
On a related note: on Sept. 27, 2012, conservative RT contributor John Long wrote a column about the Va. law that allows a religious exemption to the state’s compulsory attendance requirements, currently claimed by some 7,000 students (that is, by their parents). He was prompted to write by a study from a branch of the U.Va. Law School, the Child Advocacy Center, that raised troubling questions about the quality, and moreso even the quantity, of instruction for homeschooled children. The study found that Va.’s law and it’s implementation was the most permissive in the U.S.
Long, didn’t like the conclusions of the study, or the relevant RT editorial “Take religion out of education waivers” (Sept. 17). Long, who said he’s home schooled his children for over a decade, first declared that he didn’t get local school board permission to withdraw his children; he simply informed them, as the Va. law allows. Then he claimed that since the religious exemption is for parents who ‘ve concluded that putting their children in public schools would violate their conscience, it’s no different than a contribution to charity motivated by conscience. But his analogy ignores the many people who avoid contributions to charity, and yet still welcome receiving the benefits (e.g. local pet shelters, rescue squads, etc.). Some of them would be the same parents who, deliberately or not, provide their homeschooled children a substandard or harmfully distorted education.
And has there ever been a child who had no recurrent bouts of “conscience” against going to school some days? Every child, homeschooled or not, knows that a Hungry Dog plus Homework plus “Stomach Ache”=Conscientious Objection to Attending School.
The study noted the difficulty in gauging the sincerity of the parents motives in claiming a religious exemption. Long believes that’s exactly as it should be. In a bit of self-congratulation, he even framed it as “‘releasing the local school board from any obligation” to children! That doesn’t sound too dissimilar from Wall Street claiming they would release the SEC from any obligation to the markets, or BP and Exxon releasing the EPA from obligation to the environment, does it?
Long’s case was summed up as “my kids don’t belong to the state, they belong to me”, as if children are things no different from homegrown tomatoes. I know there are often good outcomes from homeschooling, but they likely won’t occur as readily without parental accountability; it’s not unlike the public health considerations in requiring DPT shots for babies. That sense of one’s children as possessions to deploy as one wants (“conscience”) seems to me like a great indulgence for parents already, given how it puts at risk the broader aims of public education and overall social progress. To make taxpayers subsidize profitmaking on homeschooling is much, much worse.
hey Warren, are you saying that home-schooling is the same as private schooling? Sheesh.
“Sandi Saunders | March 8, 2013 at 11:21 pm
Yes, they are that anti-government.”
only the intelligent ones dear
Hey Dan,
Below is a link to an EJ Dionne snippet from near the end of Bill Clinton’s term in office. The essence of the arcticle is the age-old question pitting the “haves” against the “have-nots”.
In the conflict of the…. “to be, or not to be…that is the question” ….issue of school vouchers, the “haves” in the issue are generally thought to be the well-off (like al gore and the rich political class of Washington DC), while the “have-nots” in the issue are generally thought to be the “not-so-well-off.” In-between the two groups are A LOT of folks…and it’s a given that essentially ALL folks want the best for their kids.
As usuall, EJ does try to associate the voucher system concept with the bogey-man…, in this case the bogey-man is for-profit education, just as Warren lumps in vouchers with the bogey-man of home-schooling, and Dan lumps in vouchers with bogey-man on-line private schools, while ol’ Wayne lumps in vouchers with the bogey-man of religious extremists.
A voucher system can be designed to put a non-profit private school education within financial reach of most if not all of the parents in the Roanoke Valley.
THAT is the question, isn’t it, you libs?
http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/The-Arguments-For-School-Vouchers-2772425.php
Frank, tell us how a voucher system could be desinged to put a private school education within reach of everybody in the Roanoke valley. Without online education.
Below is a link to the conflict between vouchers and charters, which I think is healthy, as both sides in my opinion enable parents an alternative “escape hatch”, if you will, from traditional public school administration practices.
More choices for parents = better outcomes for their children, in my opinion.
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2000/02/24education
Black foam balls is a silly statement for a different reason. As a former public school thespian forced to work under similar constraints, we often implied guns and violence by acting, lighting, and sound effects. (Make-believe? Whoda thunk it in a theater dept of all places?)
I wonder if the theater department considered removing the weapons but keeping the sound effects. In a show like Les Mis, where the fighting was between the French army and a bunch of students with big ideas and little throughput, the theater dept could’ve made a statement by disarming the A.B.C. of physical weapons and depicting the army at the barricades through sound effects.
Here are some facts, Dan:
Roanoke City spends about $12,000 per student.
Roanoke County spends about $9,500 per student.
The fees at one private school in Roanoke City range from about $7700 – $9300 per student.
The fees at one private school in Roanoke County range from about $12,000 – $15,000 per student.
You do the math, Dan.
And, after you are finished with the math, maybe you can explain why low-income parents in the Roanoke Valley SHOULDN’T be financially enabled to chose to send their children to existing non-profit private schools in the Roanoke Valley?
Frank, get back to us after you figure out how much more it costs to educate low-income/single parent/English as a second language students. How much more it would cost at Roanoke County or RCor (god forbid) North Cross if they had the student population the city has. What? You mean you weren’t aware of all that? Big surprise.
BTW, Frank, RC parents generally don’t want but so many of those students going there.
“Below is a link to the conflict between vouchers and charters, which I think is healthy, as both sides in my opinion enable parents an alternative “escape hatch”, if you will, from traditional public school administration practices.
More choices for parents = better outcomes for their children, in my opinion.”
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2000/02/24education
–Frank
Nice try, Frank but in reality, “more choices for parents = more money in the pockets of the wealthy.” That’s the chief goal of the whole game. One of the sub-strategies for achieving it is to fool people that their kids will get a better education along the way.
And btw, Frank, you’re horribly distorting the amount city taxpayers spend per pupil on students, by wrapping in state and federal money. A lot of the federal money in particular is spent for programs that help students for whom English is a second language, developmentally disabled students, deaf students, emotionally disturbed students and physically handicapped students. Your pie-in-the-sky taxpayer-subsidized-private-school education utopia concept leaves those kids in the dust and you know it.
You raise good points even for you, gdad.
The only point I am making is that the money …is there… to enable low-income folks the ability to have choices in the type of educational environment they want for their children.
As far as your posit about teaching English to foreign parents and students…how do you know that those foreign language-speaking parents and kids wouldn’t get a better eduction, at lower cost, in private schools than they get in government schools?
If public school administrators see that they are no longer the only choice for public education dollars…well, they’re not dummies, and they’ll figure out how to compete effectively for those dollars.
Have you know faith in your government school system leaders, gdad?
HayFrank..how do you plan to force RC and NorthCross to accept these “vouchers” and work to develop a student population that uses them? Are you nuts? Do you hear a lot of outcry from these schools that they’re not getting enough low-income immigrant students in the mix? I’ll confess, I have school aged children and come in contact with many families in both those schools and I’m pretty sure they’re not interested.
This is what makes the entire “voucher” nonsense so silly. These schools don’t WANT those students. They cannot be forced to take them. Drop it.
Frank,
To the extent that private schools APPEAR successful, you’ve got to admit that it A LOT to do with the fact that they by and large don’t have to deal with nonEnglish speaking students, developmentally disabled students, free-lunch students, emotionally disturbed students, physically handicapped students, deaf students and students with other issues non cover by the list above.
You’re ignoring all the and mixing it with theoretical mumbo jumbo and pretending that there are apples to apples comparisons to be made.
1) You can’t compare the two and 2) the theoretical mumbo jumbo is the same kind of horse manure-filled garbage that was used to support electric deregulation in the 1990s, which was billed as all about helping consumers save money and get the most efficient service by fostering competition among electric utilities which NEVER transpired, so they had to UNDO deregulation — EXCEPT, of course, in that process the regulated monopoly utilities managed to extract a higher rate of return from their customers. The whole exercise boiled down to a transfer of wealth that favored the rich.
Fancy that!
Hey Dan,
Sooo, what you are saying is that low-income parents must be resigned to …your… fact that they have no and MUST have no options for their childrens’ educational environment, outside of government schools.
Ok, I get it. And, the rich get richer…’cause they get the best education they can for their little kiddies, and the poor kids are stuck with the leftovers of whatever falls their way off the breakfast table of government-funded schools.
And, Dan, those other programs you list can be funded by set-asides, out of the same pot. And, what you’ll find when you carve out those costs will be an amount of money remaining for government schools which will be closer to the fees charged by private non-profit schools. Then, we get to have a closer “apples to apples” comparison, and …Walla!!… the value of a private non-profit education is still within reach of government school kiddies.
And, it’s ludicrous to think that all government school kiddies’ parents will want to make the transition to private non-profit schools (for one thing, there won’t be enough room). And, if the government schools’ leaders are as smart as everybody seems to think they are, then they’ll get with the program and compete.
Just think, Dan, if those government school leaders are really good, this might be the beginning of the demise of non-profit private schools, eh?
Ok kristen,
While I believe you are wrong, let’s take your’s and gdad’s approach that poor kids have no future at a non-profit private school in Roanoke City.
What we end up with is, what’s good enuff for your kids is what the kids currently served by government schools deserve…and furthermore, those kids shall not have options like some others do, to improve the environment where they get their education.
Ok, I get it.
Most parents want the best education they can get for their kids, Frank. Some can’t afford private schools, where supposedly the education is better. And some can.
The outrage is that those who can afford it, and who have chosen to pay for it, are now demanding a taxpayer subsidy for that choice. And they’re masking that greed under all kinds of theoretical BS to conceal the idea that what they actually want is a subsidy. And you’ve fallen for that BS hook, line and sinker — just like to so many other strange and spurious conservative scheme and conspiracy theories you take a shine to.
You can bet your bippy that the people who send they kids to private schools right now would not be in favor of your “school choice” scheme if it ONLY applies to kids now in public schools.
Because then (assuming that the private schools would accept as full payment the per-pupil subsidy now paid for public schools) those private schools would suddenly include some of the very kids those parents sought to keep their kids away from by enrolling them in private school in the first place. And the previously-paying-for-private-school parents wouldn’t get any money out of that.
Frank, I didn’t think homeschooling and private schools are the same, just that they’re related because both involve depopulating public education. But I did make a mistake in my last line. It should read:
“To make taxpayers subsidize profitmaking on private schooling is much, much worse”
Now Dan,
Of course everyone would get vouchers. Why wouldn’t they?
And of course the vouchers might not put all parents in reach of paying the full price at all private schools, but it would make it easier for more than can do so now, right?
It’s conceptually similar to health care, Dan! Except in this case, the decision-makers are the parents, and access to where they want their kids to get their education would involve more choices than just “government” schools.
By the way, just WHAT IS the alternative school which low-income folks have available now for their children, Dan?
Warren,
I’m not aware of any profit-making private school in the Roanoke Valley.
There you go, propping up a straw-man, or creating a bogey-man, for your low-information libs to flail away at.
Instead of this moronic game of trying to destroy public education in this country with vouchers, the real objective should be to build a world class education system that trains our children to exceed in a highly competitive world and is accessible to every child. This is not a local, regional or state issue; when states like Texas start dumbing down textbooks because of ideology it becomes a fundamental issue of national security.
Creating a world class educational system would be the absolute cheapest and best investment we could possibly make in the future of this nation, something anyone who really loved this country would readily support. I expect someone even like frank to be able to grasp something this simple.
“There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”
Lord Acton
I have to lmao at HayFrank who’s suddenly enamored of things being “non profit”. I’ve been assured so many, many times in here that the “profit” motive is what makes the private sector so infinitely more efficient, effective, and superior to ANYTHING the non-profit government could produce. Guess not.
Fwiw, HayFrank, “non profit” just means they know how to unload all their cash. Not that they’re operating on a shoe string. Ask Carilion.
well, Kristen, you DO have a point, there. However, there are non-profit private schools in the Roanoke Valley, some of which operate on a shoe-strig budget…two of which are in Roanoke City. My use of the term “non-profit” private school was to differentiate them from the libs who were referring to voucher schools as “on-line” for-profit” schools.
Those folks can’t see the forest for the fire of hate in the eyes, and holy cow, do those folks simply abhor any attempt to give poor folks the opportunity to chose an educational environment for their kids which is NOT the local government school system!
Frank at #21, you said:
“And, after you are finished with the math, maybe you can explain why low-income parents in the Roanoke Valley SHOULDN’T be financially enabled to chose to send their children to existing non-profit private schools in the Roanoke Valley?”
Does this mean you also support “financially enabling” low income parents to obtain healthcare, food for their families, and a place to live? After all, I believe the research would suggest that good early childhood healthcare, a good night’s sleep, and a nutritious breakfast sets the stage for better educational outcomes.
when government created medicare and medicaid, holy cow, “you who must not be addressed”…or, “you who alleges to have an mba”, ….health care cost just got cheaper and cheaper, didn’t it? Just WHAT in the world do you think’s gonna happen to the cost of health care now, after obamacare gets implemented?
Folks like you take your narrow-mindedness and ignorance as casually as the sun coming up in the morning. Our country can’t even shut the border with mexico. It can’t figure out how to prevent $65 billion dollars of annual medicare fraud, and billions more in annual medicaid fraud. Heck, the government led by JFK WAS able to marshall the resources to put a man on the moon within nine years of being challenged to do so…….then our current president told his NASA appointee to tell Al Jazeera that his “foremost priority was to make Muslims feel good about themselves”.
Yeah-boy! The head of our country, and the leader of the party of ignorant and narrow-minded libs, actually told his NASAappointee that a top priority of his was to make Muslims essentially feel better about themselves. Seriosly. I can’t make this stuff up!
Whatever your hope is of a “world class educational system” (which is a reasonable ideal), whatever’s created by the feds will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and will be run by unions.
Jason Perdue,
Not so fast! They’ve already got healthcare. They’ve already got the food (for criminy sakes, the RT’s is even worried about how the Roanoke City Schools’ superintendent can make a simple decision to close city schools for inclement weather, all the while knowing full well that some little kiddies might starve! I kid you not.).
Actually, JP, I’m in favor of school vouchers. Are ya with me on that?
hey you in post #33,
Are you serious? You say you want an educational system that “trains our children to exceed(sic) in a highly competitive world and is accessible to every child.”
You want competition? Our little kiddies don’t compete. Everyone gets a trophy, remember? Political correctness has abolished winners and losers among little kiddies. How can they effectively compete in a world where other countries aren’t faced with our brand of political correctness?
Oh. It just occured to me. You want obama to take over the world, then we’ll export our brand of political correctness to those dastardly smarter countries, and dumb-down the whole world into a lib utopia! Got it!
“Does this mean you also support “financially enabling” low income parents to obtain healthcare, food for their families, and a place to live? After all, I believe the research would suggest that good early childhood healthcare, a good night’s sleep, and a nutritious breakfast sets the stage for better educational outcomes.”
–Jason Perdue
No, Jason, Frank doesn’t mean that. You see, the big deal here for Frank is that he wants to undo the “government schools.” He wants to set up a voucher system that will ultimately bleed the “government schools” dry. It would siphon off many of the better performing students, leaving the increasing percentages of low-performing students in “government schools” — plus the physically handicapped students, the deaf ones, the developmentally disabled ones and the emotionally disturbed. Their average test scores would drop, the state would slap them with an “F” and that would give Frank and his cohorts more ammo to sling horse manure about the “evils of government.”
And how do voucher students perform in private schools? Not any better than in public schools:
“This follows $14 million already allocated to “the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program” which provides tuition vouchers of up to $7,500 per kid. Though limited to the District of Columbia, the plan has had great PR value as it allows the pro-voucher contingent to point to Congress own backyard as evidence for the need for school choice in other places.
The D.C. plan was pitched as a five year ‘experiment’ and pushed through a divided congress in 2004. The plan thankfully expired in 2009 but Barack Obama allowed current participating students to continue receiving vouchers (at taxpayers’ expense) until they graduate. However, no new students will be accepted.
This is just as well because every dollar extracted from taxpayers for vouchers means less to fund public schools. Instead of pouring millions into voucher systems (which tactics I believe violate the separation of Church and state since most voucher schools are religious) that money could be going toward improvements in our public schools. Just think then, how much difference that $14 million could have made to D.C. public schools.
And what of the plan’s efficacy? Has it delivered on its promises? In fact, studies of the plan have disclosed it hasn’t lived up to the hype. A final study commissioned by the U.S. Dept. of Education found that voucher-funded students did not better than non-participants. The plan’s main benefit has been to prop up failing Roman Catholic schools in the district that would otherwise have closed.
. . .Further, in mulitiple other further studies that ranged from the D.C. schools, to those in Milwaukee and Cleveland, it was found the targeted population (enrolled in private schools via vouchers) did not perform better in reading and math than those in public schools.”
More here: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/02/school-voucher-scam-when-will-politicos.html
I see Frank has latched on to the silly mantra of “government” schools. This is what happens when you listen to right wing infotainers who have made it a fine art inaccurately defining a position to support their own.
The trick here is to pretend that public schools are some cloned monolithic entity that take strict liberal marching orders from some nebulous puppet master from the Federal Department of Education. It only works as a criticism cause people like Frank don’t bother to consider that public education is largely a state matter, and in this state, it’s largely a local matter. All an informed person would have to do is look at a school division’s budget and it should be very clear that only a small amount of a school systems overall funding comes from Washington. If they be goverment schools, then would be government in the sense of the city or county from which their funding and supervision derive.
Worse still, is the vague idea of salvation from vouchers. Somehow, allowing the funding money to follow the student will magically provide some wonderful educational opportunity for some student, cause if you if you have a few thousand dollars in your pocket, you always make a good choice with your money. In the case of Virginia, you’d be taking that wad of cash from schools that have at least some formal method of accreditation, some formal review of professional staff, and some accountability for students to private schools that have, well, nothing. Nada.
But hey, they aren’t “government” schools, so they have to be good.
No, Frank. I am opposed to attempts to shake the foundation of public education. My point was that I found it odd that you support doing away wit other forms of governmeny enabling (i.e., Medicare/Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance), but you happily school vouchers.
Dan’s analysis of the voucher motive is spot on. Voucher proponents seek to divert money to private schools. They care nothing about educating disadvantaged students. As the DC study that Dan cited suggests, let’s keep public school money in the public school domain and set out to improve on what we’ve got.
Are you with me, Frank?
Can someone please decipher what frank is neckpuking about in #39? I can tell he’s attempting to communicate what he feels is an important point but its all reading like gibberish to me. I don’t associate with people like frank that much anymore, so my asshat-ese language skills are a little rusty.
” You say you want an educational system that “trains our children to exceed(sic) in a highly competitive world and is accessible to every child.”
Um, Frank? Not sure what the (sic) is for on your cut and paste from Steve’s post, but “exceed” is indeed the correct spelling of the word. I and both of my kids could have told you that, thanks to our education at “government schools” .
Now maybe it’s time for you to stop lecturing to us – or, indeed,anyone – about education
Mike Scott,
Frank probably rejects the whole notion of accreditation as some kind of liberal plot. The same with teacher certification. Are private school teachers necessarily certified?
I think I’ve figured out the problem here:
Frank feels cheated by rotten education he got in a public school, something he displays in full glory every time he posts. Of course, that was THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS’ FAULT, not Frank’s. He showed up; it’s not his fault he couldn’t learn. It was those darn government schools, filled with union teachers who were too busy trying to inoculate students with Marxism.
So Frank is on a little revenge trip against public education. It kind of grates at him, actually, that he lives in a state where there are no teacher unions.
Liberal teachers DO NOT teach what they know, but rather, what THEY BELIEVE. Its not like it is some big secret.
Well, I don`t know about Frank, but Dan, your education couldn`t have been all that supreme if this is all you can do.
Hey Mike Scott and Jason Perdue,
Yep, you are correct, Roanoke City’s school budget is heavily funded by state and local taxes. Duh.
And, the only thing wrong with the government schools is that the tax-payers need to pay more taxes, is that it?
And, low-middle income parents must be stupid to want to think they could have an alternative to the monopolistic government schools in which to educate their children, is that it?
And, the last thing that a bloated government bureaucracy needs is to compete with such alternatives, eh?
What about Charter Schools? Are they the devil as well?
Frank….DOn`t waste your time asking Dan or any other liberal to `do the math`….Remember, these people have figured out how to spend more than they make. Liberalism 1 Mathematics 0
This is pretty funny!
You libs are all about giving women free rubbers, but you don’t want to give those low-income women ANY alternatives other than your bloated government schools in which to educate their children who managed to get born alive.
Give’em food stamps….but, NOPE for a choice of education for their kids.
Give’m free-healthcare, but NOPE for anything other than a govenment school for education.
Hypocrites.
Awood, good one!
“how can they be outa money, the printing press still works!”
Dan,
What role does the VEA play in Virginia?
Frank, what’s funny is you comparing private school vouchers to condoms. Do you realize how ridiculous you’re sounding?
“You want competition? Our little kiddies don’t compete. Everyone gets a trophy, remember?”
Frank knows this because he is so involved n public education and yet he’s seems to be proposing that parents should be able to choose a system in which the schools to which the send their children have less accountability, not more. Vouchers are magic. They make everything good and free market solves all problems.
You show me a private school in which parents have a big financial stake in their precious child’s education, and I show you school where the teacher has no leverage on student performance. You assume that “everybody gets a trophy” is the product of some liberal self esteem program to make everyone feel better. It’s perhaps more true that a certain group of parents expect their children to get trophies, and the more they pull or influence they have, the more trophies they want for the children.
You can believe what you want to Frank, but school vouchers are not about giving low income parents or children a choice of schools. They are about giving people who can afford to send their children to private schools a financial break that they don’t need or deserve. Someone is swallowing the kool-aid, Frank, and it’s not liberals.
yeah, Dan, good one!
Dan, condoms are used to stop little kiddies from happening, ya know?
Vouchers are used to enable the parents of the little kiddies who are born to be able to chose an alternative education environment, rather than being stuck with government schools, as the only option in which to educate their little kiddies..
That just scares the bejeesas outa you libs, doesn’t it?
Dan, what role does the VEA play in Virginia concerning public school education?
Hey Mike Scott,
Your post at #55 is hilarious! Thank you for that laugh! Wait a minute, ’cause I’m still laughing!
Ok. So, your research has shown you that …the teachers… at North Cross, Community School, RCS, Faith Christion, etc….”have …no… leverage on student performance?” Bear with me a minute while I…hahahaha!
Seriously Mike Scott, is that what you believe? Seriously? If those schools didn’t perform, those parents would excersize their option to go elsewhere, wouldn’t they? Having the freedom to choose IS important, is it not?
As far as the “every kiddie gets a trophy” concept is concerned, it is driven by the political correctness mentality embraced by our generation, and exemplified by obama’s NASA administrator having as his main priority to “make Muslims feel good about themselves and their contributions to math, science, and engineering.” Interesting, no?
Re: student performance in charter schools, here’s are a couple snippets from a 2010 story that appeared in The Washington Times, with a link to the story at the bottom.
“A study of middle school students in charter schools in 15 states has found that they generally performed no better in math and reading than other public school students.
Students in charter schools in urban areas were an exception; they did better in math than their public-school peers, and charter-school students were generally more satisfied with their schools, said the study, done by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. and released Wednesday. But the outcome — that charter-school students generally didn’t do better academically than other students — is sure to be disappointing to education officials seeking new ways to improve student achievement.
. . . The findings, the first of their kind on such a scale, involved 2,330 middle-school children at 36 charter schools in 15 states. The charter schools were popular enough to use lotteries to decide which students would be admitted. The study compared outcomes of students who attended the schools (lottery winners) and children who applied but were not admitted (lottery losers) and typically went back to their neighborhood schools.
“We found that the average charter school — did not have positive impacts on students’ math or reading achievement,” Mr. Gleason said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/29/study-charter-school-students-performance-average/#ixzz2N9XUxToz
Conversely, we could all practice what frank preaches and send our sons to a girls school to get their masters degree in children’s Lit or something equally useful. Yeah, frank’s a real authority on the benefits of education. I guess he learned about condom and education equivalency theory at the school for advanced studies of ass-grabbery.
The pit bull has found a new bone to chew on and is playing tug of war with it.
I would not be at all surprised if Frank once worked in an industry in which the vast majority of revenue comes from the federal government.
Because he sounds an awful lot like a family member of mine who’s in that boat. My relative’s stock answer is government is bad — except in his industry, in which it’s imperative that government keep the dollars flowing!
frank, there’s a whole host of topics that you are intellectually unequipped to participate in and education is chief among them. Please try to find a thread more suitable for your skill-set where you can actually make commentary that doesn’t embarrass you and cause us to spit up coffee on our keyboards from laughing so hard. Can someone please start an “Advanced Snipe Hunting” thread so frank doesn’t feel left out?
Frank, this blog does have a few “joke of the day” threads.
Those might be more appropriate places for you to post comments. Or on any OPEN thread.
Frank – public schools have been educating the vast majority of Americans since their inception in the 1880′s.
Here’s a wee bit of information about “government” schools…
A national study conducted by Stanford University economist Margaret Raymond found that 37% of charter schools got worse results than comparable neighborhood public schools, 46% did about the same and only 17% were superior to the local public schools. The Raymond study surveyed half the charter schools in the nation and more than 70% of all charter school students. Raymond said, “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/charter-school-problem-results-positive-new-study-suggests-article-1.405678#ixzz2N9Rdb2Lb
“You libs are all about giving women free rubbers, but you don’t want to give those low-income women ANY alternatives other than your bloated government schools in which to educate their children who managed to get born alive.”
Just when I think HayFrank can’t be any bigger of an anus, he proves me wrong. Perhaps he needs to go the way of stevenelson
Actually, public schools have been around since early 1800′s. My last post had one too many 8′s.
Hillary,
I’d reckon Frank cares little about outcomes for students. The big thing, according to him, is that parents have “choice.” It doesn’t matter if that that choice allows them to put their kid in a school that’s more likely to be worse performing than not.
So long as there is “choice” it will put additional budget pressures on the “government schools” that he thinks so little of.
If HayFrank thinks that the only thing standing between the kids at Indian Rock Village and Choate is a few thousand in vouchers, he’s even dumber than I thought. It hardly seems possible
Ok. you libs want to keep our country’s low-income parents tethered to government schools, even though there are viable alternatives. Well, you’ll continue to get what you’ve got, and those with choices will be able to explore other options.
Dan, I left an industry about 20 years ago whose revenue was heavily funded by the government, to start a small business whose revenue from the government was zero. Sorry about your family member, who couldn’t find a way to break away from it. I’m glad I did.
Hey Dan at post #64,
Here’s one for you:
I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help you!
Frank apparently is unaware that RC and NC simply won’t take or can’t help certain students — and I’m not talking about disruptive or bad students. I know kids who used to be at each who were basically chased out essentially because it was too much effort and/or expense to educate them properly, and they’re doing great at PH.
We have no idea how lucky we are to have Frank grace us with his presence here every day. He is an absolute fount of wisdom and detailed information, much of which we would never get to see since we only read “lib” sources.
From him we have learned that We are all spelling Obama’s name wrong. It’s really “Obuma”. We’ve learned that one major way to reduce the deficit is to have the Gubmint stop giving all those rubbers to women and just let ‘em have more babies that they can’t support. We’ve learned that the health care law is going to lead to steady increases in the cost of health insurance which is something we’ve never had before. We’ve learned that Obama has no plan to reduce the deficit. Faux told him so and that must be correct. He’s an absolute expert on foreign policy and is able to see things that our leaders
are unable to see. For example, Benghazi, where he has assured us that our ambassador was raped, tortured and then killed and that the President and the NSC watched it all happening in real time and went to bed without doing anything about it. It’s nice to know that Petraeus, Panetta. B rennan, and Hillary Clinton were all mistaken about that when they testified before Congress. He has shown us how all the domestic and foreign policy problems that our country faces can be easily traced back to B ill Clinton, a bj, and a stained blue dress. .. And now he has assured us all that with his expertise in education and operating schools that the research is all wrong and that the only way to improve our schools is through vouchers and charter schools to get all that gubmint liberalism out of ‘em so they can teach creationism and abstinence, and the scientific theory that proves climate change is a hoax.
Truly Frank must be the most interesting man in the world. I expect to soon see him assume that role in the popular beer commercial. Of course it will have to be slightly altered to reflect Frank’s truth to power and personality.
So watch for it soon with the new catch line : “Hey ya’ll. I don’t often drink beer. But when I do I prefer Milwaukee’s Best. Say thirsty now, ya hear.”
“We have no idea how lucky we are to have Frank grace us with his presence here every day.”
Yeah, he’s a real national treasure, Wayne. Frank’s about as much fun as catching a bad case of the flu. At least the flu goes away after three weeks.