The 35 year Chilean charter school experiment that never worked

I was talking about DC, but unions are the big muscle against vouchers. You know this. They will sacrifice children if it means job protection for their members and money for them and democrats. That is the game, everyone is aware.

The individual should never be sacrificed for the good of others. Any loss would be incremental anyway. But I feel that nothing is more personal then the education path one chooses.

Who is in the best decision to determine what school is best for a child? The child? The parent? School boundary map, or total strangers like yourself?

 

Some unions definitely act that way. Clearly, unions work very differently in Germany, however.

The act of living in a society requires sacrifice. The only question is how far you should sacrifice your interests for the whole.

Most First World societies seem to prefer sacrifice to the extent of having a decent public education system. In America, it largely depends on the state as to how functional the public systems are, but there are definitely some that are sorely lacking and probably aren't worth sacrificing anything for.

 

Germans have a weirdly reasonable union culture that can't be replicated here.

So you would have a kid get a bad education at a school they don't like if it meant a little more incremental money for the school? How about 20 kids? Half the class?

 

I would like kilgram to give evidence that any states charter schools charge tuition. Florida and DE don't allow such behavior, and I also know MD, NJ, and other states in the Mid Atlantic don't allow charters to charge tuition.

 

Going the voucher route might end up being the future of education in America, but it won't speak very highly of its government if that's what it requires to improve.

 

Who cares what it speaks of? This is about freedom of thought and equal opportunity for development. That is the best message they can have.

 

Freedom of thought has more to do with laws concerning media and speech.

But as far as equal opportunity goes, the end game with voucher systems is eventually removing public education systems. That wouldn't be very equal opportunity.

 

Parents who earn more to get their kids a better education, *should* be able to get a better education. The problem is, the only way to give equal education, is to make everyone get equally bad eduction.

Public Government run schools, naturally tend toward worse education standards, simply because of politics and students differences.

Here is how....

Different students learn at different levels. The best teachers in the world, can't make a bad student learn anything.

So in a class room with one teacher and dozens of students, you have 20% that are on chapter 10, and 20% that are on chapter 5, and the rest somewhere around chapter 7 and chapter 8.

Unfortunately, the teacher can only teach at one level. They can't teach all chapters all the time. That would be confusing enough for the teacher, let alone the students.

So at which level do we teach? If we teach chapter 10, then 80% of the class fails, because they are not at that level. The result would be that parents and politicians would start firing the administrator and teachers.

They are not going to lose their jobs over this. So do they teach level 7 or 8? Then only half the class fails, yet still everyone gets pissed off.

No instead, they are going to teach chapter 5. Why? Because then everyone passes. Yes, the top 20% are drastically held back in their education. And yes the middle students are doing to be mildly held back.... but parents will be happy thinking their kids are brilliant (even though they are just not being challenged), and politicians think their policies are brilliant (even though they are actually doing worse), and of course teachers have an easy time teaching less, and administrators get to keep their jobs.

Of course all of this is a mask over the fact that education is massively worse.

This is why every good education system generally has a tier system, where only the best students go to the best schools, and worst students go to the worse schools. For some reason people get this wacky idea that if you give crappy bottom 20% students to the top teachers, they will get the best education. Not true.

If you read Thomas Sowell's book "A personal Odyssey", he talks about being at Cornell University, when they had a program to give a free ride to 'under privileged' students. The result was that nearly all of them failed out. There was nothing wrong with these students, they simply were not at the level of this school. Taking away the money aspect, didn't result in them getting more education. In fact, it resulted in them getting a worse education, because they simply failed out of school. The work was beyond them.

Your intentions don't matter. The path to hell is always paved with good intentions. The result of your system would be to doom more students to a worse education than they are currently getting. A system where everyone can choose which school they want to go to as long as they can pay for it, and have the grades to succeed in it, has given Chile the best education system in Latin America.

If public schools were so great, then enrollment should be going up, not down, at public schools. If a totally government run public school system was so great, then why is Chile doing better than all the countries around them that have exactly that system?

The facts are not on your side. That's just all there is to it.

 

Why is that? If they were so popular you woulnt have public education? Who cares as long as the kids are getting the education they want? It is their lives. They don't need to learn biased history from the 2 companies that make history text books for the public schools.

But this is not the case at all. Vouchers have strengthened Swedish public schools. Belgian ones too. The charters can try different models, show success and then be emulated by the public schools. Which is exactly what is happening there and here. The wildly successful KIPP schools are working with Houston public schools to show them ways they can improve.

 

The KIPP schools do seem to perform well, although it also appears that they don't have as many ESL and special needs kids as public schools in the same areas.

That tends to help out your results.

 

Yes, but compared to the local students in the lottery that didn't get into KIPP and were tracked compared to their KIPP counterparts they fell behind miserably. ESL students will be a new challenge, but they have already shown they can outperform public schools in "bad" neighborhoods.

 

You referenced the Swedish and Belgian charter schools. How do those work, and how did they encourage improvement for the public ones?

 

I saw a great documentary on Swedish schools let me see if I can find it. Basically though they, like KIPP or Montessori schools have different methods and the public schools that largely use the Daley methods copy what works. In on case they discipline kids in bad schools by making them take detention in the class with older kids. It embarasses them and is higly effective. In some areas it meant stopping wood shop in favor of robotics class to because they were losing kids to the nearby charter tech school, now the two schools are involved in a friendly "space race" to attract students. It was interesting, not sure they were all in Sweden and Belgium but I will check out that link.

 

I am still looking but in the mean time this is a hopeful story in the inner city, Messmer charter school getting 90% college attendance from their HD grads:

[video]http://youtube.com/watch?v=JP-6FCKhh00&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DJP-6FCKhh00[/video]

Also includes a bit about how public schools have improved to keep up so their kids choose to stay.

 

It is 45 minutes, but it is good. Sure, it is from the right, and I don't expect you will agree with everything. Stossel is a libertarian. But it is all about getting the kids the education they deserve and they have a lot of promising stories:

[video=youtube;Bx4pN-aiofw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw[/video]

 

Of course not, they drive the ESL and special needs students out. They also have severe staffing problems, being highly dependent on Teach For America program teachers (who are short term). They have very high churn rates on both teachers and administrators. The KIPP schools one attempt to turn around an existing public school (in Denver) was a complete failure.

here are some examples of poor KIPP school performance
http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/07/duvals-kipp-charter-school-is-colossal.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...in-kipp-schools/2011/06/13/AG1sQeTH_blog.html

http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.w...ool-led-to-jacksonville-kipp-schools-failure/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/...pecially-if-We-Fail-to-Identify-the-Question#

http://gothamschools.org/2011/04/04/a-struggling-kipp-school-plans-to-overhaul-teaching-staff/

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/gerald_coles_kipp_schools_powe.html

 

Just a silly blog, no data. They took kids that were from D feeder schools, and got them to a C in short order. Change takes time, these kids have to play catch up. That is no failure.

From the article:

If they bothered to read how the study was done;

They controlled for both sets of students and found:

Now how do you read her report, look at the actual study cited and read that, and write what she did unless your head is up your @$$?
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/KIPP_middle.pdf

Again, silly blog. Failure compared to what? The school they used to go to? Not according to their test scores. They are up. More change takes time. This was an inner city 96% African American failing school in Jacksonville. Now what are they scoring? Twice the state average in math, although they are still behind in reading:

http://www.kipp.org/school-content/kipp-impact-middle-school

In Florida, you can only get the voucher if you go to a failing school. So all the students in our charter programs are basically from F schools in our FCAT grading system. What amounts to a 1 or a 2 in the Great Schools Rating System. Other then the technical schools where kids learn job skills rather then a traditional high school education, the charters are making big improvements:

http://www.greatschools.org/florida/jacksonville/schools/?st=charter

You may say, "well the average scores from non tech schools are only about a 7 or so, that isn't great", but then you would be forgetting that each of these students had to have gone to failing school to even get the voucher. So the question remains - failure compared to what?

The daily communist. The whole article is illogical, but here is the best one

As we shown, 96% of of that KIPP school is black children. So you may think he is right. But then you are forgetting, no one was bussed or forced to go there. Those kids are there because those kids had to get out of their poor dangerous public school. White kids are already in good public schools. Charter programs are only really being allowed in the worst school areas, it is the minorities that fill them, because they are the ones that went to the bad public schools int he first place.

From the article:

Teachers unions can stick up for adults over kids somewhere else. I don't blame KIPP one bit. As far as this part:

The vouchers were only available by lottery to kids in the worst schools in Brooklyn. Dont be surprised if 3 years out they are only doing average, especially when they have been dealing with multiple union attacks.

If you think the schools are worse then where the kids went before, dont send your children there. For the thousands of parents who try to get their kids in the 100 slots that open up, who are you to tell them you know better? You dont even know the name of the school their child used to go to, and you dont even know that child's name.

From the article:

This is just dishonest. The 22 schools omitted have been open less then 3 years. How much change are they supposed to make in the short amount of time?

 

This is absolutely true. We see this in DE. The Charters are very race identitifiable. If they are located outside of areas with public transportation, they are virtually lily white, if they are in areas served by public transportation they are majority minority.

 

What I mean with the healthcare. The Spanish healthcare is the 5th most efficient of the world, while healthcare of USA is about the 40th.

Public systems can be much more efficient than private.

http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-efficient-health-care-countries

 

Efficiency isn't what it is cracked up to be. America has better recovery rates in every major treatment category. Cancer, heart disease, trauma, etc... But dead men are cheaper to care for.

The Spanish even get to ride our cost tails on medical innovation. When we start saving that money will they stagnate too or pick up the difference?

 

What does the data say? Our charter system is the opposite, KIPP in jacksoville is 96% black, that is because only neglected schools get vouchers here. How do your voucher rules work?

 

Medical innovation is the only thing where Spain was quite good.

What do you mean with dead men? Because in Spain the rate of deaths is really low, lower than USA.

USA is much more expensive for person, have lower life exptancy, it means that the child death rate is higher than Spain.

The difference in cancer, heart disease, trauma are null. In Spain also hospitals are equipped with the last technologies and the doctors are ones of the best, that even migrate.

And also can you explain me this:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/ny-hospitals-charging-much-546-six-liters-saltwater-iv-bag ?
NY hospitals charging $546 for six litres of saltwater in IV bag. Because it is insulting. It is what you get from private hospitals. Things like that make your hospitals only useful for wealthy people, but not for many workers... There are many reasons why USA's system is considered one of the worst. In any ranking you will see the American healthcare ranked high, except in punctual things and they are the elite hospitals, hospitals that everybody cannot go.

 

Life expectancy means little, we have different lifestyles. If Americans walked half as much as euros did we would be in good shape. But cancer recovery rates etc... Things hospitals and doctors do that you get charged for. The differences are not null. 20% better cancer survival rates. In a big country like ours that means hundreds of thousands of lives over a decade. We would be losing more people just in the lung cancer difference in one year then we did in the last two wars fought.

How long was that IV used for and does it include special services etc.. Those are not the prices here.

 

DE does not have vouchers. We do have charters and private schools (the best of which cost between $15,000 to $48,000 per year per child)

 

That's wierd, because in Florida, at least here in Pensacola, charter schools are open to whoever wants to go to them. In fact, most public schools are open to whichever student (as long as they cause no trouble and can provide their own transportation) wants to go, based on space available.