Pennsylvania legislators were moving to adopt a “charter reform” bill that would have benefited charters mightily.
In response to the loud outcry from supporters of public education, some Republican legislators switched sides at the last minute and the bill died.
There are indeed serious injustices that need to be corrected–like the outrageous over-funding of cyber charters–which cost taxpayers about $1 million a day.
This post explains why the bill failed and why it deserved to fail.
The bill will be back, and so will the supporters of public education.
Keep your eye on Pennsylvania.
Congratulations PA!
Here in Florida, we defeated the Parent Trigger bill and look forward to beating it again!
Although I usually vote D. I am all for supporting competition in the K-12 space.
I have had personal experience where the real problems in the K-12 space is.
1) We need better parents.
2) The quality of the output of most of the Colleges of Education in this country frankly sucks badly.
As an undergradate majoring in Mathematics at UNC Asheville, I was very upset that the Math department deliberately watered down the senior level Analysis class so that the Math education students could pass. If you don’t have subject mastery, why are you attempting to teach that subject to anyone.
When I did my graduate work in Mathematics, I took 2 Math Ed. gradaute courses. I enjoyed teaching as a grad assistant and wanted to better. These classes were a complete and utter waste of time. It was 3 hours a week of the obvious. I could not believe that people who were enrolled in graduate school could ask such inane questions over and over and over again. These folks are seriosuly going to teach.
I am an IT and web professional in Higher Education. I took a instructional technology design grad course on multimedia to see if I wanted to go in that direction. Sadly I knew far more than the professor. I frequently had to call BS on her when she said things that were blatantly untrue.
Lastly, my mother who was a Director of Collections (librarian) at two universities, said at both institutions that the most insecure, territorial and incompetent professors are disproportionally found at the Colleges of Education. It is one of the few areas that my mother and I agree….
Look, the iPad combined with the cloud is going to do more to jumpstart the reinvention of k-12 classrooms and curriculum then all of the research done in all of the Colleges of Education in the past twenty years.
The solution comes from competition and entrepreneurial ventures. With the iPad and the cloud the part of learning that is consuming information can be effectively removed from the classroom (this is mostly evident in Science and Math). Then classrooms evolve into well mentored discussions. Those math teachers who have spent a lifetime teaching from recipes will find their incompetantcies exposed in this more dyanmic environment.
Thus, charter schools are one way of introducing competition and entrepreneurship in a space that is desperate need of both.
Jose