A reader says this about charter schools:
“Charter schools, which are investment tools for the wealthy are hijacking our public schools. One CEO of three charter schools in NYC makes $475,000.00 plus benefits. As an investment advisor I expect a return on my investment.. My property taxes and federal tax as well as state taxes are going to professional hijackers. We are all losing except the rich who are insuring their takeover. Ask Mike Milliken about it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the United States of Plutocracy, is public education the last bastion of Democracy?
http://www.examiner.com/article/in-the-united-states-of-plutocracy-is-public-education-the-last-democracy
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Now Stuart, is Democracy an end in itself, or is it a means to some other end, and if the latter, what end?
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Hey, how’s it going!
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PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, DO NOT SEND US ANY MORE OF YOUR REQUESTS TO STOP E- MAILS, EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Contact WORDPRESS instead, for God’s sake: Type the URL http://wordpress.com into your browser, sign into your account (or if already signed in, click on your account icon), and then in Setttings, change the Notifications to “no email delivery.”
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This is the second Charter CEO that I’ve heard of who earns more than the President of the United States. The first one was Eve M. in New York who had 7,000 kids in her Charter schools and she pays herself almost a half million dollars a year. I wonder how much Eve pays her teachers.
According to salary.com, the annual median pay for superintendents of public school districts in the United States is $145,309.
I wonder if the teachers in these Charter schools are earning higher salaries with a similar ratio than public school teachers, and according to nces.ed.gov the average annual salary of a public school teacher in 2011-12 was $56,643.
If the ratio holds, that means Charter school teachers should be paid about $200,000 annually but that ain’t so.
I found this at American Progress.org that shows base pay and highest pay for Charter School Teachers:
Base Pay for Charter school teachers was $26,977 and the highest was $46,314.
Click to access teacher_compensation.pdf
A friend of mine told me many times I would be better of if the public schools were turned over to Charters because I’d be paid what I’m worth. Boy, was he ever wrong. My last year of teaching with an MFA and 30 years in the classroom was about $80,000.
And the NEA reports that the National Average Starting Teacher Salary in the Public schools is $36,141.
http://www.nea.org/home/2012-2013-average-starting-teacher-salary.html
Comparing average starting pay:
Charter school teachers start at $26,977 with a CEO who pays themselves almost $500 thousand annually.
Public school teachers on average start at $36,141 with a superintendent who on average is paid about $145 thousand annually.
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Has anyone heard about the Detroit teacher who was fired for breaking up a fight between two boys with a broomstick? I just heard about it on Greta Van Susteren’s show on Fox News. It was a female teacher and the fight was between 15 and 16 year old males. It’s was pretty intense.
http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/05/07/teacher-fired-after-using-broom-to-break-up-fight-hires-attorney/
Of course, she used this story to bash unions. “In one school, the union helps someone viewing porn on the clock stay in the job but then this teacher loses her job for breaking up a fight.”
I went to the LOCAL source mentioned above. This is a state-managed school. They have NO union representation. This is a product of school reform.
Of course hitting a student with a broom wasn’t the best thing to do, but I bet she would have also gotten in trouble had she stood there waiting for help and one of the boys ended up seriously hurt. I think she was destined to be messed over either way.
I hate hearing stories like this.
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“destined”? Destined? Why? Sorry to go metaphysical on you, but the word caught my eye. Are you saying it was “The Will of Allah”? Does everyone have a pre-ordained destiny? Who or what pre-ordains it? I believe in accident, but not in specific, life circumstance destiny. Bad luck for that teacher, yet that too. Even Oedipus was not “destined” to what happened to him, in my opinion, although many will argue otherwise saying “You can’t escape a prophecy.” But the whole point is that one can as long as one has control of his bad temper.
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Obviously by destined she meant that the teacher would have gotten in trouble no matter what. She couldn’t physically stop the fight, couldn’t get help, couldn’t let them keep fighting w/o not protecting them and wasn’t supposed to stop them with a broom. Her only chance was to call in sick that day.
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You’re getting your news from Fox News? That’s not news, that’s gobbledygook.
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I don’t subscribe to this site via email, but I am certain there is an unsubscribe option at the bottom of the email.
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Teacher 111, It was previously reported that the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email did not work for her.
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So just delete the emails! You do not have to read them.
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First, Charter schools were created to be “innovative” experiments for trying out the newest experimental methods that couldn’t be pushed through the traditional public schools.
Obviously, that is a HUGE judgement on the TPS that charters had to be created in order to try new things. What a sad thing. TPS can’t deny it either (although they will try but their examples will just prove it).
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Second, charter schools have been co-opted by the rich. I realize that you didn’t expect that. I recognize that Gates and Co. have bought many of them out.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t advocate for charters as THEY SHOULD BE. As hotbeds of experiment and innovation. As places where new things can be tried without fear of failure. Otherwise we will just (rightly) be portrayed as anti-charter. Instead, let’s destroy their plan. We should THINK and decide to advocate for charters as originally planned.
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It’s true that the private sector hijacked the Charter name but not the concept. The Charter concept was never meant to be profit driven. The original idea by Ray Budde was that teachers would be responsible for running the schools—not traditional public school administration, a corporate CEO and not the Department of Education with its Machiavellian Common Core program driven by NCLB and Race to the Top.
If the Charter concept had been implemented as Budde proposed, the US schools would be run more like they are in Finland with teachers in charge instead of CEOs and elected representatives calling the shots.
Click to access Ray-Budde-Origins-Of-Chartering.pdf
The private sector for profit (no matter what you call it) charter schools of today are nothing like the concept Budde suggested.
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Wonderful, wonderful, Lloyd!!! Thank you for sharing this!!!
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Thanks for this excellent reminder, Lloyd, of the crucial difference between the original concept and what it has become.
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Does any data exist to show that before charters were corrupted that any of the charter innovations were applied to the general public school population (even a single large neighborhood pubic school perhaps) and what the results were?
Would a better model be to allow teachers in traditional neighborhood schools to try new things? Although I know my neighborhood school will never get class sizes down to 15….
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Ms. Wilson, here are the several ways in which you can unsubscribe to a blog that you have followed. If you are not yourself a WordPress blogger, use method 2 or 3.
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4. To change your email preferences on a per-blog basis, click Edit List in your Reader and use the drop down menus to change the frequency of email notifications for specific blogs:
Click into your WordPress.com Reader click the “X” next to any blog there to unfollow it and to longer receive posts in the Reader or by email.
http://wordpress.com/#!/read/
http://wordpress.com/#!/read/edit/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/following/#unfollow-a-blog
5. Or locate the “Get new posts by email” column. In the drop-down menu set your frequency of receipt choice. Locate the “Get comments by email” column and remove the check mark for receipt.
never
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The barbarians have long since battered down the gates of the humanities at the K-12 level. Now their hordes are massing before the colleges and universities, armed with standardized tests and evaluation forms and rhetoric from dullest Rotary luncheon ever.
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See Section 123, subparagraph 15, of the Rheeformish Lexicon: “The Prosody of Financial Statements and other Rheeformish Poetry.”
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their mercenary hordes, their “boughten friendship,” to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost
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This isn’t legit.
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“New markets tax credit” plus EB-5 visas both combine to keep huge sums flying into charters from domestic investment firms and from overseas millionaires.
Meanwhile, the AFT noted 250 billion in needed capital expenditures for school infrastructure needed in 2008. I wonder how much of THAT has been funded since then?
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On the May 10, NBC Sat. morning show, a retired colonel was interviewed. He picked up the anti-public, drum beat. This time it was a rant to dismantle the Veterans healthcare
system. It’s always the same. Private sector abuses, higher costs and incompetence receive no mention. The public sector receives relentless disparagement.
Sen. Sanders recently asked the Federal Reserve Chair, Yellen, during hearings, if the U.S. is a democracy or a oligarchy.
Network coverage provides the answer.
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Amen, sister.
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