Jersey Jazzman reports on what competition does to schools and communities. A new charter school in Bethlehem, PA., is recruiting students from the public schools by sending out mailers claiming that students who enroll in the charter school will be safe from drug dealers in the public school. Really.
A promotional mailer claiming to be from a new Catasauqua charter school paints Liberty High School students as drug users, sparking outrage among many Bethlehem residents.
Innovative Arts Academy Charter School denies it had anything to do with sending out the promotional mailer, which lists the school’s return address.
The postcard references the September 2015 drug arrest of a 17-year-old Liberty student and asks “Why worry about this type of student at school? Come visit Arts Academy Charter School. Now enrolling grades 6-12.”
It shows a stock image of a teenager holding their head in their hands and reprints a Morning Call headline: “Teen busted by Liberty HS officials with more than $3,000 of heroin, cocaine.”
Nothing like using defamation to recruit new students.
The school insisted it was not responsible for the mailer. The CEO of the charter school resigned.
Outsiders were wondering about the role of the real estate developer, who not only owned the building in which the charter was located, but loaned the charter $100,000.
Was it “all about the kids?”
The annals of competition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hello? For the “competition is good” crowd I would like to remind you that you compete with people you want to beat, to “win” against. Inside of your organization, you and your “colleagues” collaborate to do so. The rules are “you compete with ‘others/outsiders,’ you collaborate with “friends/relatives/insiders.” Is that the way you want to have our schools view other school children, who will become their collaborators in the military and in corporations?
If so, I want you to go home and tell your kids that the one who does the best in school today gets to eat. The others will just have to work harder.
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The charter follows the Trump school of competition. This is also known as the Machiavellian school of competition where you can say or do anything to win.
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And you can endlessly brag about your homerun ability when, as the popular theory goes, you were born on third base.
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Personally, I hate competition and refuse to compete. Competition rather than cooperation sucks.
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Pennsylvania is where Ohio was 5 years ago on ed reform. If they were smart they would act before it’s front page in every newspaper, but they’re ideologically opposed to regulation so they’ll wait until it collapses.
How is the “market share” between “sectors” going? Are they posting gains? Can they drive those icky, old-fashioned public schools out of business, do you think?
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Competition in an adult even playing field is one thing. Who in society benefits when one school tears down another to bolster enrollment. Many times these same schools that have destroyed the public schools, then close themselves further deteriorating the system.
Competition has evolved into an unfair playing field where the privilege stomp the disadvantaged and do a victory dance celebrating their superiority. Kinda like Kramer on Seinfeld beating 5th graders in Karate. No only is it rigged it is causing great harm.
We continue to worship capitalism as the savior, when we should be praying to save ourselves from capitalism.
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In my area two IB programs are competing for students. The big rich district has turned predatory recently implementing schools of choice. So don’t tell me, it’s public vs. private. It’s public vs. public. No moral restraint whatsoever. Yes, a big, rich, public school system, unionized and all, is trying to kill a small IB program offered by a consortium of districts of which it itself is a member. It’s all about capturing the state foundation grant. Hardly better than vouchers. Public education does not have a monopoly on virtue.
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Though I often disagree with Harlan concerning the public vs private debate, I feel it necessary to agree that public institutions compete for students. In addition, parents who have the means move to public education hotspots like birders going to Cape May (for those of you not ornithologically inclined, this is a really good place to see birds).
I am constantly made aware of the success of education in certain places in history. A good friend, now passed, once recited the occupations of his graduating class in the late 1940s from a small Tennessee farming community. In my travels, I have encountered other stories from that era through people I have met in my travels. One such place I visited in Indiana was tiny, but it’s alumni we’re professionals scattered about the country. Perhaps these places were evidence of good education.
Perhaps education is bigger than all that. Maybe the snapshots we see that suggest educational success, whether they be anecdotal, as were my observations above, or test-based as are most contemporary opinions, are just very small parts of a machine that is way more complex than planning allows.
Modern parents want control of their children’s path in life. So they move into Rolling Acres, US, where the children are all above average. And lo! The children do well. Some send their children to private schools which are filled with families of like attitude. And lo! There seems to be success. Who should be surprised at any of these outcomes? These places are filled with stability for a moment in time.
But what have we done if we create success in one place and find failure in another? Do we resign ourselves to the Malthusian prediction that over population will produce a persistent lower class? Of course not.
Competition always has winners and losers. This might produce the best athletic teams and maybe even the best widget makers, but it does not produce the best societies. Class becomes caste, and soon a civilization crumbles. Education seeks to provide a solution to this seemingly inevitable progression. We are all in this education thing together, whether we know it or not. We are on a huge team of billions of people worldwide. The game is survival of humankind. As Patrick Henry once said in a different context, we best hang together lest we hang separately.
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This gives new meaning to the term “school bully.” In this case, the bully is actually an entire school.
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Is that even legal?
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As we know, it has never really been “all about the kids”, but it has always been about the Benjamins. For-profits entering education is a means to make money while substituting training programs to fit children for jobs at Amazon fulfillment centers and other deadend, low-paying jobs.
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Bloomberg reported, in May 2015, that Paulson and Co,’s second largest holding was Mylan (EpiPens). Alan Singer reported in June of this year, at AlterNet, that Paulson donated $8.5 mil. to the Success Academy Charter School Network. Mylan’s CEO is the daughter of W.Va. Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin. When Manchin was W. Va.’s Governor, he introduced legislation to create charter schools. His Democratic colleagues rejected the legislation saying charter schools would result in a two-class system. W. Va. needs to get rid of Manchin, as its senator.
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What should we conclude about the foreword to Figlio’s recent Ohio voucher research, specifically whether the foreword’s “competition finding” was honest? If it’s inaccurate, was truth sacrificed, in pursuit of a win?
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