Privatization fail: WI public schools outperform private voucher schools

This is all actually very simple; public schools don’t have to turn a profit. Many private scools do. For the record, cost + profit is greater than just cost. In order for a for-profit to compete with a nonprofit on a cost basis, the for-profit i going to have to cut corners — i.e., what conservatives spin as “efficiency.” Here we see the results of these efficiencies; a half-assed education program that’s the predictable outcome of taking money away from actual education to line the pockets of pointless middlemen and bean counters.

So the proper way to accept this news is, “Well duh, of course…” If you’re having a different reaction, maybe you didn’t go to public school.

[photo by Bart Everson]

Milwaukee private school closes ‘in the dead of night,’ taking over $200k of taxpayer money with them

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A small private school participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program abruptly closed in the middle of December, but not before collecting more than $200,000 from taxpayers this academic year to educate students who now attend other schools, state officials confirmed.

LifeSkills Academy, a K-8 school that had dwindled to 66 students, appears to have closed around Dec. 12, according to a letter sent to the school from the Department of Public Instruction.

All Saints Catholic Church owns the building that LifeSkills rented at 3434 N. 38th St.

"They moved out, as people say, in the dead of the night," Father Carl Diederichs of All Saints said.

The school’s leader listed in DPI documents is Taron Monroe. Diederichs said she appeared to work with her husband, Rodney Monroe.

LifeSkills received $202,278 in taxpayer-funded voucher payments from the state this year, and more than $633,248 in voucher payments in 2012-‘13, according to the DPI.

The school joined the voucher program in 2008-‘09 and collected more than $2 million in total public payments to educate children.

You’d think that running off with taxpayer money would be enough of a scandal, but we haven’t reached the bottom yet. That $2 million Lifeskills took in over the years? It didn’t buy taxpayers one helluva lot.

No students attending LifeSkills were proficient in reading or math in 2012-‘13, except for a single fourth-grade student, according to the most recent state achievement test score results.

So they collected millions, closed up shop after collecting hundreds of thousands more, and didn’t deliver jack in terms of education. This is a prime example of the privatization of government services, people. It’s the idea that private business can make a profit and still deliver better and cheaper services than the public sector, which doesn’t have to put money aside solely for profit.

In order to believe this anti-math, I think you’d have to be a former Lifeskills Academy student. It makes absolutely no sense at all.

School vouchers a waste of taxpayer money

Politico: Ever since the administration filed suit to freeze Louisiana’s school voucher program, high-ranking Republicans have pummeled President Barack Obama for trapping poor kids in failing public schools.

The entire House leadership sent a letter of protest. Majority Leader Eric Cantor blistered the president for denying poor kids “a way into a brighter future.” And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused him of “ripping low-income minority students out of good schools” that could “help them achieve their dreams.”

But behind the outrage is an inconvenient truth: Taxpayers across the U.S. will soon be spending $1 billion a year to help families pay private school tuition — and there’s little evidence that the investment yields academic gains.

In Milwaukee, just 13 percent of voucher students scored proficient in math and 11 percent made the bar in reading this spring. That’s worse on both counts than students in the city’s public schools. In Cleveland, voucher students in most grades performed worse than their peers in public schools in math, though they did better in reading.

Private school vouchers have always been a scam. They’ve allowed Republican governors to hand out taxpayer money without any real accountability, while undermining public school teachers unions. It’s never been about helping students.

And as always, a privatization scheme has turned out to be a bad idea. It costs more and delivers less — as any thinking person would predict. Government is a not-for-profit, meaning it can operate a school at cost. Businesses are for-profit, meaning they can’t. As I’ll continue to point out until the last conservative finally understands math, cost + profit > cost. Privatization has to be either more expensive or less efficient/effective. In many cases, as we see here, it’s both.

It’s simple math. Of course, if enough people get school vouchers, everyone will suck so hard at math that they won’t be able to see the problem. After all, here’s the sort of “education” these indoctrination centers are providing:

[A]cross Louisiana, many of the most popular private schools for voucher students posted miserable scores in math, reading, science and social studies this spring, with fewer than half their voucher students achieving even basic proficiency and fewer than 2 percent demonstrating mastery. Seven schools did so badly, state Superintendent John White barred them from accepting new voucher students — though the state agreed to keep paying tuition for the more than 200 voucher students already enrolled, if they chose to stay.

Nationwide, many schools participating in voucher programs infuse religion through their curriculum. Zack Kopplin, a student activist who favors rigorous science education, has found more than 300 voucher schools across the U.S. that teach the biblical story of creation as science; some also instruct children that the world is just several thousand years old and use textbooks describing the Loch Ness Monster as a living dinosaur. Parents at one such school in Louisiana received a newsletter calling secular scientists “sinful men.”

Shut it down. For good.

Affirmative action for rich assholes

Salon: Legacy preference in college admission, or the practice of selecting the offspring of alumni over other qualified candidates, was originally a strategy developed to grandfather Jewish applicants out of admission. Though the policy’s intention has changed, it remains the reality that as American students head back to campus this fall, 10 to 25 percent of them do not deserve their spots. They’re “legacy admits,” the kids who got a boost via birth.

Quite a boost, in fact. In their 2005 paper “The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities,” Princeton scholars Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung found that legacy status gives fortunate applicants the equivalent of an additional 160 points on the former 1,600 point SAT scale. One hundred sixty points is no small adjustment; on the contrary, it’s the sort of improvement hopeful high schoolers bury their noses in books for. Yet it comes gratis to a set of students already privileged enough to be born to graduates of prestigious institutions.

Worse, the “legacy” system is a taxpayer supported free ride. Where the rest of us have to actually pay to get into college, legacy admissions pay to go to the head of the line. That payment is somehow “charity” and actually qualifies as a tax write-off — as if there’s some sort of noble sacrifice in getting little Dubya into a school he would never otherwise qualify for in a million years.

Who makes up the difference here? Well, you do. According to the report, “alumni that make such donations are entitled to deduct the amount of their donation from their income for tax purposes. In so doing, the richest alumni receive a tax subsidy of 40 percent of the amount of their donation. That is, the public ultimately funds as much as 40 percent of any given legacy admissions payment.” No wonder these clowns have such an oversized sense of entitlement.

Welfare for the rich is fine. Help for those who actually need it is somehow called “government waste.”

[photo by Arenamontanus]

In which conservative hatred of bureaucracy and red tape is exposed as a sham

Raw Story: A Fox News guest on Thursday argued that hungry students would have a “teaching moment” if they were refused access in the cafeteria line to school lunches because their parents hadn’t properly filled out the right paperwork.

During a segment on Fox & Friends, therapist and school counselor Thomas Kersting told host Gretchen Carlson that he approved of a New Jersey school district’s plan to reportedly “throw the meal away” if kids didn’t have enough money to pay for lunch.

“I agree with the superintendent,” he said. “I think it’s a little harsh. You know, I don’t think they’re going to throw the food out right in front of the kid and embarrass the kid.”

Kersting explained that some parents had allegedly told their children to accept the lunches before the paperwork had been completed and filed, and so the Willingboro School District had decided not to feed students unless their parents had signed the proper forms and been enrolled in the Free and Reduced Lunch program.

So no lunch for you until your mom has filled out the proper 27B/6. If we have children actually eating without the proper forms on file, why that’s a short step away from anarchy. It’s much more efficient to simply throw the lunch away, because… Well, never you mind about the because. Because central processing says so.

Kersting continued to explain how this was the smartest thing ever in the whole wide world. “We have more food than any other nation. You know, no kid is going to starve,” he went merrily on. “You know, if one day a kid doesn’t have lunch, right, maybe that’s a teaching moment when that kid doesn’t have lunch. That may sound harsh saying that, but we’ve got to get people to start being responsible for themselves.”

The fact that “we have more food than any other nation” is meaningless if we’re throwing away food, rather than letting people eat it. You wonder if this guy understands that eating isn’t some sort of pleasure reserved for the deserving, but is rather a necessity to, you know, live and stuff. And that “teaching moment” stuff? That’s the sort of “let them eat cake” shit that would’ve cost you your head in the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette here only thinks he’s making a compelling argument.

But really, conservatives are all about mindless, faceless bureaucracies these days. They’re making people jump through bureaucratic hoops to vote, to have access to an entirely legal abortion, and now to eat. When conservatives complain about bureaucrats, their really complaining that the privileged aren’t n some sort of express lane around all the bureaucratic BS they expect everyone else to navigate through like a rat in a maze trying to get to the cheese.

If a big banker needs a little government oversight, that’s freakin’ Big Government Run Amok. If a kid misses a meal because his mom didn’t sign the proper 27B/6, well that’s a teaching moment. Please observe as we dispose of the Sloppy Joe in the proper government approved receptacle, in the government approved manner.

Now let that be a lesson to you.

School posts invitation for disaster

ThinkProgress: A school in Arkansas wants any potential shooters to know: Its teachers are armed, and ready for a showdown.

Since the Arkansas Christian Academy is a private school, it is not subject to the rules for public schools in the state that prevent teachers from carrying firearms. To that end, the school has between one and seven staff members carrying a weapon on any given day, according to Pastor Perry Black, who this week posted signs that say “Staff is armed and trained. Any attempt to harm children will be met with deadly force.”

Black also professed to having armed guards outside of his Sunday church services. “We reserve our right as American citizens and as Christians to protect the children on our campus,” Black told KARK.

What would Jesus do, right? Even if we accept that taking up the sword and not turning the other cheek is the entirely Christian approach to violence, this is still a terrible idea. “[S]erious questions persist about the wisdom of arming teachers,” the report goes on. “Even trained police have a track record of mistakenly firing on civilians in standoff situations, raising concerns about whether a teacher in a roomful of children could be any more equipped to deal with a crazed gunman. What’s more, it might not be in the interest of a school to let its staff carry deadly weapons; in Kansas, a school that armed its teachers was denied coverage by major insurers, who deemed the armed teachers too great of a risk.”

Further, most of the bloodiest school massacres share one trait in common — the shooters committed suicide. I’m pretty sure that the fear of imminent death is no obstacle to the suicidal. In fact, since “deadly force” is promised by the signage and death is often the killers’ “escape route,” Black may have made his school more attractive to mass murderers, not less. It would just be a variation on “suicide by cop.”

All in all, nothing about this is a good idea. More guns are not the answer to school violence.

What passes for ‘education’ on the right

ThinkProgress: Earlier this month, a Tennessee high schooler recorded an abstinence education assembly spearheaded by two right-wing leaders — and after details emerged about the topics discussed at the public school event, medical experts confirmed that they weren’t “completely accurate.” Health officials refuted some of the material, and local politicians expressed surprise that Tennessee’s public school students have been receiving false information.

As the Tennessean reports, the conservative speakers included Joi Wasill — who founded a nonprofit organization with strong religious, Republican, and anti-abortion ties — and Beth Cox, a member of a Tennessee county school board. The two women delivered an hour-long presentation for the freshmen and sophomores at Hillsboro High School. Wasill and Cox told students that all medical textbooks confirm that life begins at conception, there’s a new STD spreading around the country that’s worse than AIDS, contracting STDs will leave women infertile, and having sexual relations with eight different partners is the equivalent of drinking a whole classroom’s spit.

Cox told the young women in the room that if they became single mothers to boys, their sons wouldn’t have the necessary male role models in their lives to teach them “hunting, fishing, playing ball, all those things that teach them how to be a man.” During the second half, after Wasill took over, she asserted that “fetus” means the same thing as “baby” and adoption should always be assumed as the best option. If a girl is pregnant, send her straight to the nurse and give her prenatal vitamins, Wasill recommended. She also warned that abortion carries the risk of internal bleeding and death.

Apparently, “not completely accurate” is now identical to “completely inaccurate.” And it’s a reminder that religious conservatives are about the least trustworthy people in the world when it comes to education. These are people who believe their political opponents are literally the devil and his minions, so lying is just asymmetrical spiritual warfare. If telling you that abortion will grow you third eye will keep a kid from “killing her baby” and going to Hell, then a third eye it is. It’s not wrong to lie, it’s as right as right can possibly be and Jesus smiles down on every “not completely accurate” word with complete approval. They lie without hesitation.

These people have zero business inside a schoolhouse, since they have absolutely no interest in educating or in presenting students with the truth. Their only interest is to get students to comply with their own literally overzealous religious tenets — by hook or by crook, if need be.

“Religious fundamentalist” is a synonym for “liar,” plain and simple. Don’t trust these fanatics any farther than you can throw them.

[photo by kewl]

Another ‘responsible gun owner’ acts irresponsibly

Raw Story:

A prosecutor in Lapeer, Michigan says, “No harm, no foul,” after a charter school took the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) advice and hired a armed security guard who promptly left his handgun unattended in a student bathroom.

Chatfield School co-directors Matt Young and Bill Kraly announced last week that they had hired retired Lapeer County Sheriff’s Dept. firearms instructor Clark Arnold as a security guard in response to the December mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

“It’s a tremendous asset to the safety of our students,” Young told WNEM in a report that aired on Tuesday.

But by Wednesday, the school had admitted to The Flint Journal that the retired firearms instructor had made a “made a breach in security protocol” and left his unloaded handgun unattended in the school restroom “for a few moments.”

“The school has put additional security procedures in place that follow local law enforcement practices and guidelines,” a statement from Young said. “At no time was any student involved in this breach of protocol. We will continue to work on improving school security.”

Lapeer County Prosecutor Byron Konschuh displayed a marked lack of logic in response to the incident. “If you left a gun unattended and a toddler finds it and shoots and hurts someone, it could be some kind of reckless use of a firearm,” he said. But since no kids got a hold of it, it was “almost like no harm no foul.” So, if you leave a gun laying around and a kid doesn’t find it before you remember where you left it, that’s completely responsible use of a firearm. Apparently, luck is an important factor in responsible firearms use.

But here’s the thing; Arnold was a trained firearms instructor. You assume he knew what he was doing. This just points to the fact that we’re all human and humans make mistakes. But when firearms are involved in these perfectly human mistakes, the consequence have the potential of turning a lot more serious and deadly. Bringing a gun into any situation increases the danger of that situation, simply by virtue of the presence of the gun and the fact that it’s in the possession of an eminently fallible human being. This is one reason why having a gun in your house makes you more likely to be shot, not less — the less often you’re in the presence of a gun, the less often you’re exposed to the danger of a deadly mistake. It simply makes perfect sense.

And people want to bring the danger of that deadly mistake into our schools? Seems less like a common sense safety measure and more an obvious recipe for disaster. As safety measures go, guns are terrible.

Choosing Ignorance

One of my favorite openings for one of my posts was written in July, 2007. That post, titled "Monument to BS Works Out Pretty Much the Way You'd Expect," was a post about the opening of the Creation Museum.

Just outside of Cincinnati -- in Petersburg, Kentucky -- stands a 60,000 square foot, $27 million monument to gullibility, fanaticism, and the ability to believe the stupidest damned things despite all evidence to the contrary. Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum features exhibits showing humans co-existing with dinosaurs, offers 'proof' that there was once a global flood, and warns us not to judge Cain for marrying his sister.

Yeah, it's that nuts.

Why revisit a museum that has an exhibit of a triceratops wearing a saddle and tells people that dinosaurs were packed into a 450X75X45 ark? Because today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. The good news is that more people believe in evolution than this stuff, the bad news is that neither belief holds a majority. According to Gallup, fully 25% of Americans believe that creationism offers a better explanation of all the species that populate the planet than evolution. Put more simply, a quarter of Americans believe that it's all explained by magic, as opposed to a complex scientific system that actually works in the real world -- evolutionary biology is an applied science. It's like disbelieving in math, despite the fact that people use it constantly to come to working answers. If it works, if it generates results, it's obviously true... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Putting the 'Party' Back into the Republican Party

Being in opposition, after eight years of a Republican presidency and 12 years of GOP rule in Congress, suits many of them just fine. It's not that they were glad to lose. There are a lot of indignities involved in being the minority, and a pretty small minority at that. But talk to Republican lawmakers and insiders these days, and they speak as if an enormous weight has been lifted from their shoulders. Some of that weight was named George W. Bush, but in a larger sense, Republicans are relieved to be free of the burden of running things.
-Byron York, DC Examiner (via Political Wire)

"We weren’t very happy with the results of the election, and on through the inaugural, but I guarantee you, I’ve never seen the spirit of Republicans as high as it was at the GOP retreat,” Arizona Rep. John Shadegg told the Examiner's York. "When we held our guys together [on the House stimulus vote], that had people extremely excited. Then there were the ongoing scandals with Democratic tax cheats, and I think Republicans are beginning to say, ‘Ah, there could be some fun in the minority.'"

The joy is felt in the Senate, as well. "I’m much happier,” said Sen. Jim DeMint. “Our message was so muddled with Bush in the White House, often going the big-spending approach, that we could not define ourselves in any other way.”

Joy! Republicans don't have to worry about "the burden of running things" anymore. They're free to dick around and have fun. Of course, the problem with this new Republican happiness is that they're still Representatives and Senators -- their job is still to govern. "The burden of running things" is still squarely on their shoulders, as much as they seem to believe that it's not. And I'm not sure if their constituencies would approve of many of their ideas of "fun."... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Reason #1 Why McCain Chose Palin

#2 is the PUMAs, #1 is that she's Mike Huckabee in drag. Creationist, an extremist on abortion, she's exactly what the nuts wish McCain was.

Exhibit A; James Dobson, head nut and a man who said he wouldn't vote for McCain "under any circumstances," is now voting McCain:

clipped from www.time-blog.com The announcement by the head of Focus On The Family, an influential Colorado-based ministry, came Friday afternoon at a conservative outreach meeting in Minneapolis, which had been organized by the McCain campaign. "If flip-flopping is a sin, then I am a sinner," Dobson told the group, according to a first-person account of the address, which was confirmed by Dobson's office. The announcement comes just hours after McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin has been widely cheered by conservative activists for her pro-life views and conservative governance record.

Griper Blade: Fighting for Freedom from Reality

In a ruling certain not to rock the legal and educational worlds, a federal court in Los Angeles ruled yesterday that you can't force universities to pretend that BS is true. In terms of common sense, the ruling -- Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al -- wasn't much of a stumper. But there are people who think you get to choose what's true for you -- as if the universe were a series of multiple choice questions with no wrong answers -- and those people aren't pleased.

The perpetually panic-stricken WorldNetDaily kicks things off by completely misrepresenting just about every fact in the case:

Arguments were heard today in a federal district court case to determine whether a state university system can dictate that private Christian schools in the state teach their college prep courses from exclusively secular, Bible- and God-free textbooks.

As WND reported earlier, the University of California system adopted a policy last year that basic science, history, and literature textbooks by major Christian book publishers wouldn't qualify for core admissions requirements because of the inclusion of Christian perspectives.

Robert Tyler, who is representing Calvary Chapel Christian School and five students in the case against the University of California, told WND that the university's discriminatory policy creates an ultimatum for Christian schools. "If you want courses to be approved in private education, so your students are qualified to attend (UC) institutions, you must teach from a secular point of view," he said.

This is typical of the strategy of whiny victimhood that the religious right has been reduced to these days. The truth is that the textbooks in question managed to accomplish the seemingly oxymoronic task of teaching ignorance...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Continuing the War on Science

Huckabee claims his creationism won't affect education. But that's not the only worry we should have

There are some things we take as an article of faith. I'm not speaking of my own atheist self; but of the majority of people in the world. I suppose there's no real harm in believing something there's no evidence for, but I'd argue that there's a real problem with believing in something despite all evidence to the contrary. The former is faith, while the latter is delusion. Which brings us the popular delusion of creationism and its alter-ego, intelligent design.

I've had people ask why "both theories" shouldn't be taught in schools. I always have the same answer -- there aren't two theories. Creationism is just a hypothesis -- there's absolutely no evidence in its favor. In fact, the evidence we have points away from creationism, not toward it.

At this point, I'm usually pointed to a bunch of crap that "proves" evolution isn't true. The problem here is that even if they were able to completely disprove evolution, they really haven't done anything to prove creationism -- logic doesn't work that way. If one person argues that 2+2 equals 3 and another thinks it's 5, proving that 2+2 is not equal to 3 doesn't automatically prove it's 5. And that's all that the evidence "for" creationism consists of -- arguments against evolution. The entire foundation of "creation science" is based on a logical fallacy.

Creationism requires that you "unlearn" logic. It means you cast critical thinking aside and embrace that delusion I spoke of earlier. It's not hard to see how this banishment of reason from someone's mind would handicap their thinking in other areas. Not surprisingly, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee doesn't get that...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Bush Puts Donors Above Kids' Educations

Call it 'No Millionaire Left Behind':

ABC News, The Blotter:

A major Texas fundraiser for President George Bush has made millions of dollars in profits from a federal reading program that critics say favored administration cronies at the expense of schoolchildren.

A company founded and owned by Randy Best, who raised $100,000 to qualify as a Bush "Pioneer" during the 2000 presidential campaign, received the lucrative contracts under a Bush administration initiative called Reading First.

After receiving the contracts, Best was able to sell his company, Voyager Expanded Learning, for $360 million. It was valued at only $5 million a few years earlier.

Congress is investigating and -- surprise, surprise -- the whole thing stinks of corruption. "They designed it for their friends and cronies, and they ended up not designing the best program for America's schoolchildren," said Congressman George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

"For example, one of the educators who gave approval to Best's reading testing program, Edward Kame'enui, was on Best's payroll at the same time," ABC News reports. "He also approved a reading program for publisher Scott Foresman at the same time the publisher paid him $400,000 in royalty and consulting fees."

Kama'enui denied any conflict of interest. If there's one thing you can say about these guys, it's that they've got balls.