Chesterfield schools could lose 525 jobs

MeToo and 12StepRevenge, I am not sure if you are public school teachers, but you are clobbering your own support of public schools by showing your obviously uncaring attitude toward student achievement and bullying manner toward NotHoraceMann.  :)

Really “choice” is not a difficult concept to understand. We have lots of choices available to us in America. Many, many folks who are “pro-choice” (as in pro-abortion rights) are astonishingly opposed to parents choosing which school their child attends. I, and many others, find this particularly hypocritic.

Government subsidies already give citizens’ choice in other areas. For instance, Medicare subsidizes health care for seniors. Seniors choose their health care providers, their physicians, specialists, and hospitals. Some even choose Bon Secours, a Catholic-run hospital. Also, Medicaid recipients can choose their health care providers but are limited to those who take Medicaid. Still, imagine the quality of health care if providers were government employees. Scary thought.

Food stamp recipients can use them at the grocery store of their choice.

I really don’t understand the confusion concerning school choice.

BTW, there is no school choice for parents whose children go to failing schools, who cannot afford to move, and who cannot afford tuition at a private school. These parents have NO choice. And, YES, there are compulsory school laws FORCING children to attend failing schools that are no safer than prisons!  Parents can be arrested for truancy.  This is the travesty school choice proponents want to fix.

I believe any fair-minded person should see the need for giving parents a voice, a say in the education of their children. Even poor, single parents DO care about their children’s education. Because they pay no taxes, the “system” bullies them into thinking they have no voice and no say.

See if you can find the problem with reading “instruction” in public schools:
http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/reading_first1phonics.html

Oh, the humanity! A typographical error! It must be indicative of my inferior intelligence. You win, Not Horace MaNN.

P.S.I’m sorry your daughter couldn’t get into UVA… I did! It must’ve been due to my Inferior Public Education or maybe the “system working against her” (or maybe you’re just rationalizing).

First of all, I want to make a couple of apologies. I want to apologize for my criticism of teachers in Chesterfield County in an earlier post. I know there are good teachers, believe me, my children have had good teachers!  Dedicated, caring teachers who work hard. But I believe there are too few of these teachers. Else why are outcomes still so poor for minorities, the very groups NCLB was written to help. They are still left behind! I don’t hear voices of teachers shouting that researched-based instruction (must be PEER-REVIEWED under NCLB) must be taught to children in K-2 (i.e. phonics!! not whole language which is a joke!) Where are the teacher-advocates?  Their voices are only heard when they fear a salary cut or a job cut! Many teachers are good teachers, but they are buried under crippling policies and procedures dictated to them by bureaucrats and the school board. Their true talents are supressed, to say the least. Put them in a private school, and they would SHINE! I have many friends who are teachers, so I know what they have to put up with, and they are the ones who tell me what the problems are - lack of vision and politics rule the day in CCPS. Why do 25% of teachers put their own kids in private schools?  This is above the general average. Because they know what public schools are like.

My second apology is mistakenly citing that 42% of 4th graders in Virginia failed to show proficiency in reading on the NAEP in 2007. This figure should have been 62%!  Sorry for the mistake!

CCPS has become a bureaucratic Educational Industrial Complex (pronounced ICK) which just exists to perpetuate itself and provide lots of jobs to people. Most decisions are made, not in the best interest of educating students, but in the interest of getting more funding in order to keep and provide more jobs.

Our private school runs on a shoestring budget, parents are happy, students are happy, teachers are paid 20% less (that’s right 20% less) than public school teachers, tuition is $6,000 per year, and 90+% of all students score higher than grade level on the Standford 10, given each year in the spring. And there is not one aide. Only one secretary. Quality textbooks. All 4th graders can read, even those with disabilities. (There is one NILD teacher for the entire school.) And students are not subjected to bullying, violent environments, profanity. (What’s up with the 18,000 acts of violence in CCPS last year?) The Otis-Lennon ability test is also given along with the Stanford 10 which shows basically an IQ score for the students. Again, 90% of all students have an AVERAGE ability score, but yet over 90% score ABOVE grade level!!!!!!  Fewer dollars, fewer resources, fewer teachers!  Wake up, taxpayers!

If CCPS really thinks it is striving for excellence (before budget cuts), then prove it to the taxpayers of Chesterfield by giving all 4th graders the Stanford 10 in the spring and compare to the scores of private schools and homeschoolers. If CCPS scores are comparable, then we taxpayers will plead your case. In the meantime, many of us will plead for school choice in order to give taxpayers a huge tax cut!

I fear the “dumbing down” of Americans is really the creation of the proletariat that has been in the process for over 100 years!

NHM: You DO have a choice. There’s nothing mandating your children attend public school. No, wait… you want the government to SUBSIDIZE YOUR CHOICE. Oh, you’re such a fine American (while I am clearly not, right?). You want the public to create a school that embodies what YOU think should be taught in PUBLIC school. How many schools will we have to create to satisfy every complaintant? It’s simply not feasible. Drop the PUBLIC part from your argument and it might hold water. Here’s something: read up on Social Contract Theory. It may provide you with some insight.

Honestly, if you feel that the public education system as it stands is failing your child, you should exercise your options by sending your child to a private school where you can have them taught creationism or whatever the heck else you want them to learn. Better yet, take on the responsibility your self and homeschool.

You want

today teachers teach to test… they teach to pass the SOL’s.  If they are good teachers then why do we have Sylvern Learning centers… Hunnington Learning Centers and so on… These learning centers are being put everywhere it seems that we might have more of these learning centers than pay day loan locations.  Seriously… I believe we are teaching children to pass an sol.  What is needed is politicians to get out of the way of our teachers and administrators and let them teach!!!!!  We need innovation but to often an excellent teacher cannot express fully what they want to do because they know they will get passed over.  We need to focus on getting our children to learn how to live… how to balance a budjet… how to live within their means… teach them how to buy a home… how to read a mortgage document… the problem is the MORTGAGE document is not laid out in a A-B-C-or D- answer.  I bet if all of these people who bought these sub prime loans were given a Mortgage Document formatted like a SOL test then people would understand.  So what we need to do ... is get all legal documents formatted like an SOL test and our children would understand.