All You Need to Know About Charter Schools

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All You Need to Know About Charter Schools

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Clarissa

May 6, 2015

Want to see something hilarious?

First, observe these photos of a luxury mansion:

Huge, eh?

Now see the backyard:

And this is how it looks inside:

There is a lot more, as you can see in this article from the Washington Post.

In case you are wondering why I’m showing this to you, here is the punchline: the owner of the mansion has been working for over a decade as “president of Building Hope, a nonprofit that provides business, technical and financial assistance to public charter schools.”

I have nothing more to add.

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17 responses to “All You Need to Know About Charter Schools”

Dreidel

May 6, 2015

Hey, in a capitalist system, it’s no crime to do well by doing good…

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1. Clarissa
  
  May 6, 2015
  
  I dont like people who mooch off the government like this. Charters feed on federal money. These are your and my taxes, my friend.
  
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  1. Dreidel
    
    May 6, 2015
    
    Yes, but some charter schools actually EDUCATE kids — which most public schools haven’t don’t in decades.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      May 6, 2015
      
      First of all, they jack up stats by picking out the kids who are already doing well out of public schools. And second of all, I can easily educate any kids about a million times better than any charter at a fraction of the cost. And actually, that’s what I do.
      
      The guy is a con artist, a fraud. Any administrator in education who lives like this is a scammer.
      
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      1. Dreidel
        
        May 6, 2015
        
        I agree with your first paragraph. People like YOU could certainly educate your children (or anybody else’s) exceptionally well — just like some people can get rich by intelligent investing in the stock market, so they won’t need Social Security in their dotage. But the average family can’t do either successfully. They depend on whatever schools are available to educate their children.
        
        Private schools like Catholic and charter schools have a much better track record (and I wouldn’t recommend Catholic school to anyone, unless the nuns have stopped beating on the pupils after all these years).
        
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    2. djiril
      
      May 7, 2015
      
      The public schools I went to provided a perfectly adequate education. I see politicians on TV all the time whose knowledge of science and history could be vastly improved if they went to my High School.
      
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Vic Crain

May 6, 2015

Clarissa, I agree with you. There have been a lot of charter school scams, but the pillaging isn’t limited to schools. We have heads of major charities who take home excessive pay. (I stopped contributing to the PBS station in Philadelphia for that reasons as well as to the American Red Cross.) The governance problem that plagues US corporations has infected nonprofits to the point of hindering their missions.

Dreidel is wrong by defining “doing well” in terms of looting and pillaging. That’s not what life is about.

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Dreidel

May 6, 2015

Life is about taking good care of yourself and enjoying the trip, before it all dissolves into zero at the end. Helping others / your country is noble if that’s what you choose (I’m a retired physician and career military officer), but those options are secondary.

If I’ve outlived my conscience along the way to a comfortable old age, I really don’t see how that’s a problem.

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1. Vic Crain
  
  May 6, 2015
  
  That explains a lot. I’m in my 60s, and I believe in karma and accountability. And my experience with military medicine is very negative.
  
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Socal dendrite

May 7, 2015

To be fair, the guy was a CPA for 35 years and a partner in two international accounting firms, so I imagine that is how he made his money. He’s owned the property since 1989, fifteen years before he got involved with the Charter Schools. Of course, maybe he should think about donating some of his wealth to the schools instead of spending it like this, but that’s a different issue. I can’t imagine he’s the only well-paid accountant to have a fancy house.

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1. Clarissa
  
  May 7, 2015
  
  Just imagine how much it costs to maintain this kind of a mansion. This requires an enormous and steady stream of income.
  
  As an educator with decades of experience, I can absolutely guarantee to you that there is zero value this fellow can bring to an educational process. He’s stupid, vulgar, and a total disgrace. Schools don’t need this type of clown to exist. We should stop donating our taxpayer money to fund his extremely bad taste.
  
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  1. Socal dendrite
    
    May 7, 2015
    
    I certainly agree that his taste is extremely bad 🙂
    
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David P. Bellamy

May 7, 2015

All public schools could be run like Charter schools are run. It is a matter of attitude. Students would be better off if this were done.

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1. Vic Crain
  
  May 7, 2015
  
  David, that’s not the experience with charter and for profit schools in Philadelphia. While there are a few stars, there have been a lot of scams and failures. There are also highly successful public schools.
  
  There have also been field experiments about how to motivate student performance. It’s not that hard to do, regardless of the type of school.
  
  The biggest issue I have in education is faddism. Educators seem to be able to focus only on one idea at a time to the exclusion of all else. They destroyed the “whole language” concept through an all-or-nothing approach that failed to recognize and address the weaknesses of the concept. Now the fad du jour is charter school.
  
  In the South, the charter concept was seen as a way to funnel public money to private christian academies. Of course, the people driving that don’t want to see catholic schools sharing in the largess. The underlying issue is greed, not education.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    May 7, 2015
    
    “The underlying issue is greed, not education.”
    
    Exactly. And we can see that put proudly on display in this fellow’s house.
    
    We hear so much belly-aching about overpaid college administrators and even professors. But I’ve been to the house of my university’s #1 administrator and that house is nothing like this one. WE ARE NOT THE ONES WHO WASTE MONEY IN PUBLIC ED.
    
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Pen

May 7, 2015

For some reason, this post makes me want to say “Look at me! I have an amazing house that’s much better than that one! And it only cost me thirty dollars! What? Where is it? …Minecraft.”

I apologize for my loopiness. It’s the end of the academic year.

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1. Clarissa
  
  May 7, 2015
  “It’s the end of the academic year.”
  
  I know exactly what you mean. 🙂
  
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