The link: Gingrich, Sharpton launch school tour in Philly (sandiegounion.com)
A quote:
The odd couple of Gingrich and Sharpton found common ground in the concept that education is the new frontier on civil rights. President Barack Obama has a goal of turning around 5,000 failing schools across the U.S. in the next five years.
At Mastery, the trio met with about a dozen 11th graders who attended the school four years earlier when it was under district management. At that time, students said, kids ran wild, expectations were low and teachers didn’t care about the students – or even about teaching.
“It was horrible,” 17-year-old Donnell Clark said.
But since 2006, the school has been run by Mastery Charter Schools, a nonprofit that now has four campuses in Philadelphia serving 2,100 students. The Shoemaker campus visited Tuesday has outperformed some of its more affluent suburban counterparts on state standardized tests.
I’ve seen a charter school in South Texas that was a total scam, and I’ve known of charter schools in South Texas that were as successful as the one mentioned above.
The writer, Newt, and Al choose to ignore why some charter schools can be successful. A big reason is because they don’t have to take students who won’t cooperate. They get to be selective. They get to kick kids out of the school. They get to run the place very strict. They get to run them like private schools.
That’s a big part of their success. Any school that has to take most every student can’t be any great success.
Actually, I’m assuming that the charter school mentioned above has much more freedom to expel students than a typical school. How else could you run a school and be successful? Kids know when you got no teeth. When there’s no real bite behind your bark.
Filed under: Education
