School Choice Week in Chicago: Pay Fines or Be Scruntinized by Police Surveillance Cameras.

Charters are privately run government schools.  In Missouri, they are under the same mandates and common core standards as traditional public schools.  They are taxpayer funded which means the taxpayer is paying private companies to deliver education.

Do they do a better job than traditional schools?  Some do, some don't.  But what one charter school in Chicago does do better than a traditional public school is levy fines for bad behavior and minor infractions.  It fines a child's parent for a child's untied shoes or bringing chips to school.  While teaching lessons to children, the charter school administration pads the coffers of the charter school (did we mention it is taxpayer funded?) and makes a tidy profit from bad (and perhaps just plain adolescent) student behavior.

From The Chicago Tribune:

A charter network praised by Mayor Rahm Emanuel for its academically competitive schools is charging students $5 for minor disciplinary infractions like having untied shoelaces, bringing chips to school or dozing off in class. Critics say the network is using the fines to push out troubled students so it can boost graduation rates, but school leaders say tougher discipline has led to a safer school environment.

The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which runs 10 high schools in the city, has raised nearly $200,000 from the disciplinary fees last year and almost $400,000 since the 2008-09 school year, according to three parent and student advocacy groups who held a joint news conference Monday at Chicago Public Schools headquarters.


There is a video of the news conference and protest on the site.

If this has been a great money maker for the charter school, maybe the money should be returned to the school district and the taxpayers.  Why should the charter school be keeping the money since it is taxpayer funded?  Think of it.  The charter school could return the fines to the Chicago public school district to defray the cost of hiring policemen to patrol in the traditional public schools and setting up surveillance cameras.  From "Policing Chicago Public Schools":


Last summer, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) proposed purchasing new surveillance cameras for fourteen (14) high schools at a cost of $7 million dollars.  The Chicago Tribune reported that:

“Footage from up to 80 high-definition cameras could be monitored by CPS and will be fed to a nearby police station, then linked into the citywide network of surveillance cameras. That network includes cameras operated by the Chicago Police Department, Office of Emergency Management and Communications and Chicago Transit Authority. Images from the cameras can also be viewed on officials’ cellphones.”  

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) charges CPS $25 million a year for two police officers at each high school. But because the district hasn’t paid the full amount in previous years, it will have to pay $70 million in the 2011 school year.  CPS estimates that it costs $75,000 a year to have a police officer stationed at a school for daily 8 hour shifts.  A coalition of student researchers, called Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), found that:  “In 2010, Chicago Public Schools spent $51.4 million on school-based security guards, about 15 times more than the $3.5 million it spent on college and career coaches.” As education budgets shrink, it makes sense to question schools’ heavy investment in policing, surveillance and security.

Do you think traditional public schools should try fining students for poor behavior?  Would it cut down on the enormous cost of hiring police officers to be stationed in public schools?  The above paragraphs are a sad testament to children running the public school asylum in Chicago.

If attending school is seen as a responsibility rather than a right, and you have to pay to retain your right to be in school if you misbehave, the act of attending school becomes an act of becoming accountable, rather than being entitled.  Maybe the parents of the charter school students who pay the fines would rather do that than having their children under camera surveillance piped into police departments.  Again, from the Tribune article:

Some Noble parents, though, have seen the discipline policy work.

After paying more than $300 for behavior classes and detention fees, Kimberly Davis said her daughter is now on track to graduate from Comer.  (link on Comer's statistics added by MEW)

"You have to buy into the program," Davis said. "For (her daughter), it worked."

Here is an article from The Chicago Sun-Times about Noble's educational testing results:

Only one of nine Chicago multi-site charter operators — Noble Street — beat the districtwide average of all Chicago public schools for the percent of students passing state tests last spring on every campus it oversees. 

Is the reason the Noble students pass because of the educational teaching or fining students into compliance (and getting rid of the rule breakers), or a combination of both?  Groups can protest the fines levied on children, but the parents have the right to pay the fines or withdraw their child from the school.  If the parents don't like this practice, they can re-enter the traditional public school.  What might be a more meaningful protest is to question where the money from those fines are funneled. 

It's sad the school choices in Chicago have evolved into paying to stay into school or facing police cameras.  I guess dipping into the pocketbook of parents has greater impact than appealing to student sense of good behavior and learning to abide by the rules because it's the moral way to live.

The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 01.15.12

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 01.15.12.  Today we feature:

• Rahm Emanuel's bullying tactics to push his agenda for schools (we thought bullying in schools and work environments had been banished)
• Sex education (a national curriculum) in the classroom coming soon to your school?
• George W. Bush on his thoughts about the 10 year anniversary of No Child Left Behind

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Nancy Pelosi should call astroturf out when it's evident from the left.  Here's a story about Rahm Emanuel and his method of operation he utilizes to ram charter schools through in Chicago.  

The most disturbing revelations of Chicago's Millionaire Mayor One Percent was the use of paid outside agitators to hold signs, march, and speak in favor of closing public schools and Board of Education officials forging documents to push out homeless students from one school. All of the revelations have come out since New Year's Day, although many of the details had previously been published in Substance, some as early as last summer, when Substance first exposed what is now widely known as Rahm's "Rent A Preacher" scheme.
 
 Things became even more serious on the evening of January 6, 2012. State Representative Esther Golar said she was at the meeting about the proposed closing of Walter Reed School in Englewood, which is set to receive Guggenheim students, and saw people arrive on a bus. She said she talked to them and discovered they were from a halfway house and were paid $25 to come to the meeting. 

It looks as if community organizing is still alive and well in Chicago.  That's one way to push charter schools through in Illinois.

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 Education Week reports:

A new set of standards outlines the minimum that students should learn about their sexuality from their earliest years in school until they leave high school.


The standards, developed over the last few years by dozens of health and education experts, say that by the end of 2nd grade, students should be able to use the proper name for body parts, including male and female anatomy. By the end of 5th grade, they should be able to define sexual abuse and harassment. By the end of high school, they should be able to describe common symptoms of and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, according to the standards released today with the backing of four national health education groups.

Is this within the purview of your school and federal government to mandate such courses to teach to your child?  You might want to call your school board to determine if such a curriculum will be offered/mandated in your public school system.  Ask your superintendent if such a course will help your human capital to become STEM ready.

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And finally, the best for last.  George W. Bush talked to TIME magazine about the 10th anniversary of the bipartisan and largely failed policy of No Child Left Behind.  It's a short piece but quite telling.  This paragraph caught my eye:

So when NCLB is finally re-authorized, what changes would you like to see?
Progress toward excellence. [Former Secretary of Education] Margaret Spellings recognized that in order to be able to accurately judge, you need to measure progress toward the absolute. But what I’m worried about is the pressure to have too many goals or measure the wrong thing.

With all due respect to the former president, this is one of the worst policies ever in education and has been a sorry blueprint for students, teachers and administrators.  It's been a colossal failure for increasing academic achievement and billions of dollars are down the drain.  He should not only be worried about too many goals and/or measuring the wrong "thing", he should be penitent NCLB was ever passed and these goals and measurements have been put in the hands of the federal government, the NGA and the CCSSO.  

Taxpayers are forced to pay taxes for services in which they have no voice.  And he's actually PROUD of this?

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Education thought for the week:

Teachers open the door.  You enter by yourself.--Chinese proverb