Reply to MCPS just voted to revoke the charter of MBLI

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]MBLI sucks and is failing students.  They don't even have books in the library, they can't provide transportation, they don't follow IEP's. The owners don't know how to run a business let alone a school.  The state should face never allowed them to open.  [/quote]

So let me get this straight: MBLI not yet having books in the library of a building they JUST moved into is reason to shut them down, meanwhile, my children have never gotten textbooks from MCPS.

Also, you clearly have not seen the SAD state of many MCPS libraries. And if that's the basis for closing schools, then there are several MCPS schools that need to join MBLI on the closure list.[/quote]

But why should MCPS support a charter school that is not better than what they are already delivering and potentially worse?[/quote]

Because some families have chosen it. [b] If it costs the same, MCPS should allow that choice. [/b] And of course, the point is that they were dealt some bad shocks which they should be able to recover from.[/quote]

What do you mean, costs the same? Public school systems, with taxpayer money, should not have to fund charter schools that can create their own curriculum and select for admission. It means taking away funds from legitimately public schools that welcome all students, including disabled ones, and strives to provide equal access to education. I say this as the parent of a child with special needs, and a child who is gifted. Both were well-served by MCPS. I find a charter system automatically suspicious.

[/quote]

I don’t know anything about this specific school, and of course taxpayers shouldn’t be funding schools that don’t adequately educate kids.  Unfortunately, sometimes it’s the public schools which fail to adequately educate kids.  We know as a society that monopolies are a terrible idea that tend to lead to poor outcomes for the consumer.  Why have we embraced monopolies to provide such a critical service to our children?

MCPS wrote their own curriculum for years.  Most parents didn’t really have any idea how bad it was because access was restricted, then Curriculum 2.0 was designed as an electronic curriculum and parental access was cut off altogether.  Sometimes individual teachers would quietly supplement the curriculum to compensate for the deficiencies, which helped their students, but also meant that many kids had gaps if their teacher wasn’t willing to undertake the additional effort, time, expense, and professional risk by doing so.  To compound the problem, when families complained that the curriculum was failing their child, other families whose child had a teacher willing to bridge the gap supported MCPS and said they hadn’t noticed any problems.  Many parents either supplemented at home or used one of the many tutoring centers available in a locally booming industry.  Meanwhile, everyone was being reassured that “MCPS is one of the best school systems in the nation” and would point to the achievements of its high performing students.  While MCPS does have some fantastic opportunities that my kids were fortunate enough to take advantage of, students who relied on the official curriculum would have been completely unprepared.  Finally, an outside curriculum audit reported results so dire that MCPS had little choice to switch to a standard curriculum.

As for “welcoming all students, including disabled ones”, even with an IEP, there were often times, sometimes for extended periods, when my child didn’t get the speech therapy required by her IEP, and I know from talking with other parents that they weren’t the only one.  Then MCPS decided that child didn’t need an IEP any longer because their grades were high enough to show the speech problems weren’t affecting their academic performance, despite their stutter being bad enough that their teacher had them placed in a lower class because they were unable to effectively communicate they knew the material in question.  I was also a volunteer reading tutor and the teacher I was helping asked me to document everything because she felt that her student was dyslexic but trying to get MCPS to identify them as such was apparently a long and difficult process,  deliberately made so to minimize the services they had to provide.  For students with severe disabilities, MCPS has a reputation for litigation, because they have determined that most families do not have the resources to compete against MCPS in a protracted legal battle and so litigation is cheaper than actually providing services.

I support charter schools, vouchers, and any other option that will encourage competition and give parents more options, not because I oppose public education and want to weaken it, but because I embrace it.  I think ensuring that every student (including the disabled ones) is provided a strong education, providing not only the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to be productive members of society, but also to give them the opportunities to learn as much as they are willing and able to undertake, is vital to the continued success of both our local community and society as a whole.  Providing equal access to a building is not the same as providing equal access to education.  If the public school system isn’t actually educating ALL students, then to fulfill the promise of “public education” the public should provide them the opportunity to get an education elsewhere.[/quote]

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