Reply to Will DeVos' confirmation as Sec of Education increase applications to the top private schools?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why don't you all Google how much it costs to educate a student in DCPS for a year and try to make sense of those $ against the outcomes?  Seems like a system due for a shake up to me. [/quote]

Much of that money is privatized; i.e., the people who work with children and have the most training in education (teachers) have very little say on where that money goes. As a brief example, I'm a preschool teacher. Every classroom in my building has Promethean boards, but starting wages for assistant teachers are about $1 above minimum wage. As a result, assistants are frequently absent. Substitute assistants are paid just as badly, so when an assistant is gone, no one shows up for the day. We then either end up teaching up to 20 kids on our own (which is against the law but we do it anyway) or picking off students above 10, Hunger Games style, to go to other classrooms. We spend tens of thousands of dollars per student, but it's not going toward making healthy classroom or work environments.[/quote]

This is the opposite of privatized as privatized implies a competition and a meritocracy. This is an unbelievably frustrating situation for those closest to the kids to be in. It's time to shine some light on this and if Betsy DeVos does nothing else than expose it and show parents the questions they should be asking, and alternatives they may have, it's a win for me[/quote]

It's privatized in the sense that the actual money available is earmarked for all kinds of technological gadgets we have no use for (we are required to receive iPads and laptops) and preferred shoppers we need to use to get school supplies with the meager funds offered to us (we can only shop from a handful of vendors who sell overpriced nonsense). We get lots of brand new books and puzzles and toys that are developmentally inappropriate. It goes on and on. My point here is that the money that goes to public schools is already being funneled to people who aren't interested in bettering public education. This is a problem that can be fixed in a number of ways, but I doubt simply taking money from the public schools and giving it to institutions with even less oversight (i.e., fly-by-night charter operations) will lead to less waste. Experienced teachers tend to have a pretty good idea of where more money needs to be spent and where less needs to be spent to provide a better educational experience. The people who have spent the least time in public school classrooms do not make good minders of where public school money should go. DeVos has never been a part of public education. That is not a mark in her favor.

That said, we've had terrible public education policies for decades. Duncan was almost as bad as DeVos will be, for example, and we know who put him in charge. Unfortunately, the destruction of public schools is a bipartisan goal.[/quote]

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