Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And the public school wastes loads and loads of money on things like abstract art...

Huh? Which public school, how much money, and what "abstract art"? Are you saying that art instruction in MCPS should only include representational art?

No..stupid statues in the courtyards etc. .

Which statues in which courtyards are stupid, and how much did MCPS pay for them?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To the PPs who are opposed to this why don't you just take more of your money/time and funnel it into charities that help the under privilege...Each dollar you spend one something else is money that you are taking away from more deserving people.

I don't understand. Is this a valid summary?

PPs: We oppose giving public money to wealthy people to send their children to private schools.
You: Why aren't you giving more money to charity?

If it is a valid summary, in what way does your post respond to the PP's statements?

We pay more than our fair share of taxes...Your side is saying by using money for private school we are harming the underprivileged...so I'm saying use your own money if you feel that strongly... A lot of middle / upper middle class kids are making big sacrifices to send their children to private school and giving a textbook allowance for example so that our kids don't have to pay for the same textbooks used as the public school kids eg shouldn't be seen as taking away from the public school.

Says who?

It is your prerogative, and your choice, to make big sacrifices to send your children to private school.

+1 It's not my role as a taxpayer to subsidize your choice to send your child to private school. If you don't like what you're paying, send your kids to public school. Public schools have to accept everyone.

+1 90% of Americans send their kids to public school. We should not be subsidizing the few who complain of their sacrifices as they choose to spend 20K$/per year on average to send their kids to school when a public alternative is readily available.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To the PPs who are opposed to this why don't you just take more of your money/time and funnel it into charities that help the under privilege...Each dollar you spend one something else is money that you are taking away from more deserving people.

I don't understand. Is this a valid summary?

PPs: We oppose giving public money to wealthy people to send their children to private schools.
You: Why aren't you giving more money to charity?

If it is a valid summary, in what way does your post respond to the PP's statements?

We pay more than our fair share of taxes...Your side is saying by using money for private school we are harming the underprivileged...so I'm saying use your own money if you feel that strongly... A lot of middle / upper middle class kids are making big sacrifices to send their children to private school and giving a textbook allowance for example so that our kids don't have to pay for the same textbooks used as the public school kids eg shouldn't be seen as taking away from the public school.

Says who?

It is your prerogative, and your choice, to make big sacrifices to send your children to private school.

+1 It's not my role as a taxpayer to subsidize your choice to send your child to private school. If you don't like what you're paying, send your kids to public school. Public schools have to accept everyone.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And the public school wastes loads and loads of money on things like abstract art...

Huh? Which public school, how much money, and what "abstract art"? Are you saying that art instruction in MCPS should only include representational art?

No..stupid statues in the courtyards etc. .

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We vote for governor in November 2018.

Hogan got elected because people in liberal areas of the state failed to show up. When DC and I went to vote it's was ghost town at our voting place. People in MoCo figured, why bother, Democrats going to win, anyway -- sort of like what happened with Clinton on a wider scale.

I sure hope the next midterm elections would attract a larger crowd!

Ah, right. The only way a republican ever wins is if not enough people voted.

I am a Dem and I voted for Hogan. I also think he is doing a really good job.

Not the only way, of course. But in this case, it's factually correct. Voter turnout in the areas with lots of registered Democrats was very low. And registered Democrats typically vote for Democratic candidates, just as registered Republicans typically vote for Republican candidates.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We vote for governor in November 2018.

Hogan got elected because people in liberal areas of the state failed to show up. When DC and I went to vote it's was ghost town at our voting place. People in MoCo figured, why bother, Democrats going to win, anyway -- sort of like what happened with Clinton on a wider scale.

I sure hope the next midterm elections would attract a larger crowd!

Ah, right. The only way a republican ever wins is if not enough people voted.

I am a Dem and I voted for Hogan. I also think he is doing a really good job.

Anonymous wrote:And the public school wastes loads and loads of money on things like abstract art...

Huh? Which public school, how much money, and what "abstract art"? Are you saying that art instruction in MCPS should only include representational art?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To the PPs who are opposed to this why don't you just take more of your money/time and funnel it into charities that help the under privilege...Each dollar you spend one something else is money that you are taking away from more deserving people.

I don't understand. Is this a valid summary?

PPs: We oppose giving public money to wealthy people to send their children to private schools.
You: Why aren't you giving more money to charity?

If it is a valid summary, in what way does your post respond to the PP's statements?

We pay more than our fair share of taxes...Your side is saying by using money for private school we are harming the underprivileged...so I'm saying use your own money if you feel that strongly... A lot of middle / upper middle class kids are making big sacrifices to send their children to private school and giving a textbook allowance for example so that our kids don't have to pay for the same textbooks used as the public school kids eg shouldn't be seen as taking away from the public school.

Says who?

It is your prerogative, and your choice, to make big sacrifices to send your children to private school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I believe in the freedom of school choice.
Why don't you, op?

It's only freedom of choice for some. But, while Trump is busy attempting to weaken the independent media, by all means, he should go ahead and weaken public education. Both are essential to democracy.

Public education is already weak, IMO.

We spend tons of money on education in this country and it gets wasted on stupid shit like Chromebooks in 2nd grade so kids can learn how to message each other, Promethean boards that don't work properly some of the time, additional testing year after year for no good reason.

What are you so afraid of? Try something different.

This.

MCPS is more focused on perception than education. I was at an early meeting where MCPS was talking about installing Promethean boards in the schools. I think it was the 2008-09 year, a time when the country was facing economic difficulties. I know it seemed prudent to use caution before adding a large budget item. I asked them what function the Promethean boards could perform that couldn't already be done with the technology they already had. After thinking a while, they finally said that it could be used to annotate videos as they were watched. I'm sure the Promethean boards are nifty, but I'm not sure how frequently teachers need to annotate videos.

I have seen MCPS pour money into things that have little to no effect on education. Further, MCPS has poured money into reducing the gap for many years, and it hasn't seemed to reduce the gap. I remember Jerry Weast having red and green zones. I don't know how many superintendents before him tried to close the gap. The people of Montgomery County are not only willing to fund our school system at a high level, but to support allocating higher funding to lower performing schools. If giving money to MCPS was the answer to helping struggling students, I think they'd be in much better shape.

Frankly, despite it's claims to being one of the best school systems in the country, I think it's a mediocre one at best whose performance is masked by a highly educated population who makes up for its shortfalls either through parents supplementing at home or hiring professional tutoring services. Seems to me a lot of our public school students are going to private "schools" like Sylvan and Kumon.

If we had charter schools, vouchers to private schools might be less of an issue. However, MCPS has fought charter schools for years leaving us with the choice of MCPS or private.

I believe fiercely in the importance of public education. I think every child deserves a good education. However, if they aren't getting it from MCPS, maybe we should look for other options that will offer them that opportunity.

And that is what so many people try and get into these programs that MCPS offers and why I think MCPS needs to drop programs and focus on better classrooms. I have seen 3 years of promethean boards and they are a waste. We also know in a few years they will be extinct. Elementary schools RARELY teach to the whole class anyway thanks to politically correct mixed classes. They have these massive boards and the teachers spend 90% of their time teaching in the corner at a reading table. My daughter's class has reading groups, spelling groups, and math groups. They all get 5-10min of the teacher at a time. She isn't teaching in front of the class. She isn't using the board except for 1-2 times a day and it mostly just has a list of what they need to do on their own while she is with other groups. You can write that on a dry erase board. Which speaking of, no one uses those boards anymore.

MCPS would do best with less technology, making these kids write more, tracking classes with higher end classes with the biggest ratios and lower end classes with small ratios. There is no time to be politically correct anymore. Get the kids with the highest needs right from the start at K and work intensely with them in EVERY school, not just the FOCUS and Title 1 schools. Stop all the programs and start tracking the kids in the school. Appease the kids above-grade average with some advance work, give the kids at grade level peers just like them and teachers that won't ignore them year round. Give the kids that are struggling a class with kids that they don't feel stupid in. A small class with the best teachers to motivate and bring them up to baseline. Even let the para's only go into those classes to help. They basically only come to pull the struggling kids out anyway. It seems like putting them all together in one class is doing a disservice to all of them as well as the teacher. And since they have stopped tracked math classes in ES, math scores have consistently gone down. Why? Because small math groups with busy work for an hour SUCKS and it doesn't get your child better at math - it makes math boring!

And the public school wastes loads and loads of money on things like abstract art...

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To the PPs who are opposed to this why don't you just take more of your money/time and funnel it into charities that help the under privilege...Each dollar you spend one something else is money that you are taking away from more deserving people.

I don't understand. Is this a valid summary?

PPs: We oppose giving public money to wealthy people to send their children to private schools.
You: Why aren't you giving more money to charity?

If it is a valid summary, in what way does your post respond to the PP's statements?

We pay more than our fair share of taxes...Your side is saying by using money for private school we are harming the underprivileged...so I'm saying use your own money if you feel that strongly... A lot of middle / upper middle class kids are making big sacrifices to send their children to private school and giving a textbook allowance for example so that our kids don't have to pay for the same textbooks used as the public school kids eg shouldn't be seen as taking away from the public school.

Anonymous wrote:We vote for governor in November 2018.

Hogan got elected because people in liberal areas of the state failed to show up. When DC and I went to vote it's was ghost town at our voting place. People in MoCo figured, why bother, Democrats going to win, anyway -- sort of like what happened with Clinton on a wider scale.

I sure hope the next midterm elections would attract a larger crowd!

We vote for governor in November 2018.

Isn't Hogan's term up soon?

Anonymous wrote:To the PPs who are opposed to this why don't you just take more of your money/time and funnel it into charities that help the under privilege...Each dollar you spend one something else is money that you are taking away from more deserving people.

I don't understand. Is this a valid summary?

PPs: We oppose giving public money to wealthy people to send their children to private schools.
You: Why aren't you giving more money to charity?

If it is a valid summary, in what way does your post respond to the PP's statements?