What do we do now? I live in Plymouth MA. A nice enough town. In fact it is my suburban dream. We have it all. The ocean, 365 ponds and lakes, nice rural areas, yet plenty of stores within 10 minutes, even a super Walmart. And next year were getting our own baseball team the "Plymouth River Eels". One problem, We have a high school that is not acreditted, and I have a 14 year old daughter that enters high school this fall. Our middle school is not very good either, but we had a scape goat. Massachucettes has a charter school program. What that means is that the state alloted X amout of dollars to fund privately owned public schools. These schools are started by individuals that as long as they meet certain criteria, the state funds the school. So basically what you have is a free private school. The benifits are a plenty. Smaller run schools tend to be much more effecient with their money. The average charted school costs the state just over half the price as public schools per student. So the schools can easily have smaller class sizes. As well as they govern themsleves.
So we just happen to be so lucky to have a charter school here in Plymouth(any town can go but only plymouth kids get bused). Problem is it only spans grades 5 through 8. My daughter was fortunate enough to avoid plymouth middle school and attend "Rising Tide" charter school. I remember there was an incident where a student was caught with marijawana. The next day a letter was sent home to every parent of the school explaining exactly what went on. The police were called in. Charges were pressed. The student was suspended for two weeks. The letter went on to explain the future actions that were going to happen to try and prevent this type of thing from happening again. They were going to hold an assembly in order to further educate on drugs and the consequenses and so on. If this same incident happened at Plymouth middle school, I seriously doubt I would have ever found out about it unless my daughter told me herself. We fell inlove with Rising Tide and so did my daughter, it was our free private school. thay have awesome teachers. No teachers union to protect them, yet they want to teach there. why? These are teachers that are more worried about making a difference and being able to teach somewhere they have that ability. This school holds their students to a standard, if they weaver from that standard there are consequences. One of the standards is that the kids treat each other with respect. When my daughter first started there (fifth grade) some kids were picking on her on the bus. My daughter never told us. Eventually the bus driver picked it up. She turned the students in. Two of them were suspended, one for three days one for two days. The teasing stopped after that. The two students were threatened with expulsion if it continued. Would this have happened at Plymouth middle school? Again I would never have found out. Day after day, my little girl would have been picked on, but Rising Tide meets with all the bus drivers to discuss the childrens code of conduct and exactly what should be done if they don't follow. Now its over. Danielle is off to high school. We just can't afford private school, so my little girl is at the hands of Plymouth South High School. A school that lost its acreditation for having overcrowded conditions among other things. There are charter high schools that my daughter could go to, but not in Plymouth and I don't have a way to provide transportation.
The point of the post is that I would like to see eductation completely privitized. I don't know all the ins and outs of what makes better education. One thing I do know is competition usually gets the ball rolling. By competely privitizing eductation, not only would you save the tax payer money as Massachucettes charter school system has proved. We would all be given a choice where we could put our children and that would take a lot of the liberism out of our schools. Parents would most likely choose schools that protect their children.
Many critics of the Massachucettes charter school system complain that it steals money away from public schools and further lessens their quality of education. There is some truth to that. For every child the charter system takes from Plymouth schools, they loose the amount that the charter school spends on that child, but since that happens to be almost half of the cost of public school, then technically they should be saving the public school money. Of course that is not how the critics look at it. They just see less money -Bad. Even though they have less students and technically their keeping half of the money for each student they loose. So they are really making money from charter schools. The Charter schools tend to outperform the regular schools on the MCAST. Critics again complain that it is unfair that certain children recieve better education that others. Yet, their answer is to get rid of the better education? Not try to make it all better? The main reason the charter schools out perform the regular is because any one can go to a charter school, most times you must register a year early or you will be put on a waiting list that goes in sequencial order from who signed up first, but its the type of parent that bothers to do this for their child. The type of parent that searches for alternate sources of education for their child will usually be the type of parent that stays involved in their childs education. This is why charter schools do so well. Mit Romney has supported these charter schools for his tenure, I am worried what happens when he's gone and the Dems get elected to governor. Will my twins get a chance at Rising Tide? Any how, I really think Massachucettes is on to something. We need to take the next step. We need to make this system for everyone. It won't be easy and it will have problems.
So now I must send Danielle of to a school that isn't even recognized be the state.
