John La Plante reports at the Minnesota Free Market Institute:
The Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) made news when it released a new report on charter schools in Minnesota. (The June 2008 report, simply titled “Charter Schools,” is available at www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/.)
The finding that got pundits and journalists talking is the conclusion that students in charter schools “generally did not perform as well on standardized academic measures as students in Minnesota district schools.”
So where do we go from here?
If you believe that poverty is the fundamental obstacle to educational performance, you might use this as an occasion to dismiss the role of charter schools, call for a new “war on poverty” that also includes yet more increases in funding for district schools.
It is true that we expect schools to do too much, including saving the planet from environmental catastrophes and teaching parents how to be parents. But let’s not let schools off the hook, either. How a school is run can make a difference.
Couldn't resist a little climate change denial and a shot at schools' efforts to improve parenting skills while you were at it, could you, John? You'll have to forgive John, boys and girls; he's a little bitter right now.
After absorbing the blow from the bad news from the Legislative Auditor, La Plante offers an embarrassing explanation that the glass isn't empty, it just doesn't have any water in it.
It is perhaps unsurprising that John La Plante is not an educator by training or experience; he's a political scientist. And John admits that charter schools are a matter of belief:
If you believe that poverty is the fundamental obstacle to educational performance, you might use this as an occasion to dismiss the role of charter schools, call for a new “war on poverty” that also includes yet more increases in funding for district schools.
Yeah, you might do that, John, unless you invested in all the magical thinking behind the charter school movement. Obviously, John believes in other things, too. Like the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny.
John apparently believes in giving twenty-seven-year olds a pot of public money for a brave new adventure in education.
Let's be direct, boys and girls, people like John, Sticks and Davey Strom, perhaps the Snap, Crackle, and Pop over at the box of puffed cereal known as the Minnesota Free Market Institute, won't be happy until they have entirely wrecked the institution of public education.
Frankly, we've humored these clowns far too long. Bridges fall down, or sometimes pieces of them do; we can't seem to educate our kids - a task that the public handled pretty well for decades - well the list goes on. Why is this happening?
It's happening because people who believe in a value called the "common good" have let the scrubs and fools like John La Plante control the conversation. That needs to change; it starts by calling out the sociopaths at places like the Minnesota Free Market Institute for what they are: antisocial, selfish character defectives. And unfit to carry on the discussion of the common good.
Update: Phoenix Woman picked up Spot's little rant and fleshed it out with some good references. Go read it, please.
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