Re: Charter School Job...Pros/Cons?!?

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We do have a ton of charter schools in San Diego. I am pretty familiar with
them as most of them are in the district I was teaching in and they serve
the students from the neighborhood where I lived (I lived in the ghetto
because that was all I could afford on a teacher and student salary).

Beware any charter school that opens to teach low performing (poor and
minority) demographics. Teaching at them is pretty much the same as being
at a regular low performing public school except that often they do not
have tenure or a teacher union (at least this is how they operate in San
Diego).

The principals at these usually blow a lot of hot air about raising
standards and ending the achievement gap. Blah, blah, blah.

Here are some local examples. Preuss school opened to serve high performing
poor students. They claim they have done such a great job and their scores
are better than at schools with similar demographics.

Well, of course their scores are better...They cherry-picked the most
motivated and highest achieving ghetto kids. But a study came out (this
year/last year?) showing that when the test scores of the Preuss students
were compared against the other applicants that were not selected from the
lottery (Preuss cherry picks qualified students and then has a lottery to
select from among them), there was NO DIFFERENCE in their achievement. LOL

Now here is the real nasty dirt on Preuss. They made the US News N World
Report (or Newsweek? whatever) list of best schools because so many of
their students take the AP exams. Well, not long after that happened, UCSD
(University of California at San Diego) began investigating the school for
grade tampering. Turns out the principal was changing students' grades and
bullying teachers to change students' grades. The principal was given a
rainbow retirement package as a result. That is where you are a bigwig, you
do something naughty, and you are rewarded with a fat retirement. Must be
nice. I think best case scenario for me in my life when I was naughty was a
spanking. I think worst case scenario I caught an STD once. And maybe
somebody might have some explicit video footage of me that I didn't agree
too. Sigh. Oh, and the school was also giving students credit for classes
they never even took. The teachers who blew the whistle were fired by the
way. One filed suit. Don't know what happened with that.

Anyway, I also looked up the AP exams they were giving. Most of them are in
Spanish literature or Spanish language or Spanish this or that. Gee, how
impressive...A bunch of kids who speak fluent Spanish are taking AP exams
in Spanish. Laugh. Boy, would I like to take an exam on English when my
main competition is from people who did not grow up speaking English. I
would kill an English exam if I took it in Morocco.

Also, guess how many of their students ever took an AP math exam?

Go on. Guess. Give me a number...

One. One male asian student. Gee, do ya think he learned his math at that
school or in Vietnam or China?

Are you bored or do you want to hear about more local charter schools.

By the way, Preuss is the best of them. LOL. The others are for low
performing kids. (ie. Don't wear red at some of the charter schools and
don't wear blue at the others.)

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