Clearly, if you go to a charter school, you will be unable to properly cut out things with scissors and will develop a habit of slapping primary colored large words hap-hazardly onto scary concrete walls. Please. How silly.

Of course, as a homeschooling family I don’t really have a dog in the hunt, but it’s still interesting to watch the mud fly from the sideline and develop some commentary. The thing that really got me were these phony reasons they are giving. They are so funny. Here’s how the site lists them out [my commentary in green brackets]:

• Charter Schools Drain Funding from Local Schools. [$10,000 per student is what Alabama government schools spend. Briarwood private school tuition is $6,375.00 per student. Go figure.]
• Charter Schools Compromise Teacher Quality. [This is probably the same teacher quality that the AEA fought so hard against a few years ago when No Child Left Behind required "highly qualified" status for all public school teachers.]
• Charter Schools are Plagued by Abuse, Corruption, & Failure. [LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!]
• Charter Schools Perform Worse than Other Schools. [ "Because charter schools vary as widely as traditional public schools, their academic achievement also varies widely. It is difficult -- not to mention scientifically invalid -- to make blanket comparisons of charter schools to traditional public schools." --NEA Website. Someone needs to get the AEA and NEA on the same page quick.]
• Charter Schools Weaken Accountability, Standards, and Local Control. [Somehow, this will be the first time in human history that competition has weakened accountability. It's a miracle!]
• Charter Schools are Being Forced on Us by Federal Bureaucrats. [Somehow, I imagine that if we already had charter schools and the Feds wanted to make them illegal that this bullet point wouldn't be on that list. :)]

–Nocharterschoolsalabama.org, AEA

Please. Give me a freakin’ break. Nobody believes for a minute that the AEA cares about any of this baloney. The AEA has one purpose. To use education as a cover for getting more money into it’s stakeholder’s pockets. That’s it. End of story. If a certain law, policy, agenda, event will bring more money to the AEA and it’s members/leadership then they will back it. If it doesn’t, then they will come out against it. The actual content of the item in question is irrelevant. The AEA is a public employees union, and the fact that charter schools don’t require their teachers to be unionized might have something to do with their opposition. Ya think? Just maybe?

Now we have a new longitudinal study titled “Fifteen Years Later: Home-Educated Canadian Adults” from the Canadian Centre for Home Education. This study surveyed home-schooled students whose parents participated in a comprehensive study on home education in 1994. The study compared home-schoolers who are now adults with their peers. The results are astounding.

When measured against the average Canadians ages 15 to 34 years old, home-educated Canadian adults ages 15 to 34 were more socially engaged (69 percent participated in organized activities at least once per week, compared with 48 percent of the comparable population). Average income for home-schoolers also was higher, but perhaps more significantly, while 11 percent of Canadians ages 15 to 34 rely on welfare, there were no cases of government support as the primary source of income for home-schoolers. Home-schoolers also were happier; 67.3 percent described themselves as very happy, compared with 43.8 percent of the comparable population. Almost all of the home-schoolers — 96 percent — thought home-schooling had prepared them well for life.

–Michael Smith, Washington Times (Op-Ed)

Guess how many teachers ran to my aid? None. My friend David helped me up, and the kid was too big for me to retaliate against so I just did what most bullied kids do. Nothing. Think it’s hard to believe my story? Think it’s crazy to think I wouldn’t have told my parents? Well, here’s exhibit A:

Jake Arend doesn’t need survey results to convince him ball tapping is a serious problem.

Classmates began hitting him in the groin when he was in sixth grade and it continued for years.

“I was just the scrawny kid everybody picked on to make themselves look better,” Arend said. “If you get hit in that area, you just want to fall and cry, but I tried not to.”

By the time Jake got to Danville High School, he says he was being ball tapped every week – sometimes even three or four times a day.

“Sometimes it would be just the flick of a wrist, and there was one time I actually got hit in the area with a socket wrench,” he recalled. “When I got hit with that, I actually just hit the ground and just laid there in the fetal position for five to ten minutes for the pain to go away, then I got up and went to class.”

Jake never told his parents and he never told his teachers, fearing the bullies at school would hit him ever harder if they got in trouble.

“I just thought ‘It’s pain. I’ll deal with it,’” said Arend.

–Bob Segall, NBC Indiana

Please, parents. Realize that when you send your kid to state prison, school, that you give up any control over them and what happens to them. If joining the PTA or some such thing makes you feel better then you are kidding yourself. The state owns your kid for 8 hours a day, and they don’t give a rat’s a– what happens to them. And, please don’t give me the “boys will be boys” argument. You’re not allowed to use that argument unless you’ve been beat up by a bully at least a few times a year for your entire elementary school experience. If you haven’t then go blow that crap somewhere else. I don’t want to hear it.

This recent article that my buddy sent me describes the beginnings of the coming breakdown in college prices:

The clock is ticking for Alisha Hull. She’s been looking furiously for a job since she graduated from Ball State University in May with a degree in microbiology.

But with the economy sagging and no real prospects in sight, the honors graduate soon will have to make that first payment on her $55,000 in student loans — or ask her lenders for a delay.
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Hull, 23, is one of 1.4 million people who graduated from U.S. colleges in May. More than half of them are being dumped into a bad economy loaded down with debt — a total obligation estimated at $32.5 billion. It’s the largest debt ever recorded for a nation of college graduates, and some economists and student advocates say it could hamper not only the buying power of young families struggling to set up households but also an economy struggling to shake off a recession.

–Dana Hunsinger, Indy Star

College has become 13th grade. For many, many young people, it’s a way to get out from under the supervision of their parents without having to actually take responsibility for anything yet. And when you throw in fraternity nonsense it just makes it even more so. Either parents get stuck with the bill for this 5 year party or the college grad finances most of it and comes out absolutely loaded with debt. But, don’t expect to hear the straight truth about all this in the media or from the college establishment. They are going to continue to try and force-feed us the notion that college is worth it for everybody. It’s not:

Andrea Barner, 32, won’t be getting a mortgage any time soon. After being laid off in April as a supervisor of caregivers, she has fallen behind on her $500-a-month payments.

Barner, who is single with a 10-year-old daughter, said she lives with a friend and pays rent, but the looming debt issue hangs over her every day.

“I went to school trying to do the right thing — so I could get a good job,” she said. “Now I wonder about it all.”

–Dana Hunsinger, Indy Star

It’s time to get back to the old way of doing things. Apprenticing. I’ve got a better idea for those non-professionals seeking entry into the job market. Do not waste your money on college. Instead, go out and take that few thousand dollars you have and use it to finance a low-wage or even no-wage internship doing something that you are interested in. Do you like electronics? Go and offer to work at a local electronics or computer repair shop for 60 days for minimum wage or even for free just to learn the ropes. Think insurance is a good career? Get in touch with a successful local insurance agent and offer to work for free for a few months in exchange for being taught hands on by someone who’s good at it.

The bottom line is that I know so many people with college degrees who work in fields that are totally unrelated to their degree. If you are willing to work your butt off for someone in exchange for being taught, they will reward you. Unless you’re planning to be a professor, lawyer, doctor or accountant, college is NOT mandatory. All that’s mandatory is hard work and a good work ethic.

It’s really hard to understand what he’s saying here, so here’s the transcript:

First of all, we all know what’s really promoted in our schools: Heterosexuality is promoted in our schools. Every time kids read Romeo and Juliet or they’re encouraged to go to the prom or whatever is it is, kids are aggressively recruited to be heterosexual in this country.

And you know what? It doesn’t work. The reality is that if schools could affect your sexual orientation there would have been no gay people in the first place. But there [are] still people out there who believe that myth, because you know what? It’s easy to panic people if you make them think that they’re after you’re kids.

–Kevin Jennings, Iowa GLSEN Speech (2000)

It seems here that Jennings is taking the odd position that schools should take a completely neutral approach to an issue that is blatantly obvious to everyone on the planet: that people are created for heterosexuality. Mr. Jennings, look at yourself in the mirror. Tell me what those parts are for. Now tell me what the appropriate, common sense teaching should be on that. Jennings can be gay if he wants. I could care less. But, promoting an aberrant sexual lifestyle as if it’s on par with the natural order is ridiculous. Current stats show anywhere between 1.12 – 1.5% of the U.S. population as homosexual. That’s probably about the same percent that think we never landed on the moon, or that deny the holocaust. 1.5% of anything is “aberrant.”

But he doesn’t stop there. No, he’s also the guy that covered up the statutory rape of a male student by an older man when he was a teacher:

Jennings does not limit his promotion of homosexuality in schools only to high schools or middle schools. He wrote the foreword for a book titled Queering Elementary Education, which includes an essay declaring that “‘queerly raised’ children are agents” using “strategies of adaptation, negotiation, resistance, and subversion.”

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration, however, of Jennings’ unfitness for a “safe schools” post involves an incident when he taught at Concord Academy, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. In his book One Teacher in Ten (the title is based on the discredited myth, now abandoned even by “gay” activist groups, that ten percent of the population is homosexual), he tells about a young male sophomore, “Brewster,” who confessed to Jennings “his involvement with an older man he met in Boston.” But at a GLSEN rally in 2000, Jennings told a more explicit version of “Brewster’s” story. Jennings here quotes the boy and then comments: “‘I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.’ High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people.”

Did Jennings report this high-risk behavior to the authorities? To the school? To the boy’s parents? No — he just told the boy, “I hope you knew to use a condom.” Sex between an adult and a young person below the “age of consent” (which varies from state to state) is a crime known as statutory rape, and some states mandate that people in certain professions report such abuse.
–Tony Perkins, Human Events

So, there my friends is your new Federal “safe schools” czar. The fact remains that the only true “safe schools” are when there are no public schools at all. I can do a much better job keeping my kids safe than some education apparatchik.

I think the operative word in the hilighted portion above is “my”. You are an adult. Your child is not. The analogy doesn’t work. A more appropriate analogy, using the work example, is that you wouldn’t let your child go to the firm Christmas party. A child isn’t mature enough to handle that type of environment, and they aren’t mature enough to handle half of the stuff they hear in public school chit chat either. It’s like my buddy said: “if being socially mature means my 11 year old sex texting his fifth grade teacher then I’m fine with being ’wierd’.”

When you make this argument, what you are saying is basically: our children are school missionaries who happen to do some learning while they are there. If this is your argument, I think you need to explore the full ramifications of that. How old is your child? Seven or eight? If they aren’t believers yet then the argument is null. If they are, how long have they been Christians? Are they equipped to handle the burden of mission work and education? How do you get around the severe restrictions the state places on prosyletizing on public property? These are all important questions that need answers.

But wait. Maybe you don’t mean it that way. Maybe you don’t mean that your kids are actually being “salt and light” in a biblical sense. Maybe you just mean that your kids are somehow less corrupted than other kids in the school and that the other kids will notice that and somehow be influenced by it. Well, that’s a stretch. If that’s your argument then what you’re saying is that your kid is Ghandi. Just let other kids observe and stand near them and the goodness will somehow rub off and take effect. I’m sorry. That just doesn’t cut it for me. That’s a weak argument. Forcing a child to be taught un-vetted, state controlled curriculum in a socially corrupt, religiously oppressive environment for eight hours a day, all under the guise of “influencing” other kids is not a sound judgement of the pros and cons.

I’ve said it a hundred times that I am not going to tell somebody else how to educate their children. That’s a highly personal and family-centric decision. But I will gladly point out bogus arguments, red herrings and straw men. This is one of them. There are lots better arguments than this one out there.