03.13
The Alabama Education Association(AEA) has launched a new anti-charter schools campaign, complete with an ominously coloured website: Nocharterschoolsalabama.org to show that charter schools are where children go to be KILLED BY MANIACS! Seriously though, get a load of this site:
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. :)]
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?
