During his occasional breaks from waterboarding Ohio’s cities and schools, Governor John Kasich enjoys speaking highly of education savior Michelle Rhee. She’s the former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor whose abrasive dealings with parents and teachers there led to the defeat of the mayor who supported her.
Last week, Kasich and Rhee teamed up to present a screening of the controversial education documentary Waiting for Superman at Cleveland State. A feel-good flick for the Kasich camp, the movie blames our educational mess on teachers’ unions and claims the solution to the problem lies at the feet of charter schools.
The screening was the second for Kasich-Rhee Productions, who also showed it to Columbus legislators in late March. But lately, critics haven’t been so kind.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2011.
The commentator is obviously in favor of continuing the spending of other peoples monies as all liberals advocate. If the mess our schools are in is not to be blamed on the teachers, their unions and the school administrators, then who? Anyone who says the schools need more money does not understand that ethics, morality, discipline and uniforms works very well in all religiously run schools and they turn out better citizen students for half the monies spent per pupil. More money only perpetuates the problems already associated with the deteriorating grades of our public school children. Liberals never learn until they run out of other people’s money to spend and we are almost there. Thank God for John Kasich and other Governors who understand that non-governmental workers deserve a break agaist higher taxes.
The problem with Charter schools in Ohio is they cost more and perform as badly as our worst public schools. They also don’t have sufficient oversight which leads to abuses. If you set up a system that puts pressure on the administrators to perform without sufficient oversight it will be prone to cheating. The USA today article proposes that, the high erasure marks doesn’t mean cheating they just show areas that need to be investigated further. I’m sure there are great charter schools, but the abuses in the system also needs to be addresses.