Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

The speaker in the video mentions the evaluation of quality versus the cost. Actually, that's beginning to happen, particularly in the big city school districts. I can speak to Chicago, where the opening of charter schools is burgeoning and the public schools are closing. The charter schools employ non-union teachers and require admission tests for prospective students.

I have a very close retired friend who formed a non-profit which has opened eight new charter high schools in Chicago in the last five years, all in Pilsen, a large Latino community. His schools require tests for placement purposes but more importantly, their admissions require an interview and commitment on the part of the parents of the applicants for involvement in their education. Their programs are designed to involve the parents and if they don't fulfill their commitments, their child is sent back to the public schools. Their drop-out rate is almost non-existent. In their first two graduating classes, more than 90% of their graduates go on to college.

You might ask why my friend has concentrated on opening schools in the Latino community instead of the even poorer black neighborhoods in the city. His answer was simple, alarming and disappointing. He explained that typically the parents of black students will not commit to the required involvement in the education process. Even if they commit, he explained, they often try to mislead the administrators and then disappear soon after their child's enrollment is approved. He explained, "opening charter schools in those neighborhoods is a waste of time". Disappointing, but spoken like the realist businessman he was before he retired.

A real disappointing report came from Detroit. My son, who lives in a Detroit suburb, reported that a very wealthy contractor from the Detroit suburbs announced that he was willing to fund the construction and operation of eleven new charter high schools in the inner city of Detroit. Detroit's goofy mayor, Kwame Kilpartick, later to be convicted and imprisoned fell in with the loud complaints from the teacher's union and rejected the offer, loudly announcing to his inner city constituents that "we're not going to let some white guy from the suburbs run our schools". The contractor withdrew his offer and has since funded the opening of three new charter high schools in the poorer suburbs of the city.

Just as an aside, when Kilpatrick was convicted of ten felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice and thrown out of office, he was replaced as president pro tempore of the city council by Monica Conyers, wife of longtime U.S. Congressman John Conyers. Mrs. Conyers herself has recently been convicted and sentenced to 37 months in the federal slammer for taking big bribes from a contractor doing business with the city.

By the way, John Conyers is now the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Does that make you feel any better about who's picking our judges? Somehow I get the feeling that our government is as wormy as a good-looking but really bad apple.