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Friday, July 13, 2012

Growing Up in the South « Diane Ravitch's blog

Growing Up in the South « Diane Ravitch's blog:


Growing Up in the South

A reader writes about growing up in the South. She brings back memories to me of growing up in Houston when it was segregated:
I don’t think PUBLIC schools should be catering to one ethnic or religious group either and I don’t think that schools that do so should receive public money.  I grew up under segregation.  My high school integrated when I was in the 11th grade.  The chemistry teacher asked if I minded being lab partners with  ”the colored girl”.  I was never a racist, even having grown up in Birmingham, so of course I didn’t mind and Portia Montgomery and I screwed up our lab experiments all year.
I can see why certain religious or ethnic groups with non-mainstream practices might want to have their own schools.  I don’t have a problem with that as long as we don’t pay for it.  There was a Hebrew School in Atlanta 



Those Cyber Charter Cash Cows in Ohio

The Ohio Virtual Academy is making lots of money. And why not? It has a teacher student ratio of 51:1 even though the state pays it for a ratio of 15:1. Only 10% of its state funding went to teachers, and they cleared a profit of 31.5%. What a cool business! Corporate headquarters is bullish; it projects that this will one day be a $15 billion industry. The results aren’t that good, but who cares?
And this cyber charter district is one of the worst performing in the state of Ohio. Its test scores and graduation rates are so low that if it were a public school it would have been shut down by now. But its owner makes big political contribution so no turnaround for this district! Even more important, Governor Kasich spoke at its