There is nothing special about RHSA, no fees, no special staffing, just a public school.

Yes it is the cornerstone of conservatism. Selfishness as a virtue. Sad,Totally unChristian.

Just as Howard Fuller said here in Toronto:

““…Those of us with money have the capacity to choose and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it.  We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other peoples’ children stay there.  I find that to be hypocritical.  We’ve got politicians running around talking about how important the public school structure is and then you ask them, ‘Well, where do your children go to school?’“

Great post Malkin!
Nice fake concern for Christians Mr. Little but Educhatter shows us how you really feel.

““McGuinty Folds Like a Cheap Suit in Face of Right Wing Nut Jobs.

In a display of political cowardice, Dalton McGuinty folded his new sex education policy like a cheap suit after a campaign sparked by right wing religious nut bar Charles McVety. Clearly, unless he is losing his marbles, McGuinty did not fear the evangelical Protestants. He did not have a single one of their votes and there was nothing he could do to get them. The only question involved with those votes is whether they will vote Tory or go for the Family Coalition Party.

Instead, McGuinty must be seen to have caved in to the Roman Catholic establishment in Ontario in an incredible display of weakness which will only lead to more weakness later. The catholic vote in Ontario is heavily skewed to the Liberals. Yes there are catholic Tories who are so fundy that the Tories make sense to them and there is a substantial number of catholic New Democrats, hence their success in catholic majority areas like Windsor, Hamilton, Niagara, west end Toronto, Ottawa and northern Ontario. All this notwithstanding, the Liberals remain the default party of Catholics and a dust up over this would not move many votes. Is this really the year that organized Catholics want to lecture anyone about the sexual education of children? Perhaps if many young people of their persuasion had had more information about sex and sexual morality a little younger a lot of pain might have been avoided.

What McGuinty was trying to avoid was one more group getting nuts while he has the HST hanging there and the pharmacists in a full court sulk. Too many groups leave the impression that “everybody is against the government” reminiscent of the last days of the Harris/Eves regime.

Frank Graves recently advised Ignatieff to start a “cultural war” of wedge issues like gun control, abortion, and gay rights, against the Tories. Looking at polling that shows the right wing fundamentalists are really only about 20% of the electorate, taking them on forces the Tories to defend them and lose the moderates or go with the moderates and lose the extremists to marginal crackpot parties.

Sure these social conservative minorities are loud but they are loud because they are losing and they realize they have become a small minority. We may now have come to the point where the progressive movement moves out aggressively on these issues and forces the Tories to defend the “duelling banjos crowd”.

After the next election, Ontario will add 18 seats to the legislature, primarily in the GTA 905 region and a few seats around Ottawa or Waterloo. This will further marginalize the social conservatives and polarize the far right in a minority position. The demographics are all opposed to the social conservatives which is why they panic. Hopefully this will drive out the national conservatives and keep the Ontario Conservatives out of power.”

　
So spare us your faux concern for students. Your not fooling anyone at all. Least not the parents who have trumped you on almost every issue raised here thus far.

I agree with whoever nailed you with being more and more irrelevant in discussions of an educational nature.

You’re going the way of the dinosaur sir and it’s killing you, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So transparent.

I did not say I am Christian, I have made it clear that I am a secular humanist, anti-theist but the world is full of religious hypocrites who profess values they don’t follow like the great conservative value of selfishness raised to a virtue.

It doesn’t seem to bother you that the vast majority of parents, teachers, education experts, trustees, etc don’t agree with you so have fun out there in irrelevant land where your prognostications provoke nothing more than eye rolling in educated circles.

Doug but the only difference between the “religious nuts” and you is you belong to the “Church of Science” and your god is Darwin. I don’t care what race your wife is, it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong, intolerance is bigotry

Our school has one teacher sending her child to Trinity college, but the principal told a bunch of parents that she is “gifted”. I don’t know of a single doctor or lawyer in this area that sends their kids to public school, I do know of three families sending their kids to Trinity college. I know of another board teacher that is sending their kids to a French speaking school in Peterborough even though they are not French-Canadian, just one is fluent.
I was talking to our local librarian yesterday and she knows of ten families in this area homeschooling, even she removed her kids and sent them to Port Hope catholic school. Ditto for the local township clerk, in fact I personally know of four PS families now sending their kids to the Catholic school. A few kids have gone to French immersion. This is in a PS school of 120.

A couple of school board members that have told me (anomalously, of course) that Dr. Hawkins in Port Hope has the worst reputation in the whole KPRD school board.

I just got a MPAC (property assessment) letter confirming my personal information, since I’m historically Catholic I just changed our support to the separate board. If I ever do send my kids back to school it will be the Catholic school anyways….unless I have a better choice.

Intriguing how our affluent political leadership choose to send their children to expensive private schools and spcialized facilites and absolutelyrefuse the same opportunity to the kids of less affluent citizens. 

They do look after their own.

Given how the federations rally around their own best interests, usually on the pretense of it being “for the kids” I don’t think there’s much need to worry about Doug’s view on being “selfish”.

Warning again. We will edit or delete any posts that contain personal insults.  I’ve had to do this already once today.

I appreciate everyone’s co-operation.

“Doug but the only difference between the “religious nuts” and you is you belong to the “Church of Science” and your god is Darwin. I don’t care what race your wife is, it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong, intolerance is bigotry”

Mark H. is exactly right in his comment above.

There are many non-Catholics in my region who send their kids to the Catholic choice, including teachers who teach in the public system. 

Take a look how many Catholic boards rank in the top 20 each and every year as the EQAO results are published. I don’t know what they’re doing but they’re doing something different than are the public schools and where those are the only two options it’s a no brainer which one most would select for their children.

I am not a bigot. Religion is chosen behaviour unlike race gender or sexual orientation. I don’t discriminate. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, I believe all religious people are unscientific and therefore incorrect by definition. This includes all religions.

Who put down Stanford on of the great education institutions on the continent? Sad.

The way I see it, if a mountain has to be moved for a child, it’s the child’s mother that’s going to be doing the moving.  Best thing to do will be to give that child’s mother the tools to really do the job well.

Derriere covering statement:  fathers have been known to help out too ....

Rumour has it a charter school managed by Stanford was shut down for failing to meet performance objectives.  True or false?

Selfish behaviour, a topic that has been expounded by the world’s well-known philosophers, throughout the ages. In my journey, I have concluded that selfishness is an inherent trait of man. The individual will look after their needs first, based on their set of values, ethics, and knowledge. It is here, where trouble comes from external factors, imposing values, ethics, and knowledge unto an individual, where the inherent trait of selfishness, the very nature of the individual, the reason that gives the man the ability to survive, is in conflict with the external factor, that usually represents authority.

In the case of choice, the anti-choice crowds expound on the selfishness of parents who do other things, other than their way of doing things. As M. Dare has pointed out:
Selfish parents = better schools. More selfish parents = more better schools.

The selfish parents are only doing what is in their best interests and for their families. The next link, is rather off the beaten track, with an essay, exploring the book, of Ayn Rand, ‘Virtures of Selfishness”.

“The study of Rand and her works will help leaders to consider their own personal
philosophy of life existence, ethics, value and morality. It is important to contemplate different
philosophical points of view. It is important for people to use cognitive processing and not let
others to convince them of falsehood. Rand believes in selfishness over altruism but is right in
one sense that happiness is truly left up to the self and cannot be left in the hands of others to
produce.

Epistemologically, the Randian view is that man’s intelligence is capable to achieve
objectively compelling knowledge of that which exists. Rand explains that to live, men must
hold three ruling values – reason, purpose, and self-esteem. These values imply all of the virtues
required by a man’s life. Rationality, the chief virtue, is the acknowledgment of objective reality,
commitment to its awareness, and the acceptance of reason as a man’s only judge of values and
guide to knowledge and action. Fairness is the expression of man’s rationality in his dealings
with other men and involves seeking and granting the earned. Caring, friendship, and high
regard, as moral tributes, are caused and must be earned. Satisfaction, the total of the preceding
virtues, can be thought of as moral ambitiousness.“

http://www.nationalforum.com/Electronic Journal Volumes/Palmer, David M. Virtues of Selfishness.pdf

Titled: Lest We Forget: Exploring Ayn Rand’s Virtues of SelVirtuesfishness (1964)

The public education system, the system, the structure, teaches children that their needs are selfish needs. Their learning needs are only met, if the child reaches certain levels of acceptance that the needs of all children must be met first, and is the highest priority over the needs of the individual child. This child brings this thinking home, and conflict develops between the parents, the child and the school. Parents are only interested in looking after the needs of their children, and it is here when parents make decisions for their children, we become selfish parents, because we did not base our decisions on all the needs of the children going to that school. I too have been called selfish, for giving my child knowledge, that no other child processed, and why would I do it, since it is not required for the child to learn this knowledge. Homeschoolers are called selfish, where the parents become selfish, for denying the social experiences that a public school provides.

So, yes parents need to following their true nature, the selfishness that have help us to survive from one generation to the next generation. Do not allow others to imposed their own values, that often are not in the best interests of your family.

You need to do some research John. Stanford agreed to take on one of the poorest schools in the Bay area. Opponents on a 5 person board voted 3-1 with one absent, to close the school after 2 years notwithstanding the fact that progress was being made. Totally political. Linda Darling-Hammond has lots of conservative political enemies due to her ability to destroy their arguments. The campaign they put on to stop her from becoming Secretary of Education.

If I were you I would not attack the reputation of Stanford. You will come out second best.

I would be ashamed to tell anybody I was a Rand supporter. Talk about an extremist, wow.

Hmmm…

  So charter schools, presumably all of them, should be given time to establish themselves and develop a track record before judgements can be made of their value??

I suspect lots of people here would be fully in agreement; the default among detractors is to simply claim they don’t work, right?

Let it be resolved that each and every charter school will be given an reasonable period of time in order to establish its value and not prejudged either individually or collectively. 

Pretty hard to disagree with that.

Ayn Rand is as relevant today, as she was when she was alive. Her books, still sell 500,000 per year, and teenagers of today, are still captivated by her writings, as I was when I was a teenager. She still makes sense, in a world that has become increasingly against the individual, and his freedoms.

Below is Rand’s definition on education.

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.“

Further on education:
“The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The Comprachicos” in my book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.) It appears, however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own social theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their paralyzed brains by means of drugs.

The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most hopeful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty.“

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/education.html

Here is her bio, and you will come to full understanding where she is coming from. I often wonder, if alive today, what she would say about the public education system, and the ongoing economic crisis. More than likely, it would be a stinging rebuke, on the elite and governments to stop telling the individual citizen,  how, why, when and by whom how one should live their lives. Let them decide for themselves.

http://www.aynrandasenseoflife.com/synopsis.html

John, you really need to examine charter schools more carefully. Google fraud and charters for a real education. It is rife with fraud and corruption. They are heavily involved in creaming, they push out huge numbers of less than successful or rowdy students back to public schools, their staff are on a revolving door, and still they cannot compete with public schools.

We simply cannot afford to waste scarce public dollars on these fraud schools any longer.

Nancy,

If you want to hang the Ayn Rand extremist label on yourself go ahead but you really can’t go farther to the right, there is no room left.

I agree she is as relevant today as when she was alive. She has always been totally irrelevant. Nobody has ever taken her seriously.

Let’s try and avoid recovering the same ground repeatedly; it doesn’t add to the flow of things.

The issue of whether or not they’re providing good value will be determined by whether they succeed or fail in the eyes of those who choose to participate in them,  not by the opinions of those with a stake in simply not tolerating them to begin with.

As to those who don’t want them because they don’t like competition…  If the status quo is a good as we keep getting told it is there’d be no move to the charter schools in any case so there’s no need to fuss.

The only thing to fear is that parents aren’t satisfied and will avail themselves of an alternative.  If that happens it makes the case for charter schools.  Parents have every right in the world to avail themselves of whatever model of school they prefer.

And we cannot simply throw more money at the public education system, where they are content at warehousing the less than academically incline students, learning things, that simply do not help them in the real world. A solid foundation on the 3 Rs is not what public schools do well in, when one takes a look at the latest figures on the Sunshine list for 2009. Only 23 % of grade 9 applied math at the Toronto board, manage to make a level 3 or more. The next logical move at the board level, if parents complain, is to dumb down the test.

In a March, 2010 Ravitch responded:

“You wrote that having a well-conceived curriculum is an achievable goal, despite the culture war that erupted when we first tried to implement a national curriculum in the 1990s. Do you still think that’s possible?

A: If you want to improve education, you have to start off with a very good idea of what education is. And NCLB [No Child Left Behind] does not proceed from that assumption. It doesn’t begin with the premise of, “What is good education?” It begins with the premise of, “How to get test scores up?” And in any human endeavor, whether education or anything else, when you have a single statistical measure, you then corrupt the goal of the organization to meet that measure. For instance, if you say to a principal, “I want you to have 100 percent graduation rate,” that’s easy to achieve. You just graduate everybody, give them all a diploma. Sure, they won’t be able to read and write, but that’s an easy number. You want to have them all pass a test? Then dumb the test down.“

http://westsidespirit.com/2010/03/18/diane-ravitch-wants-bad-school-policies-left-behind/

If public schools cannot raise the achievement rate in math, which the research has shown, that it is a lot easier to raise the achievement rate in math, since math has a lot less language to deal with, with good teaching methods, and excellent curriculum, why would anybody think that public schools are a lot better than charter schools or any of the alternatives?

Ravitch supports balanced literacy. I support her mainly in her core knowledge approach. The greatest problem in the USA is that 50 states have 50 different standards. I am not talking about “different” material. I am saying that the Alabama curriculum is a lot easier than the Massachusetts curriculum. That country needs to put every state at the Mass. Minnesota level. We ought to do the same but our spread is not so great.

No where that I found, that Ravitch supports balance literacy in a clear statement. What has been stated by her, that any reforms that have taken place since the 1980s have been corrupted by the public system within, for various reasons. Although never fully coming out with a clear statement, she does not like whole language approaches, including balance literacy, because there is an inherent weakness, that produces readers and writers where some have low literacy skills, some in the middle of the road, and a handful with excellent reading skills. She comes with hints, relating stories that would signal to a reader, that the current curriculum does nothing for critical thinking. She mostly concentrates on how good ideas get corrupted, but she was worked around the balance-literacy, by telling stories. Here is one of her stories.

“ One of my favorite parts of the book is Ravitch’s description of her high school English teacher, Mrs. Ratliff, who loved her subject and demanded excellence of her students: “I still recall a class discussion of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias,’ and the close attention that thirty usually rowdy adolescents paid to a poem about a time and place we could barely imagine.” Today Mrs. Ratliff would probably not be deemed a “great” teacher, because her class produced no hard data, not even test scores. The students wrote essays and took written tests. If Mrs. Ratliff were teaching today, Ravitch posits, “she would be stifled not only by the data mania of her supervisors, but by the jargon, the indifference to classical literature, and the hostility to her manner of teaching that now prevail in our schools.”
To improve our schools, Ravitch argues, we must resist quick fixes and grand solutions, focusing instead on the substance of education: our reasons for educating in the first place, the subjects, works, and concepts that students should learn, and the conditions that schools require in order to thrive. With deep knowledge and humanity, Ravitch urges us to turn our attention to the things that matter and to save public education before it is too late. “

It sure sounds to me, balance literacy is not on her list, to save public education.

http://www.edagg.com/story.php?title=ravitch-on-how-reform-ideas-go-sour

“Google fraud and charters for a real education. It is rife with fraud and
corruption. They are heavily involved in creaming, they push out huge
numbers of less than successful or rowdy students back to public schools,
their staff are on a revolving door, and still they cannot compete with
public schools.

We simply cannot afford to waste scarce public dollars on these fraud schools any longer.“

The above comments are some of the myths that those who oppose choice spin out on a regular basis.  For a list of those myths and the truth go to:
/school_choice/1180.pdf

SQE has heard them all.

I did Google fraud and charters and low and behold an article pops up—-from the Massachusets Teacher Association.  Surprise surprise!

Charter schools have to provide annual audited financial information.  They have much stricter accountability measures in place, so it is no wonder that if someone steps out of line, they will get caught.  In other cases, the fraud happened when the PUBLIC board was sleeping. 

How much fraud goes on in public education?  A lot more than we realize.

“How much fraud goes on in public education?  A lot more than we realize”

I agree. Forensic Audits for all school boards and their foundations should happen to find out the truth of how thick the fraud is.

That is not all tht pops up Doretta. There are charters in trouble with the law, usually for misappropriation of funds (theft) almost every day. It makes the Mafia blush. Corruption in public schools? It is amazing how seldom you hear about it.

I challange the people here to do a honest search on frud and charters. You will come back sickened.