Education

because I feel like I've explained a hundred times to people that not all charters are for profit. We're chartered and managed by the county public school system, all public employees, and all our assets, including the building, are public assets. Sometimes I explain that, a person seems to get it, then the next day they're right back claiming that charters are all run by for profit management companies. Admittedly, that happened more on old DU. Since there's not much traffic here, I'm not in the same facts-ignoring facts loop on a daily basis.

On a related note, some of my frustration comes with an unwillingness to acknowledge or address fundamental and institutional flaws in the public education structure. If those issues were addressed, I don't think you'd see the same desire on the part of parents to move their kids out of their neighborhood schools. Where I think we ought to focus energy as democrats/liberals is on the inequity in the funding between one district and the next, and the closed system that makes it illegal for someone in a poor neighborhood to attend a so-called public school in a rich neighborhood.

I'm going to be very blunt on that point, because in my area it's about race. We have police in the white rich suburbs whose job is to prevent poor black city kids from sneaking into the "good" schools. When I bring that up on DU, a typical response is to ignore the problem, and argue that it should be this way because if you let a few of them in, it's not fair to the others who can't afford transportation to the good schools and will be left behind. So, the logic goes, it's better to keep all the black kids in shitty schools rather than let a few escape.

I keep waiting for people to rise up against that, but instead they rise up against charters and I understand the reason why, but that's a symptom, not the problem. I want to know when they will put as much effort into fighting against the inequity and racism in the system they support. If you don't like charters, fine - but fight like hell then to fix the problems in the shitty schools instead of just fighting against the alternatives.