I taught high school a long time ago before the privitization vultures git their hooks in public money.
I belonged to the local NEA affiliate. They weren't great negotiating salary, but they were there for me when I was falsely accused of improper behavior in class by a parent.
I wouldn't touch a non-union charter with a 10' pole.
The terrible fact is that, without a school like ours (heavily funded by full-paying students who subsidize the other students), the city shovels kids into prison. The state doesn't seem much interested in doing things other than wringing their hands about the poor minorities.
Glad you & your colleagues are sacrificing for the kids, but really sucks it's on you and not the state where it belongs.
An old friend of mine from college taught in what I believe was a juvenile detention facility in NYS. A tough and I expect also underpaid job, but at least the state made an effort to provide the kids already in the system with an education.
@joeinwynnewood@housepanther Not a charter school, but not that dissimilar. We're technically part of the public school system (one of several, and also the least expensive bc we don't want to drain public funds), also individually accredited, also a "home schooling facility”.
By "alt school" I mean ”based in Piaget, Unschooling, Montessori, and other non-coercive philosophies.”
The city has gone hard on "school to prison pipeline" and we want students to be humans, not grist.
The school where I taught had an alternative program that ran for most but not all of the day. My end of the day Physics I class was filled with kids from the program. Good kids who I expect would have had a very hard time making it through the day in a conventional program.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell This has fuckall to do with the actual problem, and this is why people find y'all so tiresome.
The school funding problem is a state-level thing, and it's a matter of Republicans blocking every budget increase because they're anti-public education. It's not remotely a matter of budget shortages from fucking pothole repair.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell I'm with @textualdeviance - cars aren't going anywhere and if this is where you want to steer every argument, you'll spend the next 70 years railing against cars while they remain central to the city experience all the while. The solution to increasing teacher pay isn't to stop paving roads, it's to start paying teachers more.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell This says absolutely nothing about the causes for those differing numbers. Your belief that it's because of road maintenance costs soaking budgets is completely unsupported and frankly preposterous.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell Jesus, you are tiresome. You're so laser focused on this single issue that you don't see anything else. Divorcing school funding from property taxes would solve that problem, but the reason it doesn't happen has fuckall to do with road maintenance. Prop 13 itself came from the exact same people who want to maintain that broken system because it means poor people get shittier schools.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell Look, genius. No one is saying we don't need to improve infrastructure. But refusing to see, much less fix, the other things contributing to this particular crisis is ridiculous. You want a massive, large-scale overhaul which is going to take generations to do in a sustainable and equitable way. We have people suffering in the here and now who need help that your long-range plans won't bring.
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