Reply #8: Charter schools are about capital seeking opportunity. [View All]

[JDPriestly]

It's supposed to be the other way around. First there should be a good idea. The inventors or creators of the good idea either become entrepreneurs and seek capital to fund their enterprise, those inventors or creators seek entrepreneurs to help them develop and fund the enterprise.

Charter schools are the idea of people with money who create a non-profit that they hope at some time in the future will become profitable. It's money looking for something to do.

If the people putting their money into the charter school start-ups simply paid their taxes, our public schools could perform far better than charter schools. Our public school system is great. We just need to trust our teachers more and let them teach. They are, when all is said and done, better trained than most teachers in other systems.

My children went to school in the U.S. and in Austria. The Austrian kindergarten teachers were much better trained than the American ones. The concept of Austrian kindergarten was far superior to ours. Children in Austria do not learn to read until they are 6 and in the first grade for starts. The emphasis in kindergarten is to prepare children for the social environment of the school. to teach them to keep things neat and clean and, through play, story-telling and songs, to give the children the basic skills that make learning to read and do arithmetic easier.

In my experience, American post-kindergarten teachers may lack some of the intellectual training and factual knowledge of their Austrian counterparts, but the Americans know far more about how to teach and what makes children tick, about educational and child psychology than their European counterparts. Granted, European teacher training may have improved in the past 20 years or so, but I seriously doubt it.

Our public schools have the best teachers anywhere. Our families do not have the support systems, the safety nets, that European families have. That is why our children may not learn as well. Home life is very stressful for many American children.

That is why student performance is better in schools in wealthy communities where families are economically more secure than in lower income areas where the lack of a safety net for families puts stress on the children as well as the parents.