🚀 go-pugleaf

johansen@portal.ca (George Johansen) wrote:

>Actually, for anybody taking a very close look at the concept, you can
>discover a great number of anomalies and problems within the concept. 
>Rather than setting up a separate school model within the public system,
>why not just fixing the problems within the system?

It's a good question George.  But as both you and I have found out first
hand, it is not all that easy to fight 'city hall'.  I think that the
existence of charter schools parallel to the
cast-in-stone-BCT-or-go-to-hell schools  will put eventually enough
pressure on the public system to change, if it hopes to survive at all.

>It's your school board administration that negotiates the contracts with
>the teachers, and you the voter elects the public representatives to that
>system.  If you feel that the teachers are not accountable, it's likely
>because _your_ representatives negotiated that requirement away.

George, you know the school board chair as well as I do, always looking
over the shoulder at the union reps if it's OK to speak.

>Personally, I feel it would be far better to fix the current system than
>to try to start new problems within it.

I would have to disagree (surprise!).  If they will not listen to the pleas
of the parents, if decades of turning out illiterate kids and unleashing
them on the universities and colleges is not enough of a hint, the existing
system has to be threatened with the real possibility of extintion before
it will move.  I am all for several different models of schools functioning
under one funding and one set of guidelines.  That's free market man, let's
see who can do the job better.

Karl Pollak
Bottom Line Productions           Canadian Infomaticon BBS,
Richmond, British Columbia        Fido 1:153/965  (604) 275-9579