Quote Originally Posted by Wesley Mouch View Post
Yes, but...

... we also are wise to recognize that certain classes of students may be helped by different techniques. What didn't get discussed on this thread was the challenge to the charter's program because it was discriminatory.

I feel that sometimes an 'all boys', or 'all girls', or even 'all black' or 'all hispanic' school could be appropriate. Not every move to acknowledge and respond to groups of students should be squashed by the obsessive advocates of fairness. Although in this case I wonder if the challenge wasn't more an 'attack' on charters than striving for equality.
How is it equality if the school board spends $12G per student when other charter schools are getting much less? They can just as easily get equality by taking a distance ed high school course for a lot less cost to the school board. Give them a number and no name and you'll never know if the student is a boy, girl, white, black or hispanic with distance ed. There's your equality. The test scores will ultimately reveal whether the student can handle themselves at university. It's that simple.

This school wasn't about educational equality and this school did not properly prepare their students academically for university. It was just a diploma mill that gave students a high school diploma they probably shouldn't have gotten anyway because all they did was just micromanaged their students' family lives for better salaries and getting more than double the school funding. I doubt that these high school graduates have anywhere near the same success graduating from a college or a university any more than a student from a much lower funded public or charter school. It really comes down to the student taking responsibility for their own success, which they can do in any learning environment if they really wanted to. Do I really need to get into anecdotes about some of the most successful people in the world that grew up in some of the worst conditions in the world?

Please reread what the school’s principal, G. Asenath Andrews, says. I mean, the principal is ranting that a student getting a C or less is like an A even though MEAP [[the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, the standardarized test for all public school students in Michigan) says that A is really a C or less. Yet, this C or less under MEAP somehow qualifies them to get into and graduate from a university? He's defending a diploma mill. It's ridiculous:

“If you look at MEAP scores, they’re not going to look good,” Andrews says. “I think we get the students ready. If you talk to kids, I think we’d get an A. If you look at MEAP we wouldn’t even get a C. We are a good school; we are not a great school. If we had a great school we’d have to start producing the kinds of test scores that make us look great. It starts with, ‘Is she OK? Is she living in a safe place? Is she getting prenatal care?’ Then you get to, ‘Did she do her homework.’ Our kids come with so much stuff to worry about, we never worried about test scores. If you base anything on just one standard, it’s not a true indication of what’s going on.” http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/sc...nt?oid=2180156 [[upper middle of the article).