Indiana

More On That Moratorium

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

I told you yesterday about how the House Ways & Means Committee amended legislation to put a moratorium on charter schools in Indiana and cap their funding so they can’t grow.  

This is about two things.  First, political posturing.  Second, the argument that charter schools take money from traditional public schools (I will refer to them as TPS’ for the rest of this blog.  Anyone who saw “Office Space” gets the joke) so they should be destroyed.

Although I am a big school choice/charter school fan, I’ve decided to give the anti-choice people a few ideas on how they can stop students from leaving TPS’ for charter schools.

1. Make charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and home schooling illegal.  Parents won’t take their kids out of school and send them somewhere else if there’s no place for them to go.
2. Mandate all school district employees, i.e. teachers, administrators, staff, etc. have their children in public school.  They should have as much skin in the game as the parents with no choice.
3. Make it illegal for parents to transfer their children out of the school district.  Once they’re in, make them stay in.
4. If none of that works, slap a tax on people who send their kids to another school district, because all they are doing is taking money out of the TPS.
5. Turn TPS’ into prisons.  That way students could never leave and the we could save them the years it would take to get to prison because of their poor educations.

Or the TPS’ could just improve the quality of education and make their schools a place where no one wants to leave but sometimes the simplest things in the world are the most difficult to do.

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on February 04, 2009 (boomark / email).