Time magazine gave a cautious evaluation of the Philly schools that have been privatized over the past nine months. The consensus seems to be...there is no consensus. Until more results and testing is in, everyone out there in the city of Brotherly Love (among them Paul Vallas...I keep forgetting he went there) is going to run with the ball until something blows up. What really pissed me off (besides the idea that corporate America can swoop in anywhere and expect to fix anything after the shit year they've just caused for so many people--not that I'm generalizing of course) is their backlash. Specifically Chancellor Beacon Academies, which is considering a lawsuit after being dismissed by Vallas because of a lack of results (dirt on them not available in web article).

Now that's just the kind of work ethic kids are already learning, thanks to peabrained parents who want to put the onus of responsibility on anyone but their kids. The whole concept of privatization makes me see red. If it were just pouring more money into the system, I could perhaps calm down, but then I remember that money doesn't even do anything unless you've got someone in the system who knows about teaching and who knows where the money could be best spent.

I'm reminded of the grader fiasco we recently had at my school. See, because we require an extraordinary amount of writing (and I'm not trying to sound arrogant--I've ran the figures of how much writing our students do by virtually everyone I know and it's miles above everyone else's experiences, both as a student and as a teacher), the district decided way back when we'd get a budget to recruit help grading all of this. When I started teaching, I was naive enough to believe I could do it the way my professors had always done it--for content alone, fuck grammar. I still combat this mentality. I mean, if a kid has had three years of teachers shoving grammar down his/her throat, and they still don't get it, I'm not going to do much good in addition. So why not take them to task for not knowing what they're supposed to know?

Anyway, somehow the budget was magically depleted. Not because of yours truly (I was loathe to send out that much stuff), but because of (allegedly) overspending by certain teachers and misuse of the system. A big brou-haha ensued during a faculty meeting, the result of which was we were going to bully the administration for more money while continuing to disagree on how it should be divied up. Whatever.

Shortly after we were told not to overspend the budget, the district gave everyone in the building a school CD holder. For our CDs. I imagine the retail went for somewhere around ten bucks apiece, but I'll be kind and say seven. Multiply that by, say, three hundred teachers and that's $2,100. Or one grader.

I never scored very well in Monopoly, but come on!