Published by El Nuevo Herald on May 21st, 2014
Around the world there is the certainty that most basic public services should be undertaken by the State, who is funding the development of the nation, promoting a number of factors whose purpose is to strengthen our system by facilitating the means for capital investment and consequent job creation.
Thus, we see that the construction of fire stations, police commissaries, medical clinics, roads, schools and public education, is usually performed by the State who also give most of the services altogether.
However, in Florida, since 1996, have proliferated some schools called charter schools, which are largely a kind of symbiosis between state capital and private equity.
By December 2011 there were about 5,600 charter schools with more than 2 million students nationwide and more than 400,000 of them on the waiting list.
In Florida, for 2012-2013, 200,000 students were enrolled in 574 charter schools in 44 districts.
Opening a charter school is relatively easy. A group of parents, teachers and community members gather. Formalize a request to the appropriate school district and create a board that negotiates a contract with the district. The board of that district then becomes sponsor of the charter school.
This group sometimes is nonprofit. However, sometimes it is just the opposite. And this usually happens because members of the community by themselves, just look at charter schools another way of doing business through public funding allocated to these charter schools.
Charter schools are schools of choice, really not administered by the state. This means that neither students nor teachers are required to attend the school, that is, this is a major difference with the public schools, where, for example, a district students must attend schools in the district.
The main problem at the local level lies in the effort being made by the normally 85,000 teachers in Miami Dade County. They are hired year by year renewing their contract without obligation prior to maturity. Their incomes are modest and soon his professional assessment will be based on a complex mathematical equation that obviously limit its progress.
With the variety of educational modalities that exists today, the efforts of the teachers usually dissipates and is not balanced evenly.
There is a home schooling, where parents play the role of teachers and the children take examinations timely.
There are magnet schools, where students must have a special predisposition toward a particular subject.
There is distance learning or virtual school, which in Florida has experienced unprecedented growth, from $ 35 million spending in the previous year to $ 156 million today. In addition to the increase in such spending, student achievement is questioned as it is not compulsory to attend classes.
Currently, with all the pressures to teachers in Miami Dade, charter schools have the option to accept or not to impose collective bargaining union for the benefit of teachers.
Evidently, and so indicates the annual trend of 13% growth, charter schools continue to rise, receiving tax dollars that public schools really urgently need.
Right now, through a program called Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program, aims to create a system of vouchers to charter schools, to divert about $ 300 million from public schools.
We are not against business, let alone free enterprise, but if most charter schools are aimed to profit and contract specific services or come to subcontract the overall management of the school, then we could we believe that their purpose could be to privatize education and enrich one sector at the expense of public education and prosperity of teachers in Miami Dade County.
And that, financially speaking, is not healthy for our community.
BENJAMIN F. DeYURRE
Economist and Journalist.
No comments:
Post a Comment