From John Kass's piece in the Tribune yesterday about Leo High School, above (my emphasis):
A South Side school where 100 percent of the students graduate, and 100 percent are accepted to college. A Roman Catholic all-boys school that draws from poor and working-class neighborhoods, a school where there are no cops or metal detectors, no gang recruitment, no fear.
An unreal school that is mostly black, but with a smattering of whites and Latinos, and where every student who sees a stranger in the halls goes up to the newcomer, introduces himself, shakes his hand, looks him in the eye and calls him Mister.
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At Leo there are 15 students in a classroom. There are only 160 students in all. Tuition is set at $7,500, but that's just a number. The unofficial motto is that everybody gets something, but nobody gets everything.
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What if parents had the freedom to take the tax dollars spent on their children at public schools, and choose where to send their kids?
Yes, I'm talking vouchers.
"If there were vouchers," said Principal Phil Mesina, "we'd have parents and students lined up all the way down the block. We could accommodate 400. All of our classrooms would be full."
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"The Chicago Public Schools system is a monopoly provider of education for the children of the city of Chicago, and the Chicago Teachers Union is a monopoly labor provider, and this is a tragedy for the children," said John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute.
"The only way to create accountability is for CPS to empower parents to have a choice of traditional public school, charter schools or vouchers to private schools. … This is not about breaking the union, it's about breaking the monopoly control that the union has over children's lives. I think that's a key point that no one talks about."
2 comments:
Kass is a Republican hack. Please tell me how paying teachers LESS is going to encourage better people to go into teaching. How is paying LESS going to make better teachers. Teachers only make 70% of the average of equivalent college graduates in other fields. Some of that is made up in benefits ( longer vacation and pension ) but 70% is awfully low.
Vouchers might help a few kids, while killing the rest of public education. Private education is NOT the answer.
A friend of mine who teaches at a Catholic elementary school writes in:
Oh, so NOW I get it. The kids are doing poorly because the school and the teachers are bad. Close the school, fire the teachers and give them vouchers!
Wanna see Leo change? Let 250 kids holding vouchers show up one year. Leo works because the parents pay big dough and insist it works. A bunch of neighborhood kids going there for free (vouchers) ain't a good thing.
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