Charter School Amendment GA – Vote No

I have to weigh in against the Amendment to the Georgia Constitution allowing the State to create charter schools.  It’s a move that circumvents the school boards and leaves the state open to law suits like the one in Texas where the charter school group is suing the state for more funding.  It also opens the state to pressure to create Muslim charter schools like Florida. These are actually a religious schools and shouldn’t be tax funded.  Charter schools are actually private schools funded by tax dollars. They attract better students and students can be expelled back to regular public schools. 

Gulen, a Turkish Muslim organization, has charter schools in Texas, California, Florida and 20 other states. The movement of Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen, which runs 600 schools throughout the world and has more than four million followers.

Gulen is secretive and feared by the Turkish population.  They are creationists and are missionary-bent and active in many countries. Their teachers and administrators are Turkish and in other countries on work visas. Their members don’t admit they are associated with the Gulen movement.  

They are hired by our governments and paid with tax dollars.  They are allowed to operate without restrictions.  These are Muslim, parochial schools, masquerading as an international corporation with tax funding for operating outsourced charter schools.

It feels eerily like the TSPLOST.  We let public schools continue to be dysfunctional (like GDOT).  We let public school student attainment deteriorate (like roads).  We declare a crisis and propose mal-investments that don’t solve the problem (like TSPLOST). 

We need better student attainment in our public schools and the state has a plan we can vote on..hmmm...I don’t think so.  Do we have any other suggestions to make public education work as well as home schooling ? 

There are enough cronies in public schools. Adding corporate cronies to “partner” with and run these schools will complicate matters. The text book cabal needs to be dismantled.  The curriculum is unhelpful and subject to politicization.  Unions and their link to legislatures are unhelpful.  The bureaucracy is huge, expensive and unnecessary.  The costs to maintain multi-million dollar school construction, buses, lawyers and boilerplate are unsustainable.  This is a “jobs” program that is now being dismantled through outsourcing to education corporations like Pierson, Gulen, EdWest and Kipp. Private, Public Partnerships like this. 

All learning is self-learning.  We have tools like the internet and kindle that should make schools and books as we know them unnecessary, but unless we let real teachers make the cost reduction decisions, we will be left with an expensive rationing system.  I think teachers would remove the expensive overhead, district offices (except for specialists), consultants, regulations, government mandates and PPPs instead and return to autonomous neighborhood schools with district specialist support.

Our government has a pattern of taking over industries, making them monopolies, running up their costs and then, offering worse alternatives to escape the disasters they created.  I can hardly wait to see what they want to do with healthcare after Obamacare is repealed. 

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader