Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

I see that Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos for sec. of education.  She is from Michigan and is perhaps the biggest advocate for charter schools and vouchers to be used by families at any school, public or private.  Since she is basically the mother of charter schools in Michigan, I try to find out how successful these school have been in Michigan.  It seems there are a lot of back and forth between the critics and supporters of these schools.  Some have called them total failures and that some advocates of charter schools have stayed away from supporting the Michigan schools.  Some say that these schools improved the reading and math results of students by two to three months per year, especially in Detroit students.  It seems these reports are conflicted and I wonder if anyone living in Michigan can shed some light on the success or failure of these schools.

I see reason to support and criticize both sides of this debate.  I think that the public schools in large urban areas in this country are doing a poor job.  The teacher unions in these districts are not helpful to the students.  They serve mostly to protect the teachers.  On the other hand, I don't think vouchers or charter schools are the panacea that their supporters paint them to be.  For example, most private schools have admission standards so they are taking in better students.  The parents and students who take vouchers and go to these schools are putting in more effort in their education than most of those who stayed behind.  The private schools can also expel students who are disruptive but it is much more difficult for public schools to do so.  So to me in order to say that a private school is better than the neighborhood school, it will have to produce graduates that are way better than the neighborhood public school.

In many countries, including my native Hong Kong, the public schools are better than private schools because its tuition is way lower and you have to pass exams to get in.  So again, whoever is able to pick the students, is going to produce better graduates.  Some countries, like Sweden, abandoned the voucher system after finding it did not do better than regular public school.  So there are no easy solutions.  I don't know if Betsy DeVos is competent for this job.  But I hope she will try to get a lot of opinions from different sources and not just go ahead and dismantle public school education.