If you are a charter school parent, no matter what your politics, I urge you reprint this article and pass it around to your friends,<\/p>\n
While Minnesota is proud of its education system, its great achilles heel is the inner city. \u00a0The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, have among the highest achievement gaps in the nation between white and black students – and pouring money into the districts isn’t changing anything. \u00a0Indeed, as the budget has skyrocketed, the situation’s gotten worse.<\/p>\n
So for many parents in the Twin Cities, charter schools have been a lifeline – a place where their kids aren’t just numbers on a school district spreadsheet, where they have some input into how the school works. \u00a0 The vast<\/em> majority of parents in inner-city charter schools are, ironically, minorities. \u00a0Most are below the district income averages.<\/p>\n Mark Dayton wants to slash state funding to charter schools.<\/p>\n His budget plan (both of his tries at a budget plan, actually) will slash <\/em>lease aid payments to charter schools.<\/p>\n This is a huge financial hit.<\/p>\n When people throw around figures like “it costs $11,000 a year to teach a student in this district”, remember that public districts can float bonds to build their school buildings, as well as get extra money from special local school tax levies. \u00a0Charter schools are forbidden by (a stupid) state law from spending their money on buying buildings.<\/p>\n The state allots a certain amount of “lease aid” to charter schools, which helps them rent space.<\/p>\n Dayton wants to slash this aid.<\/p>\n It may or may not affect well-heeled schools in tony suburbs. \u00a0But it will shred <\/em>poor inner city charter schools.<\/p>\n So, all you black, Latino, H’mong, Native American, or Muslim parents who pulled your kids out of your wretched inner-city public schools? \u00a0Most of you, statistically, will vote for Mark Dayton.<\/p>\n You are voting for your kids’ ticket back to sub-mediocrity. \u00a0The ticket back to being treated like a number. \u00a0The ticket back to being written off, and treated like make-work programs for the teachers’ union, rather than future people with immense potential.<\/p>\n Mark Dayton cares more about feeding money to the union that <\/em>helped cause <\/em>your neighborhood schools’ collapse than he does about your kids and the path to education that you, the parents, have chosen.<\/p>\n Think about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you are a charter school parent, no matter what your politics, I urge you reprint this article and pass it around to your friends, While Minnesota is proud of its education system, its great achilles heel is the inner city. \u00a0The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, have among the highest achievement gaps in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,20,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-democrats","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13795"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20315,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13795\/revisions\/20315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}