Ace has this story and it just makes me chuckle. Imagine … a no frills charter school in Oakland, California that outperforms California standards and does so by rejecting distractions and concentrating on hard work and performance. And it took Native Americans to teach Americans the American way. Egads.
Reporting from Oakland — Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: “We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multi-cultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots, and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”
That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hard-scrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television’s “Colbert Report.” They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.
I sure hope this isn’t a parody. Wait! It’s the LA Times. It must be true. But the best part comes from ACE.
The school just graduated its first class, and they’re all going to college. Including one to MIT, and one to Cornell. (And I don’t think it’s the Keith Olbermann Farmer Fred Cornell.)
Liberal educators mocked the school. “It’s easy to give kids a sense of self-esteem when they’ve actually accomplished something,” one Bay Area basket-weaving teacher noted. “But what we do is far harder — we convince kids to have self-esteem without having accomplished anything at all. Frankly, I’m pretty sure I deserve my third raise this year.”
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“It’s easy to give kids a sense of self-esteem when they’ve actually accomplished something. But what we do is far harder — we convince kids to have self-esteem without having accomplished anything at all."
This quote can't be true! Can it? Can it? I wuwwy, I weally wuwwy!
“It’s easy to give kids a sense of self-esteem when they’ve actually accomplished something,” one Bay Area basket-weaving teacher noted. “But what we do is far harder — we convince kids to have self-esteem without having accomplished anything at all. Frankly, I’m pretty sure I deserve my third raise this year.”
And it is even easier to think you deserve a raise after accomplishing nothing but turned out kids with lots of "self esteem" and no accomplishments.