This is a story about a charter school in my town of Chico, CA that had its charter revoked last night by the school board. I used to serve on that board, and I would have voted to pull the charter too. Of course, I never would have voted for it in the first place since the premise wasn’t sound to begin with. When a “green school” can’t make it in liberally thinking California, you know it had to be bad.
Excerpts from the Chico Enterprise Record:
As of this morning, there is no more Chico Green School.
On Wednesday night, after hearing impassioned pleas to give the charter school one more chance to prove its worth, the Chico Unified School District board of trustees, on a split vote, decided to revoke the school’s charter effective immediately.
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Chico Green School received its charter in 2009, and opened its doors to students on Sept. 7, 2010.
Two days later, Chico Green received its first demand it fix things from the CUSD.
Through the following months, the school was accused of failing to produce a curriculum that met state standards, and failing to provide coursework that met the admissions requirements for the University of California or the California State University system.
The Chico Green School’s board of directors was also accused of various violations of the state’s open meeting law, the Brown Act.
In June, the school was also denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the agency that accredits schools.
Full story at the Chico Enterprise Record
That should say that low income parents have no alternatives to public schools. Obviously parents who can afford to send their children to a private school have a choice. And so do parents who live on one income, because they can choose to home school.
Folks, please keep in mind that not everything posted on this site has to do with global warming. Anthony posted this as an item of interest based on his being a past CUSD school board member. If you violate California’s open meeting laws, and don’t do what you’re supposed to be doing to educate the kids and prepare them for work/college/life, you don’t get to continue to use the public’s money. There are other private and charter schools in Chico which are operating just fine.
REPLY: Yes there are, such as Nord School, which I was skeptical of at first, then voted for. They’ve done a great job there. – Anhtony
D.Marshall says:
August 18, 2011 at 11:07 am
Now let see the charters pulled for those school boards that push Intelligent Design
Actually, I’d like to see the charter pulled for teaching anything in public schools that wasn’t being to taught to the men and women responsible for putting Apollo on the moon. That would improve education and get the cost down to where it needs to be (around $3,000 per pupil).
How does a threadjack make it in post #1? I’m curious.
“REPLY: Yes there are, such as Nord School, which I was skeptical of at first, then voted for. They’ve done a great job there. – Anhtony”
You should commend yourself for the individual responsibility you take over there in the most “horrible” of degraded of capitalistic states and land. Even all the socialistic strive for socialism utopia in europe and EU such dedication and devotion to the welfare of others has never happened in europe or EU no matter the dictates of the state since it never can dictate anything it can be held responsible for or some such.
You know things isn’t right in the head of the EU when so many people in EU hopes for everything to get right in US. :p
stephen richards says:
August 18, 2011 at 1:51 pm
No athiest ever went to war to fight for his beliefs, now did they ? The vast majority of past wars have been fought on religious grounds including the latest, AGW.
I’m sorry but this is just a blatantly incorrect statement. Just in the recent histories, USSR was officially a non-religious society, plenty of war there. The various genocides in Africa. WWI and WWII. Hitlers meme was a promotion of a genetic super race. Men hardly need religion as a motivation to kill others.
This is a great debate as it is between 2 fundamentalist groups. Both convinced they are correct and no amount of discussion will move the participants from their original positions.
Folks who start schools don’t need to know the law. They just merely need to print it out and reference it.
The same for the Curriculum Guidelines.
Long as the school and board:
1. Follow the state guidelines.
2. Have an assigned teacher and classroom per class.
3. Have an administrator.
4. Have clearly spelled out dilineations between admins, teachers and staff.
5. Maintain CUM files per student.
6. Document IEP sessions and plans for specific students.
7. Maintain 911 and emergency transportation plans.
8. Maintain background checks and credentials.
9. Plan and execute on a budget that makes sense on an annual basis.
10. Adhere to state testing requirements.
…they’ll get a pass. It’s not that hard really. Something went very seriously wrong over there.
Violate #10 and the state will take over your school in a flash. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.
=8-)
This whole discussion is dishearteningly depressing.
Why was this school closed, as opposed to your average state school?
Even if the kids sat around all day and ate popcorn, they probably wouldn’t be any worse off than many of our state school students.
As a case in point: my nephew has just graduated from a state high school. He is barely literate, and literally has a hard time reading a newspaper headline. He goes shopping, and can’t figure change. Show him a map of the world, and he can’t find Europe.
Yet, he is actively being pursued by a number of colleges, and being offered scholarships; all because he can throw a football. Implied in the offers he has been receiving is a guarantee of graduation with a degree, provided he shows up at football training and his college football team has a good winning record.
Given this, it is pretty obvious that we are all doomed; so we may as well lie back and enjoy the ride.
It’s pretty obvious from the name of the school that the founders had an agenda when setting up the school, and it was not about general education.
As for discussions over the state of public schools, we should be very careful what we ask for. Public schools are designed to provide a minimal base of education for all citizens. Any student in the public education system has the ability to purchase a book independenly and to broaden his own knowledge. That is a matter of personal responsibility, not government responsibility.
I’ll bet that most here advocate a smaller government. If you are one of those, you had better quit asking it to do more for you…because you will have to pay dearly for any service government provides, and the quality of the service will always be less than in the private sector.
We are in the habit of asking something back from government, when what we need to be doing is saying “no thanks, I can handle it”. Until we do, the economic mess we have will continue to worsen.
Aw heck, art leads me down the primrose path again. I only used ‘intolerable’ because of the previous comment about an intolerant atheist. And I take the point that a lack of belief requires no faith.
What I meant to say is that denying the existence of God requires as much faith as affirming God’s existence. Come back, Rustle Cattle; we hardly knew ye.
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…Northern California Bureaucrat says:
August 18, 2011 at 3:44 pm
“There are other private and charter schools in Chico which are operating just fine.”
That is a good point, there were several other charters that were opened in Butte County this year and that is good news for parents of the +/- 20,000 students who are on waiting lists in California to get out of the traditional public schools.
New charter schools for Butte County CA in 2010/2011: Inspire College Prep High School, Ipakanni Early College Charter School, Paradise eLearning Academy, Pivot Online Charter, and Sherwood Montessori. A step in the right direction and best wishes.
Merovign says:
August 18, 2011 at 6:12 pm
How does a threadjack make it in post #1? I’m curious.
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I’d say it is because people are watching……..closely….. intensely…….waiting and watching for an opening. I know they do. It isn’t a big deal. In fact, it’s good! If there is any proof necessary that skepticism isn’t theological……..just come to this thread. Is skepticism confined to a political question? Nope. There are several threads at WUWT that shows it isn’t. Ideological? Nope. This is an eclectic group. And, it isn’t really a group! Sure, there are some regulars….I guess I could be classified as one, but, we all come and go. We give our thoughts, we debate, we argue, we discuss. We learn. We hear the arguments. There are skeptics, alarmists, luke warmers …… we are all here!
So, some snarky pinhead gets to be first and hijacks a thread…….lol, so what, we discussed, we argued, we come to a better understanding! In the end, we’re more understanding, more knowledgeable, more enlightened.
I’ll take that over the drivel of places which don’t allow for discussion, any day.
For those that don’t know, I’m the typical gun toting, Bible hugging, ultra-conservative, skeptic. I come to this site because there are others who don’t believe like I do. They will expose me to different ideas and thoughts, some pertinent, others, not so much. And I’ll do the same. But, they believe CAGW is still just as much garbage as I do. Tomorrow, may be a different occasion, but for today, we’ve something important to do. Maybe, just maybe, along the way, we may come to understand each other. But, it doesn’t distract from the objective.
Green school violates Brown Act?
Obviously the problem is the Brown Act.
Innit?
Stephen, you are not the “typical” atheist the poster was talking about. Neither is Penn Jillette. You are firm in your belief and appear comfortable with it. However, many atheists residing in America are threatened by faith. While I am sure there are some people of faith that try to “enlighten” them to their respective faiths (who has not had a Jehovah’s Witness knock on their door?), Atheists are not a threatened sect. However, they act as if every open display of religion is a threat. A student “thanking god” at his commencement is not a threat to their belief, yet the Atheist take it as one and seek to halt all open displays of religion, regardless of the time, place or source. And that is what the poster was railing about. And that is the insecurity of the American Atheist. I am sure most do not give a whit if Johnny says a prayer at his graduation, but some do, and they are the ones making the headlines and attacking all religious people.
Snarky Pinhead Threadjacker #1 seeks future assignment to the base station of the Epistemology Re-Education Charter Schools.
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stephen richards says:
August 18, 2011 at 1:51 pm
“No athiest ever went to war to fight for his beliefs, now did they ? The vast majority of past wars have been fought on religious grounds including the latest, AGW.”
Oh, boy!
That atheists don’t start wars, is an urban legend, promoted by… atheists.
Name the three greatest atheists ever: Mao, Stalin and Hitler. They specifically went to war because of their beliefs.
Communism the strongest proponents of atheism, believed in revolution, the really bloody kind. Think Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet purges in the 1930 etc. etc. etc.
The wars that were fought in the past, needed to be justified, even back then. A leader could not simply tell his people that he wanted to go to war. He needed a legal justification. Religion often provided part of that cover, along with some alleged wrongdoing. In the end the actual reason was almost always about land and other resources, sometimes personal animosity and sometimes the pursuit of fame and glory. Religion almost always simply provided cover as an excuse.
RE: stephen richards says:
August 18, 2011 at 1:51 pm
“science informs you to become skeptical and once you become skeptical you start to look for evidence and when you find no evidence or very week evidence you become “a non believer””
Atheism confuses two different realms of thought. Science asks the question “what is in the universe and what causes it to behave in the way it does?” Believers, or religion if you will, asks the question “why is there a universe with me in it? What does that fact have to do with me and how I should behave?”.
A simple example: you are sitting on the sidewalk with a “Out of work and hungry, please help” sign and a cup sitting there. I walk along with a wad of cash in one pocket, a 38 Special in the other. Should I give you some money? Take out the gun and shoot you to death because you are obviously evolutionarily unfit? Take you down a couple blocks to a soup kitchen? Start tutoring you in how to get a job?
Science should probably go for the gun but realy has no answer at all. Atheism would allow any action you wish. Belief in God rules out thr gun but depending on the source and teachings of your belief, any of the other three might be OK. Go back and read up on Goedel’s Incompleteness theorem. Some problems simply have no solution, and God is one of them.
Keith says:
August 18, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Personally, I see the null hypothesis as being that there isn’t a sentient being or God as creator, and see the alternative hypothesis as unproven and unproveable. I fully respect the right of others to see it very differently, faith being an utterly personal experience. Because of this, I just want ID to be framed in appropriate manner.
The problem with the theory of intelligent design is that it isn’t a scientific theory. What I mean by that is that we are talking about the natural sciences. The natural sciences do not consider the supernatural. When was the last time you read a paper from a geologist or physicist that said somewhere in the paper something like “if these effects are due to supernatural causes, then we conclude that…”? Answer: Never, because it’s not natural science.
These are the natural sciences. They implicitly assume no supernatural effects. Thereby they implicitly assume there is no God causing any effect on their observations because the idea of God is supernatural. This seems to be lost on the vast majority of scientists and lay people.
You cannot assume there is no God, make some observations, and then prove there is no God. That is circular reasoning. You would first have to assume there is a God and then find a contradiction. Try that one on for size.
Thus, the idea that “the null hypothesis as being that there isn’t a sentient being or God” is almost correct but in error because it isn’t the “null hypothesis”, it’s not a hypothesis at all. This is due to the natural sciences not being able to create a hypothesis concerning the supernatural. Any such hypothesis is not part of the natural sciences.
The conclusion is this: The natural sciences cannot prove there is a God, nor prove there is no God, nor say that he did not create the earth, etc. They can only say, “If the earth arose naturally, this is how we think it happened: …”
Concerning ID, it is obviously not a theory of the natural sciences.
D. J. Hawkins says:
August 18, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Fossils don’t count? This natural selection game takes a bit of time to convert a green slime into a seahorse so time lapse photography is out. How on earth would it be possible to arrive at such a slow moving theory by just looking at the way things are in the present. The beauty of it is that the fossil record is very much akin to time lapse photography. Even in a gross way, the fossil record shows that we have a fair continuum of changing creatures throughout time. That is to say we don’t find fossil humans mixed in with fossil dinosaurs, or further back trilobites (look like muscular bug-like creatures that lived in the sea). There aren’t even any fish mixed with the trilobites – fish appear much later, but well before humans. Indeed, at one time, it appears that life existed only in the sea for much of the earth’s biological history and it wasn’t until ampbhibians appeared that could crawl out of the sea onto the land (scurrying back to lay eggs and let the tadpoles develop).
Now we could go into detail in the fossil record but this would make a long comment too long. We can follow the ancient horse from a little cat-sized fellow with 5 toes living in the bush. But as the plants evolved and gave way to large grasslands, horses that moved out into the planes needed to be taller than the grass so they raised up on their toes and grew longer limbs (rather longer limbed individuals survived) – two toes becoming vestiges and disappearing and finally they raised up onto one toe (on each foot) and the useless two remaining toes became vestiges and even today, if you look at the skeleton of a horse you will see two useless bone splints on eithe side of the main limb- the hoof is just a single toe nail.
Finally also in the fossil record, there is an interesting feature that immature creatures of – say a type of shellfish in a given age is like a fully mature ancestor of an earlier age so that we can see in the life cycle of present day creature its evolution from earlier forms. You see where this is going? A human embryo starts off as single celled creature in its little ocean, becomes bundles of cells, then a fish-like critter even with gills(!) and then he/she develops lungs and emerges at birth onto dry land. It doesn’t stop there. The pre-speech critter is essentially simeon, and then at the terrible two’s is neanderthal, teenager is cromagnon man and finally modern man. So we have both the time lapse photograph and the evolution before your very eyes that you were demanding.
Brad S says:
From what I’ve seen those who come out of faith based schools have a better education, are better people and behave better than those who don’t, especially as teenagers.
I find most atheists are an intolerant bunch.
Personally, I’ve seen a lot of intolerance from those on the religious side, too. Not accepted in certain groups because I don’t believe in God, even though I agree with the stated purpose of the group. Automatically assumed to be “nothing” (thanks for that, kim), because of my belief or lack thereof. Insulted and denigrated directly because of it. Not exactly a way to win converts, I’d say. What was that about a mote and a beam?
This sort of bickering about religious belief lowers the overall tone of this site, and frankly, isn’t relevant. Can those of us with different religious beliefs at least agree that we face a common threat in the attempt by the watermelons to take over most of our economy and work together on that without constantly taking pot-shots at each other?
See what Bobby has to say about ID,
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
Who can say that His Noodliness is not the one true God? It’s just as likely as any other idea.
A testable theory for ID .http://www.reasons.org/
Interesting if nothing else.
A simple challenge: Please read the following description of the world’s creation ….
Then tell me where it came from: an obscure word-of-mouth tradition starting some 5000-odd years ago by itinerant shepherds who didn’t even have a “zero” to count upon, much less decimal points to keep track of time; or the latest 20th century particle physics textbooks, archeology, geology and oceanographic references, biology and taxology theories, and astronomical discoveries.
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Everything was created. Suddenly and with great violence, but with uncalculable forces in the darkness. From this energy, light condensed a short while later. Then matter was created as the light energy further cooled. A period of time passed.
The earth and solar system was formed from the galactic dust and interstellar plasmas, gathering together and cooling into the individual spheres (the planets and their atmospheres) and the sun we see rotating around our sky today. Another period of time passed.
Down here on the earth itself, one continent was formed surrounded by one single massive sea, later breaking up and re-connecting by continental drift into the continents and seven seas everybody is familiar with today. Once dry, cool (non-volcanic) land appeared, the first plants began growing, changing the original inhospitable and deadly atmosphere of toxic and light-absorbing gasses into the clear and viable combination of oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor and carbon dioxide we need (the balance of gasses that all life needs on earth!) to survive today. These first plants kept growing for another while longer.
Well, the atmosphere was finally clear enough for visible light to be transmitted through the previously dark atmosphere, and suddenly the available energy on the surface grew large enough to support more life, higher forms of life above simple plants.
So animal life grew – first in the warm tropic seas as fish and amphibians, then on land with dinosaurs (who evolved into birds) and then modern large mammals. Man finally straggled onto the scene, very late behind everything else.
Heh, mods rock.
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Years ago, my wife and I served communion at a village in the Chernobyl region of Ukraine within the dead zone. Afterwards, we offered to pray for anyone who wished for prayer. Through an interpreter, an old woman asked us to pray for her stomach. A moment later she started jumping up and down saying in Russian, “I can see, I can see!” Now anyone could find reasons for that very unusual event (including, I suppose that what I’m saying is just a fabrication), but in my mind it is a clue that there is something beyond the natural world we experience with our physical senses. Some people would call that “God.”