Day 2: The Skin­ner Hor­ror Files

It depends on what the mean­ing of the word “char­ters” ‘is’…

Here are excerpts from the Salon arti­cle above:

Bill Clin­ton weighed in on the debate over char­ter schools this week, warn­ing that the pub­licly fund­ed yet autonomous schools must keep their “orig­i­nal bar­gain” if they want sup­port as alter­na­tives to tra­di­tion­al pub­lic schools.

The Huff­in­g­ton Post reports that in remarks before a din­ner host­ed by the Clin­ton Glob­al Ini­tia­tive on Tues­day, the for­mer pres­i­dent hailed the poten­tial of char­ter schools, even as he called on them to be held to high stan­dards. Clin­ton cit­ed New Orleans, whose post-Kat­ri­na pub­lic schools are 100 per­cent char­ter. While cast­ing New Orleans’ expe­ri­ence with char­ters as a suc­cess sto­ry, he added an impor­tant caveat. Char­ter schools aren’t worth sup­port­ing, Clin­ton sug­gest­ed, unless they per­form bet­ter than tra­di­tion­al pub­lic schools.

“They still haven’t done what no state has real­ly done ade­quate­ly,” Clin­ton told the group, “which is to set up a review sys­tem to keep the orig­i­nal bar­gain of char­ter schools, which was if they weren’t out­per­form­ing the pub­lic mod­el, they weren’t sup­posed to get their char­ter renewed.”

Clinton’s state­ment is stun­ning once you con­sid­er its impli­ca­tions. Research shows that the vast major­i­ty of char­ter schools in the U.S. haven’t cleared that hur­dle.… [empha­sis added] 

Bill Clin­ton’s com­ments before an elit­ist group of wealthy “glob­al­ists” is a jaw dropper.

What kind of bal­loon is he float­ing? We know he and his inter­na­tion­al­ist friends are depend­ing on using the schools (life­long, not just K‑12) to train for the glob­al work­force, so what’s Bill got in his pock­et as a pos­si­ble sub­sti­tute for char­ter schools?

To be per­fect­ly hon­est, I haven’t a clue!

Is Clin­ton’s ambi­gu­i­ty a rerun of his com­ment dur­ing Lewinskygate?

“It depends on what the mean­ing of the word ‘is’ is”, in regards to the truth­ful­ness of his state­ment that “there is not a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship, an improp­er sex­u­al rela­tion­ship or any oth­er kind of improp­er rela­tion­ship.” [Lewin­sky scan­dal]

Is what he is say­ing a seman­tic rerun: “It depends on what the mean­ing of the word “char­ters” ‘is’?

Were char­ter schools used as the ini­tial exper­i­ment in order to get pub­lic accep­tance of public/private part­ner­ships and unelect­ed boards?

There has been lit­tle dis­cus­sion of the dan­gers of such a sys­tem, while the nation has been, thanks to the neo­con­ser­v­a­tives, focused 110% on the nasty Com­mu­nist Core. Any dis­cus­sion of tax-fund­ed school choice/charters with unelect­ed boards has been avoid­ed like the plague. Except on this blog.
Read my post “The Delib­er­ate Dumb­ing Down of the Vil­lage.”

Here are some lit­tle known facts about Clin­ton found in my book the delib­er­ate dumb­ing down of amer­i­ca. From an Atlantic Month­ly arti­cle, July 1997 titled “The Com­put­er Delu­sion” by Todd Oppen­heimer, we learn Clin­ton’s phi­los­o­phy about com­put­er­ized learn­ing (Skin­ner­ian):

The not­ed psy­chol­o­gist B.F. Skin­ner, refer­ring to the first days of his “teach­ing machines,” in the late 1950s and ear­ly 1960s wrote, “I was soon say­ing that, with the help of teach­ing machines and pro­grammed instruc­tion, stu­dents could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a stan­dard class­room.” Ten years after Skinner’s rec­ol­lec­tions were pub­lished, Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton cam­paigned for a “bridge to the twen­ty­first cen­tu­ry… where com­put­ers are as much a part of the class­room as black­boards.” [empha­sis added] (p. 381)

And from The Ari­zona Repub­lic in an AP report in its Octo­ber 23, 1998 issue, in an arti­cle titled “Char­ter Schools Bill Now Law,” we learn how CHARTER schools were pro­mot­ed by Clin­ton and the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party:

Pres­i­dent Clin­ton on Thurs­day signed the Char­ter School Expan­sion Act of 1998 to speed the devel­op­ment of high-qual­i­ty char­ter schools, a key ele­ment of his edu­ca­tion agen­da. The law autho­rizes up to $100 mil­lion a year over the next five years for the plan­ning and expan­sion of char­ter schools. Clin­ton cit­ed the char­ter schools leg­is­la­tion as an exam­ple of bipar­ti­san cooperation.…

Clin­ton has set a goal of 3,000 char­ter schools nation­wide by the time he leaves office.…[empha­sis added] (p. 428)

Char­ter schools are oblig­ed to adhere to fed­er­al guide­lines, and are unac­count­able to the tax­pay­ers due to their being run by unelect­ed coun­cils; i.e., tax­a­tion with­out rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Out­side of such parental, vot­er and cit­i­zen over­sight, they become a seedbed for exper­i­men­ta­tion on this nation’s children.