The state's charter school board approved an application on Monday from Unbound Academy to open a school with a two-hour per day academic curriculum set by AI.

Should we hire more teachers, increase their funding? Nono, let’s do two hours of ai slop and call it a day.

  • CleverOleg [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    9 hours ago

    My wife had no idea what charter schools were and thought they sounded “neat”, so I had to learn and then explain to her how awful they are. TL;DR they are horrible and uniquely American.

    They are essentially for-profit schools run within a public school district. The public school district pays the school money for each student who goes there. They sell themselves as having more ability to address issues in education “creatively” but in reality they just have non-union teachers who they can pay less. Americans are suckers for this because a lot of them buy into the notion that “competition makes for better education”. Practically speaking I can see two reasons they exist:

    ‘1. To make profit. That’s what this AI thing is about, it’s cheaper than teachers and the company that runs the school gets to keep that profit.

    ‘2. Some charter schools are sort of quasi- religious. Like, they can’t be openly religious but they will kinda sneak stuff in there. Lots of American Christians want their kids to get a religious education but can’t afford private religious school.

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      6 hours ago

      IIRC charter schools are also able to pick and choose the students with the highest test scores while blocking lower-scoring students from going to them. They then point to their schools having higher test scores as a reason why public schools should be further defunded.