Chewing gum.

  Carrying visible “flaming or hot chips.’’

  Tardy to class more than 3 minutes.

  Forgetting your belt.

  Carrying a Sharpie or other permanent marker.

  Forgetting to place quotation marks around another writer’s words.

  Having visible Red Bull, other energy drinks or pop.

  Not wearing dress pants or the school shirt.

What's the problem here? These seem pretty straightforward and hard to fuck up, less the Tardy to class one, but you know what? A lot of workplaces aren't cool with that either. I think it's not a bad thing.

If paying these fines is a problem, then make sure you don't get hit with them.
If you don't want your kid to be educated with a strict set of rules in the school, then choose a different school.

Five dollars for four demerits appears reasonable. Do the students get a warning and then a demerit?

1. Children who think they can do anything.
2. Parents who make sure their children are not wrong.

I dislike the fines, but this is EXACTLY the way things like this should be tried out. Try things at relatively small scale and on a population that volunteers for it. This is exactly the way medical research is carried out. If you want the cancer treatment that looks promising, but might not actually work, you have to volunteer to get it and it's available to a limited number of people.

Contrast this with what we usually do: entire school districts, or worse, entire states, or MUCH worse, the whole country tries some harebrained scheme, or even some halfway decent sounding scheme, which turns out to have real problems. Take No Child Left Behind, for example. Testing to measure performance sounds like a really good idea. Could we perhaps have tried it out on a smaller group than the whole country in order to find out it doesn't work?

*I* don't like the idea, but my kids aren't going there. Leave them alone unless there's sufficient data to prove this performs worse than the default.

Incredibly good, I assume.

In evaluating the school, I think you have to first judge how well it is serving the students and families. Then things like the welfare of the teachers and the quality of the facilities. The billionaire connection is rather far down the list of things that I would be concerned about.

The summary indicated that the student body in these schools is made up almost entirely the impoverished. So I seriously doubt there are any Richy Rich's in these schools buying their way out of anything. I suspect the fines are just a way of punishing the kids without resorting to old school techniques like spanking them, or disruptive techniques like suspension (which would take them out of class and disrupt the whole goal of their education). It's a bit unconventional, but considering how poorly the traditional system has worked in Chicago in the past, I can hardly blame them for trying something different.

Frankly, I suspect the whole impetus behind these complaints isn't coming from the parents of these kids so much as from the teacher's unions who want to smear the very idea of charter schools.

In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S., I think that those who still CHOOSE to help our ailing schools should be praised, not chastised, for the policies of one particular charter school (and I don't even find their policy that egregious in the first place).

So you're fine with private organizations imposing fines on a whim? And that a school teaches its students to submit to such arbitrary authority?

And the rich pay less than their fair share of taxes because they have used the power their riches bring to bring it about. They deserve no more praise than a mugger who calls an ambulance for his victim would.

It's nice to know that not *all* rich people are just greedy pricks who would say "fuck all" to the poor.

The rich are like politicians or lawyers: there might be a few who are honest or even decent, but as a group, they have earned their reputation.

Step 1: Give schools millions so they can provide inexpensive education to poor kids and so indirectly give millions to poor kids
Step 2: Impose trivial fines sufficient to get parents attention focused on educational problems
Step 3: Smarter and more responsible kids with involved parents.

Works for me.

> In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S., ...

What, as opposed to the 47% of citizens that now net zero federal taxes [nytimes.com] at all? That the top 1% already pays 40% of the national tax burden? I'm not in either group, but even I can see that's not exactly "fair"...

They're not imposing fines on a whim. You sent your kids to their school, their rules were agreed to. I disagree with some of the rules (they get fined for hot chips? really?), but if I chose to send my kids to that school, I chose to make it so that every bag of chips my kid brings is expensive. Any organization can impose fees and fines on member who agree to abide by certain rules. You can avoid those fees and fines by severing your affiliation with the group. In this case by enrolling your kid in a normal public school.

You're making several assumptions here. The first and most important is that every rich person agrees with what every other rich person does. Let's say you and I are both billionaires. I spend a lot of money lobbying to make sure that the fourth jet purchased by any single person is tax deductible. You buy a fourth jet and your accountant deducts it from this year's taxes. Does that make you culpable? Maybe in some ways, but in all probability you didn't even know the damned thing was deductible when you bought it. You might have been perfectly fine just paying the extra taxes. Warren Buffet has been rather vocal that he feels he should be paying more taxes than he is. Does that make him culpable for a tax rate he didn't have anything to do with setting?

But again, does that mean we shouldn't reward positive behavior? Maybe if enough rich people receive enough positive feedback, more of them will be more willing to help. Even one billionaire parting with even 5% of his/her fortune is able to make more of a difference than I could if I gave away everything I ever made.

Actual, better pretty much any group than Public Sector Unions.

Fix the System:

1. Triple every teacher's salary
2. Eliminate Collective Bargaining and Tenure, replacing with individually negotiated Employment Contracts with a maximum 3-year term.
3. Teachers without Employment Contracts have their salaries available for merit-based increase biennially.
3. Eliminate Pensions.

In short, make teachers' jobs like most every other valued job for which you want constant strong competition among skilled employees and potential employees.

You made some good points. In the area of these additional charges, I'd just like to add that these "fees" may drive parent interaction with their children more than the mere inconvenience of arranging backup transportation (in a public transit rich area). A parent's responsibility doesn't end with food and shelter, but by and far most seem to completely abdicate responsibility for education to the state. I assume that the parents in this case are already marginally involved in their children's education as a charter school is involved, that at least should be applauded. This may mean that these parents will be even more encouraged to intercede with the education process as they will want to make sure the school does not become unaffordable through payment of the additional detention services.

If you have seen the sheer amount of graffiti in your average inner city school, you would understand that this rule is not as silly as it sounds. If you want to create a positive educational environment, one of the first steps is not having gang tags splayed on every open surface in your school.

It is troubling that we have to get to this to impose discipline, and it sure raises a few eyebrows. But on a whim? They aren't. These are infractions. Yes, not having your shirt buttoned or chewing gum, those are behavioral infractions. Fining over them can be argued to be questionable, but flagging these kind of things as infractions is perfectly reasonable. You need to get off your cornbread boundaries and visit other countries with more successful education systems than ours - wearing a proper school uniform is typically one of their common features. There are many reasons why this is so, and it is not rocket science why it works and why it is necessary.

It's called discipline, something that apparently you were never exposed to during your primary and secondary education.

Exactly. Billionaire/corporate greed is easy to understand, rooted in money. Political greed is the scary one. Rooted in the domination and megalomania of ruling over other people because they are smaller than me and I know better than them.

Fortunately, that day will never come.

It's impossible to "fully fund" public education because however much funding public education gets the result will be that it's not enough. The proof is in this question: how much money constitutes "all the money they need"?

The answer, never given explicitly, is always "more".

Yes, lets thank rich people for giving a donation that benefits themselves (or their family and friends) that is then a direct tax deduction so that they can say "Look at all the good we did" while depriving the government from being able to provide that same money across the whole and helping where the money is really needed...

(Yes, I realize some rich people really do give to help the whole, but you can not assume that; and if they claim a tax deduction for that donation then as I far as I am concerned this was nothing more than a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in disguise)

My SO works in the DC office responsible for training the evaluators who assess teachers in the classroom. I don't know exactly how it worked under Rhee, but I do know the way it works now... about half of teacher evaluations are based on standardized test scores, and the other half is based on in-class observation by professional evaluators.

No one is going to argue that teachers can overcome the strong influences of parental involvement and other exogenous factors. However, of the things that can be dealt with in the school, teacher quality is likely the most important. If year after year you have a teacher whose students show no improvement at all and there are other teachers in the same school (and even same subject) who students do show improvement, what do you do?

There are in fact efforts to identify high quality teachers and disseminate their practices to the rest of the teaching population (this was my SO's last work project), so it's not as if there are no resources going into actually improving the quality of teachers in the classroom. However, the fact remains that in many cases you have teachers who may very well be veterans of the classroom but who frankly aren't all that good at their job. Tenure for primary and secondary teachers in this day and age doesn't make sense - you need to be able to fire poor performers.

I agree with the gist of what you are saying.

Growing up, I studied in schools which were fairly strict (including uniforms), where you'd be punished if your shoe was not polished well. Looking back, that sense of discipline has served me well in everything I do.

I think parenting also plays a role, but it's more of a case of values: good parents imbibe their children with fundamental values around work ethics, integrity, honesty, the value of hard work, good education and ambition. To an extent, friends and family also play a role in how children perceive this.

Both my parents are extremely well educated, but my Mom decided to stay at home to take care of me when I was born, dropping her doctoral studies. In a way, that sense of parental responsibility speaks volumes and it is hard not to be raised with a similar sense of responsibility when your parents continuously demonstrate it.

Now, I am sure there is also an element of nature vs. nurture, but those seem few and far between.

I find that education today has become largely impersonal, and the vast majority of the teachers and the parents don't seem to have a personal, vested interest in individuals. They both look to the system, and the system as a whole is a joke.

I've heard that one of the reasons kids from Asian families do well in education is because culturally, the family and friends push education, and those values get absorbed. You see this to an extent with a lot of Jewish families, as well, where education and achievement is pushed. But you only mostly see it in immigrant and first generation families -- once they get acclimatized, those values slowly fade away.

Things like financial penalties are basically an attempt at getting parents involved and interested in a child's education, but that is clearly not working well enough. Unless people take a genuine interest in education all around (including family, friends, and lastly, the teachers), this problem is not going to be fixed.

Or take a look at the South Korean and Japanese systems for a counter example. Uniforms are the norm and kids are well behaved. I grew up in a developed country where uniforms were also the norm, and though the education system was not on par to a developed country one, we certainly knew how to behave (and they certainly knew how to add fractions and read after finishing HS, guarantees that we cannot make in the US.)

Uniforms are one of the many tools to instill discipline, an integral part of education. It is also a good way to identify kids that are skipping school (and more importantly, if they are found/seen performing acts of vandalism, which always occurs. Teens will be teens no matter the country.) Suit yourself if you really and truly believe that is a sign of totalitarianism, treating education as it was meant to be a democratic, free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want institution (it never has been.)

Calling them a sign of totalitarianism does not make it so. Having a school police is not a sign of totalitarianism either. In particular in the US where we have a plague of mindless vandalism and violence, you need a police force to ensure kids of school age are in school during school ours. In Japan, they do not have a school police because the social norms in place makes that unnecessary. In Japan, it would be a sign of totalitarianism. In the US, is a sign of necessity (and a sad indictment of our social norms.)

Does asking kids to clean their class room (as done in Japan) is a sign of totalitarianism? Does asking not to wear excessive jewelery or chewing gum like a mindless cow during a lecture is a sign of totalitarianism? You are out of your freaking mind if you really believe so.

Yes, the Scandinavian countries do not have uniforms nor school police either. Neither they have strict rules as in Japan or Korea. But that does not mean that we in the US can do the same. Our conduct and perceptions on education are nothing compared to the ones in the Scandinavia countries, or in Japan or Korea or Brazil. We do not have a pre-university education system. We have instead a 12-year long babysitting system were people can go through and learn nothing.

But don't let that get in the way to your argument. Let's leave education in the US running as usual, and let's keep doing what we are doing and give kids all the freedom they want. It seems to be working wonders for us, right, right?

I agree, any group that receives 80% of the profits from society should pay 80% of the costs of society. The fact they get away with 40% seems more than a little "unfair". The proportion of wealth in the hands of the rich is increasing, that seems like clear proof that they aren't paying their fair share.

School uniforms can have another really useful benefit - they reduce the differences between kids in a good way. Allowing kids to wear their own clothes to school fuels the kind of hierarchical society in schools where the haves and the have nots are distinguished by their dressing. They needlessly cause pressure on parents to supply their kids with the latest and greatest fashion so that their kids do not look out of place. And schools do not have to police what students are wearing as much.