By Tom Henderson • Staff Writer • 

DeVos protest sprung on three days notice

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Comments

Treehouse

we are never more faithful to our great nation's founding than when we respectfully express our opinion to our fellow citizens in public.

Joel2828

Interesting to see that it was the OEA who was in town passing out the signs. Hmmm? Let's think about this...If Secretary DeVos was able to make it possible for poor kids to pack up and leave public schools and go to private schools who would be financially harmed and lose their power? Hmmm...The guy passing out the signs (and those he represents)???

Lulu

Wow--pre-printed signs. Can't we demonstrate more creativity in messages?

tagup

That’s a pretty big “if” when the vouchers don’t cover all the private school costs.....

Sally G

I'm proud of our community members for taking a stand. This is democracy!

Don Dix

Stephanie Findley, who chairs the Democratic Party’s Yamhill County organization said -- “We shouldn’t be talking about vouchers. We should be talking about paying our public school teachers.”

As usual, the fragmented political talking points and the solution is more money -- really?

When the average overall cost to put a teacher in a classroom (in this district) is approaching $100K, and the contracted school year is 73% of a normal work year, possibly Betsy DeVos isn't the one that is so misguided or out of touch.

Joel2828

Sally wrote "I'm proud of our community members for taking a stand. This is democracy!"

You forgot to mention that it wasn't really our community (other than being used as puppets). It was outsiders (OEA) that came in and stirred all this up and even handed out the signs. That's not democracy. That's kind of the protest version of fake news. Fake protest?

Snoopdog

Families that choose to send their children to private schools are paying twice. That is the issue here about vouchers. It's called "pro-choice", not as in abortion, but as in schools. ....another issue: One reason that the test scores might be high at Mac High, for math at least, is because of a former employee who was a trial test-taker for the Governor's Association's million dollar "smarter balance" common core math test. This was to calibrate it's grading scale. Following, in 2013, she led a day-long seminar for the district instructing every math teacher of the topics what were on the so called "smarter balance" math test for his or her respective grade level. Then those math teachers were expected to altar their curriculum for the next few months to include those items, so that their students would do well on the test. Is that against the rules? I doubt Mac High would open itself up to legal liability over test scores, but it goes to show that top-down control over the curriculum from Common Core does cause schools to teach to the test.

Jim

Snoopdog you’re right on the money with common core and teaching to a test. It’s all smoke and mirrors. I’ve always contended that each child needs the basic skills in reading,math,History,the sciences and writing. But you can’t teach the same thing to a kid in New York as a kid in Heppner Oregon when they get to high school. Kids no longer have any sort of life skills classes that fit their needs. In high school they need to be prepared for the real adult world and I think we have failed miserably in that part of education.

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