Pop quiz: what do you do when federal funding for your school is tied to performance, but the kids in your local community are too ignorant to perform?
A) Dedicate yourself to making the local students smarter.
B) Tell the federal government that NCLB is a joke.
C) Travel to China, hobnob with wealthy parents, and convince them to send their kid to your high school with a vague promise it will get them into Harvard.
If you’re a typical superintendent in America, you will go with option C.
Yahoo! News has more via the Associated Press:
Next fall, Millinocket Superintendent Ken Smith hopes to have at least 60 Chinese students — each paying $13,000 in tuition and another $11,000 for room and board — at Stearns High School. Stearns at one time had close to 700 high school students, but enrollment has fallen over the years to under 200 this year […]
When Smith went on a recruiting trip to the cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Fuzhou last fall, students there had never heard of Maine. But they knew they wanted to come to America to enhance their chances of going to an American college or university.
No word on who paid for that recruiting trip. What, you expect AP to ask hard questions about something?
Meanwhile, the local students in Millinocket – whose parents do not have the resources or the freedom to send them elsewhere – are failing. Millinocket is a working class town of less than 6,000. Stearns High, a public school, performs woefully below the state average on student performance.
So the Asian kids show up, skate through the school year, and mark on their transcripts that they were valedictorian of their class. The school uses this to pad academic performance and secure more funding. The local kids, left to fail for so many years, now have no chance to graduate at the top of their class, meaning hard work would go completely unnoticed.
For basketball fans out there, this is equal to Michael Beasley playing for Kansas State because he knew he would be the star of the team.
Of course, none of that made it into the AP report. We have American children to discourage and destroy here. More than ever, it is becoming obvious that public education is harmful to your kids.
-Candance
