After weeks of being mostly bashed in online comments at www.wwpinfo.com, the proposed Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS) received some supporttive posts in the last two weeks.
“Communities start charter schools for different reasons. A VoTech school is an alternative that meets a need the home districts abandoned. Should we dismantle VoTechs too?
“A language-immersion charter school supplies a need — foreign language fluency and deep cultural comprehension. The home districts do not offer a path to this vital skill. The shame is in pretending they do. The shame is in pretending that we do not deserve choice or that the home districts should not have to compete for our tax dollars.
“From K-12, our students invest less than half the time on foreign language as they do on math. If people complain that our children cannot compete with other developed nations in math literacy then we really should not brag about our foreign language skills.”
As good as WW-P’s current language instruction may be, some people believe it can and should be better: “People who oppose PIACS have not tried to work in another country using their basic foreign language background. Try going to Mexico to do a deal with the Spanish you learned in school. Can you hold a conversation in the language that you studied growing up? I can’t! How can we expect to compete in a global economy when the people we negotiate with speak our language and we don’t speak theirs?
“China just passed Japan as the world’s second largest economy. The days when English is the only important language for business are over. This school could teach children to be truly bilingual, truly global and will make them ambidextrous in their thinking. And, even better, it will force the other public schools in the area to work that much harder to compete. This will improve the education for students across the board in our region. This is not a threat to anyone’s kids, it’s a threat to the complacency in our education system. We should all welcome that.”
“Don’t we want innovation in our public schools? Our public schools — even the good ones — need competition so that they don’t become complacent. They don’t want it, of course. But it’s good for the students. Studies show that when charter schools come to a school district, ALL the schools improve because they have real competition for their students. People in other school districts actually moved here from other parts of New Jersey last year to get their kids in. Why not give our families this option, and make our school district even stronger?”
Rocky Procaccini’s letter in the October 22 issue criticizing Rush Holt for supporting charter schools drew critcism from several online visitors. Sandra Shapiro wrote that “HR 6036, introduced this summer by Holt, has nothing to do with charter schools. Rather, the bill is about improving foreign language study in existing public schools.
“The bill calls for standards in foreign language education and provides incentives for teacher training as well as technical assistance to elementary and secondary schools. The bill would encourage foreign language study from kindergarten through 12th grade.”
Bread and butter issues still matter, even online. Commenting on the proposed makeover of the Acme center, a reader posted this:
“It doesn’t matter if it is a village. We need a basic supermarket. I don’t care what it looks like, it is green, red or purple, as long as I can just buy my food and get out of there as quickly as possible. You people think way too much about these things.
“We live in little ol’ West Windsor, not Boston or Miami Beach.”
