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Margaret Burns - if you actually believe that the reason students are becoming ill, crying and disliking school is tied to private or charter schools, you indeed have drank vast quantities of the Kool-Aid. While I believe these schools who have received funding and failed to open should be investigated, I believe there is a deeper underlying agenda present. I don't think this is the place to get into that conversation - but Mrs. Burns, let me make one thing very clear to you. If public schools were actually teaching the students information, no wait, accurate and truthful, and useful information, then there would be a higher attendance at your public schools. The public school system has failed. Failed America and most disheartening, failed the youth, the student. They have failed because of the influence that politics has had in the content that public schools are instructed to teach. Today, public school students are taught to take a test. A very specific test. In fact in the Atlanta airport, during a flight delay, I struck up a conversation with an older lady. I found out where she was from - near my town and asked what she did. She told me she was a teacher - for 35 years, in the Killeen ISD. I then asked, "What do you teach?" Her response floored me, but rung with such truth and honesty, I could only shake my head. She looked at me and replied, "Nothing." I paused for a moment to allow the magnitude of that revelatory comment to sink in. She just told me, "I teach nothing to our kids." Not because she's lazy and plays crossword puzzles or mahjong, it's because the polity of public school system has become so bogged down with garbage and a pure focus on taking some ridiculous test for money that she spoke volumes of truth. Even the material has changed over the years. Not toward the truth, but toward POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. Of course that falls smack dab in the middle of said agenda of prwatch and every single entity attached. Liberalism to the nth degree. I can feel myself about to go on a tangent of the hypocrisy of claiming to provide UNBIASED reporting and investigative analysis. Only unbiased if you are a devout liberal! So yes, private schools and charter schools are necessary. They are necessary so that the United States of American can continue to be competitive in the market place. They are necessary to prevent America from becoming a state of ignorant sheep. Our country needs a desperate change and I don't mean the kind that your guy POTUS has brought upon us, but real change - good change. Our public schools need the same. They need a revival. A revival of truth, character and integrity. A revival of the purpose in which teachers felt "called" to this profession. To actually teach - to make a positive influence upon a generation that is coming after them, but to whom the state of our country rests squarely upon their shoulders.