Jersey Jazzman connects the dots about school closings.
Do they close in white neighborhoods? No.
Do they close in affluent neighborhoods? No.
Guess where they close? In high-poverty neighborhoods.
My guess: the white and affluent neighborhoods are next.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Would seem more likely that a direct conversion to charter schools in affluent & white neighborhoods would be more likely than the closure route. These folks have both the political clout and the resources to effectively fight closures.
The take-over strategy is different for disadvantaged and for affluent areas.
In disadvantaged neighborhoods the rationale used is the fear that the children cannot reach the target range of the standardized test scores in their underfunded public school so that their child may have a chance to attend college.
In affluent neighborhoods and suburbs it changes to provide a “remedy” to the worries of better-off parents — which more typically revolve around how prestigious a college their child can get into.
It will be more difficult for the schools already successful.
But that is also why one sees specialty charters approved by a state charter authorization board after rejection by the local school board.
And why the specialty charter for the affluent will use general property tax dollars to support a boutique type of education, harming funding for the local public school.
I do not believe rich suburban parents will ever allow a school to close. But hey, suburban kids have resources because they have parents that know how to advocate for them. We allow poor kids to go to schools that are grossly underfunded. Here is my solution. Lets promote for teachers and administrators to live in the community they work in so they have the voting right to change the policies they teach under and help poor kids. Before I retire, I hope to see our poor kids have a fighting chance with learning how to read and having role models that move them away from the school to prison pipeline. If we can solve these two problems then the reformers will leave. I hope every educator has a great new year and god bless you ALL! When we realize that this is not a union issue, a privatize agenda but a human being issue, we will solve our problems. Lets start speaking for kids, not our self interest!
Several inner-city districts, such as Chicago, already require that teachers live in the city, and it doesn’t seem to have helped. And we ARE speaking for kids. Our teaching conditions are their learning conditions.
I’m frankly tired of people accusing teachers of only advocating “our self interest.” All teachers I know of advocate for students all the time, but we also need to feed our own families. I don’t see how that is a “selfish” thing.
I speak for my kids everyday…all the time….for 25 years and I am a unionized teacher. Do not stereotype or make sweeping generalizations. You do not know what you are talking about.
My working conditions and my students’ learning conditions are one in the same. Teachers KNOW this…deformers do not.
They also refer to teachers as human capital and children as assets. Spare your human being issue for Gates, Rhee, Bloomberg, Klein, Coleman, Kopp, White and fill in the name of the newest reformy philanthropimp here___________.
We get. We live it. They don’t.
Sorry George but we don’t insist police officers live in the neighborhoods they police. I’ll be honest, I teach at school on the corner of two streets with the highest murder rate in Los Angeles. I’m not going to live there. My job is stressful enough. When I go home, I want it to be in a neighborhood that is safe where neighbors look
out for each other. I don’t live in a rich neighborhood, it is working to middle class- but I can walk my dog at midnight if I want. There is no school to prison pipeline. There are kids who make bad decisions due often to bad parenting. Kids who want to succeed do.
The affluent will be able to insulate themselves, unless there is a broader political/ideological agenda that will eventually victimize the reasonable despite their wealth.
This is all a part of the conversion to fascism that is almost done here in the U.S. Remember the defination of fascism is corporations running the government and that is just what we have here backed up all the way to the so called Supreme Court in Citizens United and other decisions for the corporations and not for the people and their rights. The sooner most understand this the easier it will be to deal with the problem before it is too late.
Those corporatist privatizers truly believe that they have a divine right to own it all and that we are only there to serve them and for no other reason. They are “True Believers.” What they do not understand is that when they take us down they go down with us. They are way too arrogant to understand that simple truth though.
They go after these particular sectors as they are the ones easiest to overcome. They are not as connected and do not have the wealth and sophistication along with the time to fight back. Also, in 1996 Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act which wiped out a free press and that was certainly not an accident. No real information for most, makes the takeover easier as we then control the information and only for our benefit. Simple mind control and psychological warfare is all it is. And when you have the best in the business doing it against the least sophisticated the general result is easy to predict most of the time. What they have forgotten is that other percentage where it is not all in the bag. Recently, in the last election in L.A. on Measure J which was for a 1/2 cent sales tax until 2069 for $90 billion in transportation we prevented this passage with very little time and very little money. If you work hard and fight together and use your heads much can be done with some luck. We beat back $90 billion in under three weeks with under $25,000. We do not know if this has ever been done before yet it was this time and if that can happen it can happen again. This is what they forgot about.
“Remember the defination of fascism is corporations running the government and that is just what we have here backed up all the way to the so called Supreme Court in Citizens United…” This definition is incorrect. It is a “straw man” definition designed to fit your argument against fascism.
Webster: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
If the goal is to hurt those from minority and impoverished backgrounds somehow, then leaving schools alone (ie making no attempt to close them, fix them, support them) is what we’d likely see. While closing a school may not be helpful, it is also not likely meant to be harmful, as it costs more money in the short-term to reorganize than to leave alone, and reorganization may also lead to some of “those kids” getting moved to higher income schools.
I’m wondering what motivation you see in closing schools?
Fiscal insolvency?
In NY the plan has been to set a 2% tax cap that schools can not stay within and still remain viable. Many districts are on the verge of financial collapse. Schools have been cutting staff since 2008. Very soon now the tactic will result in bankruptcy for many districts. When schools can no longer meet their mandates within the fund limitations, we will see what the true plan is. Will it be the consolidation of districts? Will it be breaking the unions? Will it be a new charter law? Will we loose the retirement system, or seniority? I believe the coming financial crisis will be a manufactured “emergency” that requires desperate measures giving Carte Blanche to the the powers that be “for the sake of the kids”. It won’t be long now. It feels as though the media has been softening up the public for years now to prepare them to accept major changes to education and teachers rights.
Your cooment is so well put! I could not agree more.
My guess is that, having used the urban school districts as a beachhead for privatization, so-called reformers will now go after poor and working class districts in inner-ring suburbs, many of which are facing the same issues that urban schools have had to deal with for decades.
It will be a while before the Scarsdales of the world face the prospect of school closings. If and when that happens, then it’s all over, and the defromers will have won.