According to a guest post for EduShyster by high school teacher Keith Benson, The taxpayers of Camden, New Jersey, will spend $82 million to build a practice facility for the Philadelphia 76ers at the same time it is laying off hundreds of school teachers. The new facility will provide 50 low-wage seasonal jobs. This clarifies the priorities of the political leaders of Camden and New Jersey. Education last. Students last.
As Benson writes, “At every turn, the mayor and the *leadership* of Camden start with the assumption that the solution to our city’s problems lies in the hands of outside others. Hence our city leaders are now placing their hopes in corporate-led charter school chains, like Mastery Charter Schools, UnCommon Schools and KIPP (please YouTube some clips of their respective pedagogical techniques), to be staffed with mostly white Teach for America corps members who will only temporarily fill the role of teacher to children desperately needing quality educational leaders and stability. This despite the fact our public schools serve a citizenry mired in generational and concentrated poverty (due largely to historic discriminatory housing and employment policies and inherent structural inequality) that greatly affects students’ scholastic outcomes.”
And so it goes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Aaargghhh!
John Merrow has a new laudatory post:
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=7075&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lmtv_takingnote+%28Taking+Note+by+John+Merrow%29
about how “serial entrepreneurs” can “train” teachers
http://springboardcollaborative.org/who-we-are/the-team/
“Springboard Summer
Our primary offering is an intensive, five-week summer literacy program for Pre-K through 3rd grade students and their families. In each of our school partners, we train their existing teachers to implement the program.
Home visits: Before programming, teachers visit the homes of their 15 students to build parent buy-in and lay the foundation for a strong partnership.
Instruction: Teachers conduct daily, half-day literacy instruction with students grouped by reading level rather than grade level.
Family workshops: Teachers lead weekly workshops that train parents on how to pick a book on their child’s reading level and what to do before, during, and after reading.
Springboard Schoolyear
Springboard’s schoolyear program trains teachers to effectively engage the families of their struggling readers to accelerate progress during the academic year. ”
And making ridiculous “growth” claims:
“Last summer, our 642 scholars replaced what could have been a 3-month reading loss with a 3.3-month reading gain, lifting their literacy trajectories by more than 6 months.”
Apparently, Merrow believes that this isn’t stuff real teachers do all the time, so we need some smart people to show us the way.
Oh, and the best part is, they have set up shop in Camden (and Philly)!
Merrow may(?) have fallen out of love with Rhee (sort of), but rephorm has stolen his heart forever. He’s a lost cause.
As for the program, I’m sure every teacher on the planet is rolling their eyes. Have leveled reading groups? Have parents read to their kids? What genius! Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before? The thing is (as any teacher probably knows), the parents who are functional enough to do this program with their kids were probably the parents already doing at least a passable job. There’s still the question of what to do with kids of parents who aren’t that functional.
I have a sign hanging over the ledge on my desk (in the air) that says “Bang head here”. If I banged it on a real wall every time I hear something like this I’d be brain dead by now.
Time to face the facts that most politicians don’t care about the poor anymore. They don’t care about quality of life for anyone but themselves and their kind. Money rules.
Donna,
So TRUE!
The only part of your post I disagree with is “anymore”. They never did.
Last year, as Rahm was privatizing Chicago schools, and shutting down 52 of them, I wrote an article for Dianne on the case of Kelo v. New London, Conn. This landmark decision said that a city could evict by public domain, an entire inner city shopping center, to then have it bought by a private investor and turned into pricey condos, etc. that would bring far more revenue to the city.
In Chicago, this seemed a probable result of gentrifying the inner city area of the South Side. It is happening all over in America. In NY, public housing has been converted to high rise condos, In LA and San Franciso it is moving forward rapidly…as with Echo Park, Highland Park, Los Feliz, Leimert Park, etc, and with the wonderful but untidy and diverse Bay area communities.
It is the same mindset that is creating this huge struggle in public education. Charters that pick the children most likely to achieve, and mandating that they wear uniforms, leaving behind the rabble of poorly clothed ELL and special ed students, are the popular mindset of the wealthy of America.
We will have a permanent underclass and how will they be dealt with by the denizens of Wall Street? Will there be a final solution imposed?
All the angst about the Middle East is overshadowed in my eyes by our own huge population of inner city kids who are being left behind as road kill.
Sorry…errata…not “public” domain eviction…meant “eminent” domain…legalese speak.
And sadly the next was the new tax subsidy of $260 million over 10 years for Holtec to build reactor parts in camden – expected employment? 100 people!? http://articles.philly.com/2014-07-12/news/51397828_1_tax-credits-state-officials-nuclear-fuel
Christie appointed a 32-year old superintendent last year who had minimal teaching (if any) experience and had come from Wall Street.
A two year and out TFAer.
Hey you guys–get over here to beautiful Chicago to protest the Rauner (ILL’ gubernatorial version of Christie)-Christie Fundraiser being held this coming Friday night, July 25th. Grab a bus & make a fuss!
I’m having some trouble seeing how gentrification is a factor based on the story alone, but not based on Camdens conditions. I think the plan for Detroit is the same. Basically, cut services and everything past the bone, make it impossible for the poor and middle class to continue to live in those areas and just generally enable depopulation of what can only be understood to be prime real estate. Detroit has all that lakefront and camden has the Delaware River. Both have good locations in relation to other cities and industries. Belle Isle off of Detroit is particularly prime for ultra high end development. By Libertarians who want to secede. http://motorcitymuckraker.com/blog/2013/01/13/birmingham-developer-offers-plan-to-buy-belle-isle-for-1-billion-secede-from-michigan/
“In their The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White rcall where words like ‘class’ and ‘classic’ come from. They stem from Latin classis, which at the origin had nothing to do with the academic or the esthetic at all. The word designated a category in Roman property and taxation law. In Tome, the classici were the most prosperous citizens, and paid the most taxes. In the second century, Aulus Gellius built a metaphor on their pecuniary preeminence, and used their name to designate the best writers. This subterranean valorization of economic power masquerading as quality has stuck to “class” ever since. In other words, in the most concrete ways, the reassuringly neutral, analytic resonances of the word “class” are achieved through a purposeful erasure of history. . . .
“As everyone reading this knows, classes decide lives. It is not only that the class you take detrmines wht class you get into. It is that in classes we learn to class.
–Terdiman, Richard. “Is There a Class in This Class?” in The New Historicism. ed. H. Aram Veeser. NY: Routeledge, 1989.