Jersey Jazzman calls out New Jersey’s leading newspaper for making really surprising comments about a charter school in Hoboken.
The Hola charter school is innovative, and parents are lining up to get their kids in. It gets high test scores, and only 11% of its students are poor in a district where 72% of the kids are poor.
JJ writes:
Let’s recap: there’s a charter school that takes far fewer kids in poverty than the neighboring public schools. It does a “terrific job,” but — and this isn’t me saying this, but the Star-Ledger itself — that’s only because the charter serves so few kids in poverty. So it’s not fair to compare Hola to the public schools — again, even the S-L admits this — because they don’t serve the same children. And every dollar Hola takes away from the Hoboken school district is a dollar that doesn’t go to children who live in poverty — the children who are more expensive to educate than the children who, the S-L acknowledges, go to Hola. Everyone clear on this? OK…
Now, let’s get something straight about what is happening in Hoboken.
It is a tiny district. It has three charter schools. The charter schools serve the white and black middle-class residents of the city, while the public schools are for the poor and non-white.
I think this used to be called racial segregation.
Whatever happened to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision?
Yeah, that was sixty years ago, but is it a dead letter?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not just racial segregation, but sorting based on class.
In the US, class often speaks in the language of race.
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These charters obviously hold the answer to low achievement among American schools competing in the international testing derbies: make schools whiter and richer.
My question here: Where are the Advancement Project and NAACP lawyers to challenge such practices? We know there is nothing for Obama’s Justice Dept. can do, since they would be found complicit in erecting the most class and racially segregated system that American corporations could conceive.
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Perhaps a parent could simply put forward a case? I’d love to hear from some lawyers on this topic.
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Unfortunately its not just charters that are causing racial segregation, although the charter school movement certainly adds to it. Here in Tucson, TUSD and all the parties worked on a plan to get the district out from under a decades-old desegregation order. That plan, the USP, is the best and perhaps last hope for desegregating the district both in terms of integration and in terms of closing the achievement gap. Notwithstanding, the new Superintendent’s new legal team is systematically challenging that plan while creating obstacles to its implementation. The Board, which voted the Plan in, AND hired the Superintendent, seem blissfully unaware that it is being dismantled in front of their eyes. Apparently it is okay with them that the numbers are being fiddled with instead of the problem being solved. As a supporter of many of these same people’s initiatives, it is really disappointing and outrageous to watch this play out. Meanwhile, the district is challenging the payment of the plaintiff’s lawyers (3) while continuing to pay their own (4).
So in answer to Where are the AP and NAACP lawyers? They are there (in this case its MALDEF and a lawyer for the African American plaintiffs) and doing legion work, all the while under attack by not only the district itself (who, after all, has been found guilty of allowing segregation to continue) but also by a quiescent board that doesn’t (at least publicly) intervene in the legal course the district is following.And of course, while the adults hash this out, the kids are the losers.
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For Twitter: Just copy, paste and ReTweet as often as possible
How many poor kids does the private Hola Charter School have
In a community where 72% of children live in poverty
http://bit.ly/1fERXlc
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To Jim Horn – On the PISA tests US white students score higher then all predominantly white countries other than Finland. They also score very close to the Singapore average.
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And look, it worked too! NJDOE spokesman Michael Yaple actually cited the biased, data free editorial as a rationale for the approval.
http://mothercrusader.blogspot.com/2014/03/njdoe-spokesman-cites-biased-data-free.html
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See, Charters are not public, but they are public, but they are not public, but only for the purpose of receiving public funds. So, as private schools Brown v. Board of Education does not apply. Makes sense?
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