Amanda Koonlaba, a teacher in Mississippi, reminds us of the origins and purpose of school choice: racial segregation.
How soon we forget.
Only two countries have adopted school choice: Chile and Sweden. Main effect: increased segregation by social class, economics, and religion.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I really don’t want to live in a country with the few HAVES and a whole lot of HAVE NOTS. The privatization of public schools will widen the already HUGE CAVERN between the few rich and the rest of us.
They invaded the world of the have nots with TFA and then tried to put a knife in it for good with charters and all the policies of the past 25 years to get rid of unions, etc.
I heard this morning about Malia Obama working on the set of Girls this summer, at 17 years old. Opportunities like that don’t come to the have nots. The year before she worked with Halle Berry. Meanwhile, jobs for the have nots are hard to come by. http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/malia-obama-interning-on-girls-set-this-summer-work-with-lena-dunham-201557
The 1% look out for each other and themselves. Let the rest of us eat cake.
This is from Sweden, in 2010:
“School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.
“I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality,” said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament’s education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.
In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.”
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/sweden-schools-idUSL4N0JK32620131210#79WW0j0vtCLuikzs.99
This is the most amazing part:
“The opposition Green Party – like the Moderates long-time supporters of privately run schools but now backing the clamp-down – issued a public apology in a Swedish daily last month headlined “Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”.
Can you imagine a US political party issuing an APOLOGY?
It would never happen 🙂
If enough evidence can be presented about the resultant segregation from “choice,” maybe it’s time for a civil rights lawsuit. Even if the ruling said something like, you can still have charters, but you can’t use public money, it would take the wind out of the sails of privatization. This would be a victory. Even if the ruling were, the school should reflect the demographics of the community. It would be a step in the right direction. The time may be right for a challenge.
Correction: , it
Subsidized Choice. Mercedes Schneider has posted a link to the ESEA reauthorization that will be voted on Dec 2 or 3, no amendments allowed. That means the draft, likely to pass, is a done deal and done in a manner to make it impossible for citizens to have any say on the final draft.
The bill, called the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” is here: 2015 The Full “Every Student Succeeds Act” Legislation To Be Voted On 12/2 By Congress | Exceptional Delaware
or here https://www.scribd.com/…/every-student-succeeds-act-conference-report-1- pdf
I have looked over ESSA.
Several sections caught my attention.
1. Support for the expansion of charter schools is generous. There are huge incentives for expansions that represent “variety” meaning urban, suburban, rural schools along with incentives for facilities construction and financing schemes for start-ups and expansions of charter school chains. Charter school allocations over the four-year life of this reauthorization is $1,140, 000, 000.
Congress is saying, in effect, we want to privatize education with massive subsidies from federal funds, while pretending these are public schools. They are not public schools. Indeed there are “waivers” and exemptions for these schools embedded in the reauthorization. The line-by-line text bearing on charters begins on page 518 and runs to page 574, but the over all text (over 1,000 pages) has 816 references to charter schools.
2. The legislation offers competitive grants for “eligible entities” to begin or improve pay-for-performance compensation and/or “human capital management systems” in schools. There is ample proof that pay-for-performance schemes do NOT improve student achievement. The reference to “human capital management systems” is another way to say that teaching is not a profession and that the biggest problem with all workers in schools is inadequate management of “human capital”—a phrase that economists also use to describe students. The aim is to rearrange students and staff to fit someone’s view of more effective and efficient operations with the aid of “objective measures “ of performance. Here is part of the language
‘‘SEC. 2212. TEACHER AND SCHOOL LEADER INCENTIVE
FUND GRANTS., begins on page 351
‘‘(a) GRANTS AUTHORIZED.—From the amounts reserved by the Secretary under section 2201(1), the Secretary shall award grants, on a competitive basis, to eligible entities to enable the eligible entities to develop, implement, improve, or expand performance-based compensation systems or human capital management systems, in schools served by the eligible entity.
Proposals must include….a description of how the eligible entity will develop and implement a fair, rigorous, valid, reliable, and objective process to evaluate teacher, principal, or other school leader performance under the system that is based in part on measures of student academic achievement, including the baseline performance against which evaluations of improved performance will be made….
3. Beginning on page 318 there is double-speak on seeking highly qualified personnel, and then opening all of the doors for bypasses of formal preparation of teachers by…. “Carrying out programs that establish, expand, or improve alternative routes for State certification of teachers (especially for teachers of children with disabilities, English learners, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or other areas where the State experiences a shortage of educators), principals, or other school leaders, for—‘‘(I) individuals with a baccaaureate or master’s degree, or other advanced degree; ‘‘(II) mid-career professionals from other occupations; (III) paraprofessionals; ‘‘(IV) former military personnel; and‘ ‘(V) recent graduates of institutions of higher education with records of academic distinction who demonstrate the potential to become effective teachers, principals, or other school leaders.”
4. The bill substitutes the phrase “well-rounded education” for a list of core subjects in the old bill that included. The bill offers special incentives for schools to work on science, technology, engineering, mathematics, computer science, literacy, civics, history, mental health, and so on, while prohibiting the Secretary of Education from exercising influence of this kind.
Good luck on “close reading.” Everyone who is engaged in education will have four years of this version of micromanaging, competitive grants, and perks for the most effective and well-healed lobbyists.
What bothers me is that intent of Title 1 is supposed to be to pay to pay for direct services for the poorest of the poor. There are few of the poorest of the poor in charter schools. This is another example of the government showing partiality to charters, and, I fear, it will allow charters to siphon even more funding from cash strapped public schools.
Thanks! just started reading the bill, and am already writing my protest letter to my Representative. So it seems politicians believe one of the things worth saving from NCLB was it’s school privatization rotten, rotten core. Trying to see the humor in the fact that the “The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions” intends to push school privatization, which negatively affects the Health and Educational outcomes for the majority of public-school students in cities with charter schools and undermines the Labor of dedicated life-long school teachers and employees by replacing them with a few temps and dilettantes who don’t realize that they too, one day, might need something of a Pension.
Sad to see that Bernie Sanders is on the committee.
The vague wording sounds like a slush fund for charters. It is a bad idea to shift funding from what was categorical funding to a competitive grant. If crooks are running the state, they can deny public schools submission and send funding to their charter pals. Likewise, on evaluation, although VAM is not mentioned, the wording is vague enough that they can reject all forms of evaluation except some absurd algorithm. It also sounds like anyone in charters can “teach” compensatory students. ELLs and struggling readers can work with untrained staff, not professionals. There is an open door for all kinds of abuse in such a vaguely written document.
Why are there specialized high schools in NYC? Does everyone know that Stuyvesant is the #1 rated high school in the country, but only has 1% population of black students? AND this is in NYC where the population of minorities in public schools are 75%. What? Want to talk about segregation?
I feel another Nazi metaphor growing inside me…
Michelle Rhee is on the Board of Miracle Gro. Surprisingly (given her prior rhetoric), the photos at the company website, where board members chart company direction, show a top management that, demographically, appears to lack diversity.
Minority representation on the profit side of the businesses, that the self-appointed “reformers” run and/or own, provide a clear picture of their inaction relative to the civil rights movement, which provokes skepticism about their glomming on to high ideas.
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