Mike Klonsky explains that the corporate reform of education can’t be the civil rights issue of our time because it disproportionately hurts black and Hispanic children. It closes their neighborhood schools. It encourages or ignores segregation. It tolerates and practices high suspension rates for black children.
If reform is supposed to help black and Hispanic children, it has been a failure.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Schools are more racially segregated than at any time since the 1954 Supreme Court’s Brown decision.” We can thank growing income inequality, privatization, real estate red lining patterns, an ineffective DOJ and, of course, President Obama, a man that brought us so much “hope and change.”
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As I was doing some quick research for a PTA presentation on the original 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of which the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is the latest reauthorization, latest version of the original 1965 law; I was totally struck by this line in wikipedia “Historical context [of ESEA 1965 law]
In its original conception, Title I under the ESEA, was designed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to close the skill gap in reading, writing and mathematics between children from low-income households who attend urban or rural school systems and children from the middle-class who attend suburban school systems.”
51 years later and how many millions, billions, trillions of dollars spent at the federal level, plus money, as mandated by the federal law, spent at the state and local levels? and for what benefit to disadvantaged children in a classroom? How many more new programs are still using this line as the justification of their existance? All day kindergarten, now all day pre-k, and how many political supporters have been made richer as they “help” close the achievement gap? Perhaps no version of a federal law is what is required to close the achievement gap. Perhaps it is that very long distance micro management that is burdening resources of school systems and burdening principals and teachers at the local school from doing more for the students in their care.
51 years to solve this problem…. ridiculous.
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51 years to solve this problem and precious little to show for it.
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Klonsky is OUT of his mind and completely WRONG, wrong, wrong!
Education is THE civil rights movement of this century as more children and families who are of color or socio-economically disadvantaged are being ever more segregated and given a sub-standard education in the privatization movement.
Charters and vouchers are not improving educational and cognitive outcomes; they are, for the most part (just look at the CREDO study) worsening it.
We must fight for the cilvi rights of children by militantly defending their right to a free and appropriate education. In Norway, this would never be an issue because we believe in and live, for the most part, the virtues of the collective, common good. It is never easy, but the fruits harvested far outweigh the costs of “socialized pooling of resources”. Your country used to be, some 50 to 70 years ago, far more like ours than it is now.
Americans could take a long good lesson from Norwegians, I think. We are not superior to you. But we have learned some very hard lessons.
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I think you misunderstood the post. You are not disagreeing with Klonsky. The operant word is education *reform* (sic).
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Klonsky is using the language and reasoning that “reformers” give for needing charters. He then goes on to explain that the irony of their movement is that they have caused the opposite to happen. Schools are more imbalanced than ever.
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Dienne, I understand what you are saying, but Retired Teacher corroborated and restated my very point. Thank you for your feedback, however, and I enjoy reading your insights always.
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It seems to be mostly white folks paid very well to spout the corporate reform line who claim that promoting privatization of public schools is a “civil rights issue”. But as soon as any African-Americans in the education reform movement who actually care about civil rights raise the topic of outrageously high suspension rates of elementary school children of color, or Black Lives Matter, those very same white folks decide they are very “uncomfortable”. And of course, their “comfort” is what matters most. Their “comfort” means that they don’t want any African-Americans in the reform movement saying anything that might “bother” those white billionaires who underwrite their organizations and make sure their (very high) paid jobs are safe. If it means a white reformer needs to chastise the African-Americans for making a white billionaire or his underlings “uncomfortable”, then they are more than happy to do so. After all, their own “comfort” is at stake. That’s far more important than the lives of the “unworthy” kids whose lives most certainly do NOT matter to them nearly as much as their own nice paycheck does.
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Just as schoolchildren are used as props when politicians and billionaire malanthropists show up in schools for a photo op, so too have Black and Latino students been used as props in the so-called reform narrative.
This sinister alchemy, whereby public goods are transformed into private assets, and which would make Orwell’s head explode, turn public school closings, wholesale firings of Black educators followed by colonization by privileged temps, diversion of public resources to private entities and the establishment of segregated, Skinner Box sweatshops into “the civil rights issue of our time.”
Everything these people say and do is a lie, based on lies, in the service of lies.
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It doesn’t help that people like Marin Luther King III, son of Martin Luther King Jr., are out there advocating for a separate but equal system.
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School “reform” IS the civil rights issue of our time. And, just like Jim Crow laws, school “reform” must be stopped.
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