Investigative journalist George Joseph writes in “The Atlantic” about the disproportionate numbers of black and Hispanic children who are suspended by charter schools, some as young as 5 or 6 years old.
He writes:
In New York City, although the charter-school student population represents just under 7 percent of the district’s total enrollment, charter schools accounted for nearly 42 percent of all suspensions, according to the latest available state data, from 2014.
Over the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years, of the 50 New York City schools with the most student suspensions, 46 were charter schools in 2013 and 48 were charter schools in 2014. Looking at suspension rates, 45 were charter schools in 2013 and 48 were charter schools in 2014. (These suspension rates control for student population and do not double-count students who receive multiple suspensions.)
An analysis of the schools with very high suspension rates found that they are concentrated in majority-black neighborhoods.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Behind the ideology of market primacy and deregulation are values that support the idea of “school choice” and high-suspension rights in majority-black neighborhoods. One value is that being out for yourself is more important than social responsibility. Hence, the collateral damage of increased racial and economic segregation is of no concern, nor is the loss of funds to public schools. Similarly, suspension for even minor infractions is viewed as a benefit to the remainder of strict rule followers. Another value is that individual success is far more important than equity. Equity is viewed as naïve and unachievable. Therefore, charter schools are viewed as giving an opportunity to the “deserving poor.” Strict control is viewed as necessary in poor neighborhoods, but not in wealthy enclaves because poverty is seen as a behavioral failing rather than a function of structural inequality.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
These high suspension rates in charter schools are an indirect way of forcing out the problem kids and the discipline problems. The parents of the kids who are repeatedly suspended will be so discouraged and frustrated that they will place their kids back in the actual public schools.
One thing that the Atlantic article left out were comparisons of the AGE of the suspended children.
I don’t think there is a public elementary school in all of NYC that suspends more than a tiny fraction of 5 and 6 year olds. Suspending 1% of the youngest students is probably a high estimate.
Compare that with charter schools that may suspend over 20% of their Kindergarten and first graders in some of their almost 99% non-white, primarily low-income schools. Of course, in their other schools where whites and middle class minority students are more than half the school (sometimes 75% of it), suspension rates are a fraction of that.
Shockingly, the SUNY Charter Institute is basically saying “suspend as many kids as you want, and we promise to give you more and more schools”. Not once — not one time — has SUNY ever questioned a charter school that claims that their Kindergarten and first grade teachers are so terrible that one out of every five children act out violently and must be suspended. Instead, SUNY praises them as models for all!
I didn’t see the Atlantic reporter get Joseph Belluck, chair of the SUNY Charter Institute on the record about how great it is that suspending minority 5 year olds leads to much higher test scores so SUNY approves of it wholeheartedly and wants every charter to follow their lead! “We refuse to investigate” he may say, “because all that matters is test scores and not the lives of little at-risk children who are a different race than I am so I ALWAYS believe charter school leaders when they tell me those children are violent at age 5”.
Or maybe Joseph Belluck will say “yes, we are convening a committee to talk about how to convene a study to see how best to form another committee to examine this sometime in the next 40 years.”
And the media no doubt will dutifully report “SUNY is very concerned and will look into it while awarding those charters another 40 schools”.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The charter folks rarely let the cat out of the back when it comes to this “different discipline for other people’s kids” stuff. Very often the charters’ sales pitch to parents is, “Going to Acme Charter, Inc. is like going to a rich kids private school, except it’s free.”
That’s why it was refreshing to read a proponent of Relay Graduate School of Education — the faux grad school for TFA, KIPP, etc. — to slip up and give the straight dope about this.
This occurred in the Comments section of an article about Relay’s establishing a beach-head in Denver. This new “Graduate School of Education” in Denver provoked the ire of many folks.
Before you get to the Comments, here’s a chunk of that article on Chalkbeat:
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2016/09/13/new-teacher-training-favored-by-charters-comes-to-denver-as-critics-sound-off/#.V-E9XIX3WUe
CHALKBEAT:
But Ken Zeichner, a professor at the University ofWashington’s College of Education, argues that’s not enough. In the brief released last week, he writes that test scores are “a limited measure of success” — and one relied upon too heavily by Teacher Prep 2.0 programs. Such programs, he argues, focus on preparing teachers to teach “other people’s children,” meaning those living in high-poverty neighborhoods.
“From my perspective, by only looking at test scores, we’re creating a second-class education for poor children in this country that (is) just about test scores,” Zeichner said in an interview.
Instead, he writes that teacher preparation programs, including university-based programs, should be judged by a mix of factors, including standardized test scores and how their graduates increase students’ social and emotional skills, creativity and problem-solving abilities.
…
One by one, the prospective teachers spent a minute delivering instructions — praising obedient students and correcting those off task — at breakneck pace. It’s a classroom management style used in many charter schools and increasingly in traditional district schools too.
Some, including Zeichner, have criticized the style, which they say is primarily used in schools that serve poor students of color, as “highly controlling.” Teachers who use it expect students to sit up straight, listen and “track” whomever is speaking with their eyes.
(Relay’s) Hostetter said she doesn’t understand that criticism.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” she said.
Someone (whom I now call “Relay Proponent”) in the Comments section kind deviated from the charter / school privatization script, infuriating other commenters, including the outspoken Jeanne Kaplan. When challenged, her or she deleted everything that he or she posted (with quote remnants present in the Comments responding to him or her. Again, I’m calling this poster “Relay Proponent” as her or she deleted her on-line handle all with his/her posts.)
Again, go the COMMENTS section HERE:
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2016/09/13/new-teacher-training-favored-by-charters-comes-to-denver-as-critics-sound-off/#.V-E9XIX3WUe
Check out this doozy of a quote that includes Relay Proponent’s claim that Relay pedagogy should only be used in poor communities not wealthy communities — and HOW and WHY that is so
RELAY PROPONENT:
“Kids from less affluent areas are typically raised in a much different household than those in affluent households. Moreover, those kids raised in affluent households in most cases need less teaching and structure and more flexibility.
“If they’re in an affluent family, they likely have educated ‘ parents and are being afforded opportunities in their family life to learn.
“Kids from impoverished areas? Not so much. They need structure in their classroom. They need to be reminded to track and listen to the teacher most likely.
“They need a different type of teacher.”
Oh boy, this got Relay critic CONCERNED EDUCATOR riled up:
CONCERNED EDUCATOR:
“I want to just point out that, by placing students of low socioeconomic status in this light, you have highlighted a very important gap that we are perpetuating by allowing the language of Relay to continue.
“Yes, students who grow in homes with severe trauma need specific psychological structures and interventions in place, because their brains function differently, and have been altered by the toxic stress.
“However, NOT ALL STUDENTS IN POVERTY HAVE GROWN UP IN TOXIC STRESS ENVIRONMENTS. Making this assumption lowers our expectations, and devalues those students. You are making assumptions that devalue children, and Relay perpetuates that. We can value the culture of our students without assuming that culture is negative.
“In addition, assuming that our impoverished children ‘need’ a negative, controlling structure creates prison-like environments, where we do not teach critical thinking skills or self-awareness, but locks children into negative patterns of thought and behavior.
“We also perpetuate the opportunity gap, because we are denying students the opportunity to have the education that wealthy white students have, simply by making the assumption that ‘those students need structure.’
“ALL CHILDREN NEED STRUCTURE. ALL children also deserve the opportunity to have an education that prepares them to excel to their greatest potential, which does not mean treating them like prisoners.
“Relay perpetuates this cycle of creating sub-par education for students, based on the excuse of’ those kids’ (always meaning children in poverty and non-white children) needing more ‘structure’. SOME students with trauma need more specific interventions, but ALL children deserve the chance to be a child.”
RELAY PROPONENT then incorrectly claims that Relay student teachers are attending Relay GSE “to earn their Master’s Degrees.”
Jeanne Kaplan’s replies that Relay does not award accredited “Master’s Degrees.”
JEANNE KAPLAN:
” ‘To earn their master’s degrees…’ ?
Teachers cannot acquire a Master’s Degree because the ‘Relay Graduate School of Education’ is not a certified Graduate Program.
“The (Relay G.S.E.) ‘degree’ is bogus.
“Students are being taught by unlicensed people.”
In a now deleted comment (which I’m reconstructing from inderence) RELAY PROPONENT replies by saying that traditional teaching programs are all failures according to the data, and that research proves that Relay alone works. Again, from Kaplan’s response, it appears that Relay Proponent then calls Kaplan some names, and insults her.
Jeanne Kaplan ain’t havin’ it.
Kaplan also wantsto know if Relay is paying rent at the public school building where it holds it courses
JEANNE KAPLAN:
“Who are you? Identify yourself, at least. I could say the same about you. I could also call you names. That is the MO of most ‘debates’ in America today.
“Biased resources. Only you ignore data that shows repeated failure (of Relay pedagogy, or of “No Excuses”, high-disicpline, highly-regimented charter schools? I’m not sure.)
“As for no research (that Relay is ineffective) – I beg to differ. I have actually talked to people who have undergone the Relay indoctrination. Some have quit. Many have ended up in great debt.
“I ask again : is Relay paying rent?
“And please don’t take the chicken way out and not identify yourself. Transparency is another trait lost in ‘education reform.’ ”
Relay Proponent didn’t just “take the chicken way out” and not identify himself/herself.
He/she deleted everything which he/she had earlier posted.
Kind of like Eva with her Success Academy training videos.
Classroom management is essential to creating a productive learning environment. However, the “broken windows” policies are demeaning to students, and they are unfairly applied to minority children. Law enforcement operates in a similar manner in black neighborhoods. A black person with a broken taillight is pulled over and ultimately shot for “non-compliance.” When a white person is pulled over, the officer very often gives the driver a warning, the driver goes on his way. I don’t know if this is our “legacy” from slavery or not, but it is a social problem that is hurting minority citizens.
My entire career was spent working with black and brown ESL students. Some of my students had mental issues from trauma they had endured. Only two students in over three and a half decades ever got suspended. One student was a conduct disorder case, and the other one was severely emotionally disturbed. I was fortunate that my district capped my ESL classes at twenty students. Smaller classes are the key to forging a relationship with students that can eliminate problems before they start. Students that are heard and recognized are less likely to act out. There were no “broken windows” in my class, and I was not a stern teacher. We had rules and consequences that worked for most students. My black and brown students were not perfect, but overall, they were cooperative and caring. It has been my experience that by creating a respectful relationship and delivering a meaningful academic curriculum made all the difference, and this was made possible by having a smaller class.
Diane
“I’M A LIONESS . I HAVE 2 KIDS . I’M A DAD . I WANT TO TAKE CARE OF MY KIDS AND PROTECT THEM .
WHO I’M ?
LET PEOPLE FIND BY THEM SELF “
Yet, in spite of this evidence of persistent charter abuse, John King & DoEd are headed out for their bus tour that will highlight a NOLA charter school’s “innovations”. The tour is a promo for their “Using Evidence to Strengthen Education Investments” program. There’s no doubt that most of the charter-chain innovations have been made on the financial side of the equation with the help of DoEd federal grants.
Here’s King’s Press Release
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-releases-new-guidance-using-evidence-strengthen-education-investments-during-back-school-bus-tour
“The guidance is being released in conjunction with King’s “Opportunity Across America” back-to-school bus tour stop in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he will visit Cohen College Prep, which receives funding from the Department’s Investing in Innovation (i3) program. The program provides funding for evidence-based tools and strategies that deliver improved results for students.”
Couldn’t find anything about any kind of schedule for that magical bus tour. This is all I could find: “. . . the seventh annual back-to-school bus tour of the Obama Administration to celebrate progress in communities and states across the country. The tour kicked off in the nation’s capital and ended in Louisiana.”
I guess, little Johnny didn’t want to much press (and pressure) for that one, eh.
They should call their bus tour, ” Using Hype to Strengthen Educational Profits” program. That would be a better description of the current state of “reform.”
All their bus tour press releases are in the past tense, as they didn’t want any protestors.
Having successfully pushed for the expansion of the number or charter schools, the Department of Education is now engaging in a “facts-on-the-ground” approach to mounting criticism of charter schools. That is, they may try to establish policies that make charter schools more “accountable” and less subject to corruption, without actually questioning whether they should exist at all.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
I love how crazy this is.
They vastly expand charter schools THEN they try to regulate them.
That never, ever works. Now they have a huge group of entrenched people who will fight regulation.
Why in God’s name wouldn’t you regulate them BEFORE vastly expanding them? I swear they are just making this up as they go along. It’s chaos. They can’t value this stuff. People don’t treat things they value with such carelessness.
It’s worth keeping in mind that when Nat Malkus compared each charter school with traditional public schools in the same general locale he arrived at these conclusions:
“Discipline rates are another important measure on which to compare charters and TPSs because charter opponents have argued that charters use severe disciplinary practices to ‘push out’ undesirable students. In fact, a report by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies used the very same data as in Figure 8 and found that charters suspend students at higher rates than TPSs do. That pattern appears when charters are compared with all TPSs; however, the pattern of discipline is much more similar between charters and their neighboring public schools, casting doubt on whether charter discipline is disproportionate.
[…]
“Suspensions. Again, about half of charters were in the mid-range for suspension rates, compared to 70 percent of reference TPSs. The percentage of charters that had the highest rank was quite close to that of reference TPSs (Figure 24). In contrast, charters were the lowest ranked in terms of suspensions twice as often as reference TPSs, casting significant doubt on the frequent assertion that charter schools broadly use excessive discipline procedures.
[…]
“On the other hand, charter discipline practices are a clear example of a myth that these analyses persuasively discredit. Recently, a report by UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies used oversimplified comparisons that supported the notion that charters have higher rates of out-of-school suspension.30 Press coverage used pejorative phrases such as “the charter sneak attack” and the “school-to-prison pipeline” to describe the findings and further propagate this myth.31 Appropriate and balanced methodological critiques of the report will only do so much to push back on such generalizations.32
[…]
“These analyses, using the very same data but more careful comparisons, clearly show that the reverse is true for most charter schools. Compared to their neighboring TPSs, more charters have lower suspension rates than reference TPSs. Unbridled discipline policies are problematic in any school, but the idea that charter schools suspend students more than traditional public schools do is a myth.”
Click to access Differences-on-balance.pdf
In any event, I do have the impression that out-of-school suspension rates are likely unnecessarily high here in some local Boston charter schools, while also noting that they have been diminishing. The issue has deservedly received much attention. I’d wonder whether it may be worth giving at least as much attention to unexcused absences, where rates soar far higher in traditional public schools around here than they do in charter schools? Far more days of schooling is lost to that than to suspensions, I would think. And truancy is a principal at-risk indicator of later incarceration.
It’d be interesting to examine the psychology and the politics underlying the massively disproportionate attention to suspension relative to truancy.
Spoken like the true enabler you are.
In order to prove that charters don’t suspend as many students, we have chosen only the failing schools that serve the toughest kids – including those who are drummed out of charters and those whose parents don’t even have the wherewithal to look for a better school — and choose to compare them with the charters who begin ONLY with students whose parents are willing to do all that is asked of them to get their child into a better school.
See, we don’t suspend as many of the minority kids who come from dedicated families who support their education as the schools that have all our rejects plus all the kids whose parents don’t care what they do. Aren’t we great?!! Just because we spend 20X more than schools with SIMILAR academics should not make you think that those kids don’t deserve every suspension they get. They do. They are violent. They need every punishment we mete.
And hey, don’t pay attention to the fact that lots of our kids disappear. Their families are stupid and they prefer facing schools to having their kid get a good education even though they already proved by signing up for the lottery that they WANTED the good education. Once they got to our school, if their kid didn’t fit, we made sure to change those parents’ minds fast.
Let’s instead look at truancy! Oh no, the kids at the schools that we DEMAND we must be compared to have checked out parents or are new immigrants or any one of a number of reasons aren’t coming to school!
If only they were in a charters, they would be on the streets and no one’s business at all! Shame on public schools for not following charter schools’ lead and just dumping them permanently. That’s the kind of education that charter school advocates cheer on.
Shameful. People who don’t care at all about at-risk kids except for the strivers who will help THEM look good. And they get rewarded the most in the charter industry! For their “excellence” at test scores and ridding themselves of the kids who charter supporters believe with all their hearts are just not worthy of an education. The fact that are almost always at-risk minority students and the people who support charters are white should in no way make you question their true belief that these kids are unworthy and should be thrown out with the trash. Unless they are in public schools so we can blame the school for not turning them into high achieving scholars.
Here is a study for Brookings:
Let’s compare the SUSPENSION rate of kids who win the lottery for charter schools with the SUSPENSION rate of kids who signed up for the lottery but didn’t get into the school.
Want to bet $10 million dollars that the suspension rate for the SAME kids — as you so like to say — is much higher at charters?
You write: “we have chosen only the failing schools that serve the toughest kids”
So you mean that where Malkus identifies the five traditional public schools serving the same grades nearest to charter schools, in your opinion those TPS schools are all “failing schools”. I would disagree with such sweeping characterization.
“Let’s compare the SUSPENSION rate of kids who win the lottery for charter schools with the SUSPENSION rate of kids who signed up for the lottery but didn’t get into the school.”
Excellent idea. Perhaps we could agree that all these comparisons would be good:
* Compare their suspension rates
* Compare their desire to attend school, as reflected by attendance records
* Compare their ability to read, write, and calculate
* Compare their attrition rates
* Compare measurements of the academic skills of those who continue on in charter and traditional schools vs. those who depart those schools
* Compare the attrition rates and performance records among charter schools to see if there’s any direct or inverse correlation between charter school academic performance and attrition rates
Stephen B Ronan, we have had this discussion before about comparisons.
First, why would anyone researching and comparing charter schools not be extremely interested in the number of students who disappear from a cohort and where they go? Can you imagine a scientist studying the effect of a drug treatment simply ignoring large numbers of disappearing people from the study and not wondering if they left because the drug wasn’t effective or had terrible side effects? Of course not. The research is shoddy, period.
Second, why would the attrition rate at a high performing school not be significantly lower than one that has to take every child including the ones who end up there by default when they really wanted another school? If a charter school that parents jump through hoops to attend is not keeping a significantly higher number of students than a lower performing public school that has to take any kid, then something is wrong. You can limit your comparison group to some invented control group that includes public schools serving the most transient families to try to hide the truth. Or you can just take the records of these supposedly high performing charters to see how many at-risk kids who enter stay the course. What is the real 4 year graduation rate of each entering high school class? 50%? 70%? 40%? No one wants to look and that speaks volumes. Maybe some charters would be better than others and that would be good.
Third, I’m glad you agree that the suspension rates of those kids who didn’t win the charter lottery should be compared to the suspension rate of the students who did. I won’t hold my breath that this will ever be done since suspensions are something that totally excites the people at Families for Excellent Schools who are one of the prime money men behind the charter push in Massachusetts. Nice, aren’t they? They believe that young minority students are very prone to violence and they want the public to understand that and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in PR campaign to convince the public of just how violent those young minority children are.
“Compare their ability to read, write, and calculate”
Who is “their”? The charter students who are allowed to remain in those charters once all the low performers are weeded out? The ones who spend an extra year there? Is your point that you want to encourage the public schools to do the same as charters do — keep a class of those charter school lottery losers and weed out and fail any kids who aren’t learning fast enough? And THEN compare that group to the charter school? Is that the kind of model you think publics should follow?
No doubt you do. It’s funny that educating the strivers is about the only thing charters want to do these days. It’s funny that they don’t really care about any of the other at-risk students at all. I guess when the choice is between a dollar and a low-performing kid, the dollar always wins in charter school land. After all, the “market” demands that it must be that way. And your beloved “market” trumps all, right?
In respect to your first point, keep in mind that there has been research in Boston that did what you suggest… followed those who left charter school, and even included their results together with the charter school students who remained.
In respect to the second, the first column below is the “overall performance” figure which our state department of education uses to rank each Boston charter school compared to schools serving similar grade levels in both affluent and low-income areas state-wide. The second column is the school’s corresponding summer attrition rate. For example, the first line would be a charter school, with admission by lottery, that is ranked by the state in the 97 percentile of schools serving the same grades, and that has a summer attrition rate of 5.3% (the typical TPS rate is slightly above 14).
97 5.3
93 1.6
91 5.3
78 9.1
71 6.9
62 12
58 8.6
57 8
54 11
51 8
42 7.7
36 11.3
32 10
23 18.9
That’s helpful to view in a scatter plot.
In respect to this: “Is your point that you want to encourage the public schools to do the same as charters do — keep a class of those charter school lottery losers and weed out and fail any kids who aren’t learning fast enough? And THEN compare that group to the charter school?”
Kindly take a close look at this:
http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/docs/fy2016/2016-02/item3-tabA1-1.docx
You will find materials such as these:
“On the 2014 MCAS tests, Brooke once again led the state in multiple grades and subjects, with proficiency rates at or near 100%. This year also marked the highest percentage of students scoring advanced in math and ELA in the history of Brooke Charter Schools. Among the highlights at each school:
• 91% of our sixth graders in East Boston scored at the advanced level in math – the highest proportion of students scoring advanced on that test in any school in the Commonwealth over the last 9 years.
• 86% of our fifth graders in Roslindale scored at the advanced level in math and 65% of them scored at the advanced level in ELA – higher proportions than at any other school in the Commonwealth.
• 100% of Brooke Mattapan 7th graders were proficient in ELA, making them the highest ranking school in the Commonwealth.
“Despite the oft-repeated charge that charter schools ‘push students out’, the average attrition rate at the three Brooke schools last year was lower than at any other non-exam school in Boston serving middle grades.”
And please see the graphs on pp 32-33 that illustrate this: “Furthermore, even the small numbers of students who do leave Brooke each year are just as likely to be performing well academically as their peers who persist, as demonstrated in the graphs below.”
If you carefully examine these materials, they may at the least help persuade you that there are, in this area, some exceptions to your general theory.
Best wishes.
Stephen,
I am going to ask you to stop posting the same point again and again and again. Enough. Everyone here is well aware of the games privately managed charters play. Unlike you, our eyes have been opened. Enough. Enough.
There is a simple question that Stephen Ronan and company refuse to answer:
What percentage of the at-risk students who randomly win the lottery for a charter school enroll in it’s lowest grade? And how many of those students are there 4 years later for graduation?
All those endless numbers and Ronan can’t answer that basic question about any individual charter school’s graduating class. If that school’s graduating class is directly compared with the one that entered 4 years ago, how many of the SAME kids from 4 years ago are in it? I suspect the pro-charter folks don’t want to know because having half the at-risk class missing from a school they are claiming is the best in the city is a huge red flag. Parents don’t leave high performing public schools. But somehow they sure seem to leave high performing charter schools. Why?
If you jump through hoops because you think that question is irrelevant, you aren’t really interested in what works.
Ed reformers in government should focus on one or two things and do them well.
The Obama Administration chose to focus on measurement systems and charter schools. Their occasional forays into public schools does more harm than good.
The President is wrong. It isn’t “plus/and”. They chose.
The so-called “education reform” movement, of which charter schools are the biggest profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as a key agenda item. The fact that billionaires and hedge funds could pocket tens of millions of public tax dollars from this new kind of segregation was just a bonus. The first calls for “reform” in the form of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
Why parents don’t stand up ? Quit with out complains at those Corruteds rulers and I think it’s a great idea pass a resolution , registration only fo new students .
Parents are always complai at goods teacher of publics education and the % who complain at Charters scaled case is not fear that is confuse Kidness with weakness