Parents, students, educators and other citizens are invited nvited to learn about the hoax of Amendment 1on the ballot. It is an effort by the far-right to change the Georgia state constitution to allow the state to take over schools with low test scores and give them to charter corporations. Tea Party Governor Nathan Deal says it is for the poor minority kids, whom he wants to “save.”
Please join civil rights activists to learn more about Amendment 1 and the myth of the New Orleans miracle.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
John White is a cult follower. His leader is Joel Klein. The cult is money, power and deception.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/16/the-urgent-moral-case-for-replacing-persistently-failing-schools.html?via=desktop&source=twitter
What America’s non-white communities need to know is that 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.
And now, reports from the NAACP and ACLU reveal the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children. Very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that charter schools also suspend extraordinary numbers of black students and students with disabilities.
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.
And now the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities and must (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
Since We the People have stuck with and revere the words of our Founding Fathers in our general government, we should give the same reverence to our Founding Fathers’ ideas about public education: For example, Thomas Jefferson wanted a public education system that truly educated our nation’s children, not one that trained them to fit into careers cogs that served businesses and the economy.
Jefferson declared that “it is the business of the state,” not private enterprises, to provide genuine education because he knew that if private businesses controlled education, our nation’s children would end up being trained to fill the needs of business instead of being broadly educated in a way that equipped them to be informed voters in our system of government.
Jefferson’s superb idea for public education was to truly educate children in a broad range of subjects, especially in history, because as he stated: “Apprising them of the past will enable them to judge the future.” He said that children should be taught Greek, Roman, and European history in particular in order to understand the grecian roots of democracy and the Roman and European roots of dictatorship and ruling classes. In addition, he wanted children taught to read and write Greek and Latin so that they could better grasp the ideas and the mistakes of the past by reading about them in the original languages.
Today, under the “reform” movement that is led by business moguls, teachers in public schools are reprimanded for “wasting time” teaching History of any kind, and only token attention is given to foreign languages, let alone classical languages because “they aren’t on the test’ — that is, they aren’t tested by the statewide standardized testing upon which school funding and statistical data depends. Similarly, music and the arts are almost completely ignored because they aren’t tested on the standardized tests. Only the basic skills that businesses want — math and reading — are tested. If we truly wanted well-educated children, we would test for and teach all the subjects.
So, today instead of being broadly educated as Jefferson said was necessary for them to participate in our form of government that requires broadly knowledgeable voters, our are being narrowly trained to fit into the career cogs that business moguls want them to fill in their businesses.
Jefferson warned: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Ignorance of History is the gravest danger to our form of government because already too few people recognize in current trends the emergence of mistakes of the past that have led to ruin.
Today, we have an increasing number of well-trained but not broadly and well-educated professionals who are simply ignorant of vital knowledge and are unfit to participate in our form of government; many of the business moguls who are leading the “reform” movement are among this group. They are trying to push our nation onto the road to ruin, and they have a lot of clout — in the form of cash to buy politicians and media — to do it.
From the very beginning of our nation we have held that everyone is created equal, should have equal opportunity, and that it is our collective duty as We the People to use our system of government to assure that everyone has access to that equality, because business certainly isn’t going to give it to us without governmental rules and laws to make them do so.
Compare our nation’s philosophy of equal opportunity in education to the philosophy of business:
We must recognize that “reform” doesn’t necessarily mean “improve” — it means only what it says: remaking something into something that it wasn’t. The business moguls behind today’s “reform” of public education simply want to remake it into a conveyor belt system that cranks out children who fit into the career cogs of the business machine to create greater profit for the business owners. These business moguls don’t care at all about children learning History or reading classical novels that teach them about our human nature and where it can go wrong — in fact, the less the children know about such things, the better for the business moguls because the less likely it is that bee hive (cubicle) workers will protest the huge amounts of money that the moguls pay themselves or question whether what the business is engaged in and its products are good or harmful to society.
Moguls want minions, not well-educated, questioning workers. And that’s what schooling based on standardized tests of just a couple of subjects is churning out.
In a roundabout way, have we reached that place in history which our historic predecessor “elite” worried about–an elite which “ruled” under the long-held theory that the wealthy and educated HAD to hold power due to the poor and uneducated’s inability to see the bigger picture and actually govern themselves?
I have just been teaching that Jefferson Query to my American Lit/SP Lang&Comp students in the past couple of weeks.
*AP, not SP