The NAACP’s decision to call for a moratorium of charter school expansion until laws can be revised to provide accountability and transparency. This decision sent shock waves inside the corporate reform echo chamber. Would they still be able to call themselves leaders of the civil rights ipissue of our time if the NAACP disagreed with their aggressive efforts to privatize public schools?
The right wing reform headquarters called the Center for Education Reform in D.C. put out a press release accusing the NAACP of caving in to pressure from teachers’ unions. Of course, that implies that the corporate-funded conservatives at CER care more about black children than the NAACP and its national convention. Hard to believe.
Then Shavar Jeffries of the Democrats for Education Reform (the hedge fund managers’ pro-charter advocacy group) issued a statement saying that the great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois would be shocked to see the NAACP turn against charter schools and privatization.
Jersey Jazzman calls out Jeffries for apparently never having read DuBois. JJ points out that DuBois was clear about his commitment to an elite education for “the talented tenth.” Maybe Jeffries was acknowledging that charters are only for a small elite (which Mike Petrilli called “the strivers”). If so, that case should be stated openly and clearly, instead of pretending that charters could save “poor kids in failing schools.”
JJ also notes that DuBois was a Marxist and it was unlikely that he would support the privatization of public education. Or that he would be able to tolerate an alliance with Wall Street and hedge fund managers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I know I sound like a broken record, but the reform movement today has abandoned any desire to teach all students. Their schools failed just like public schools did. I wish they just acknowledged it so that we can address issues instead of doubling down on the lies.
If reformers weren’t really about PRIVATIZING because that’s what their billionaire funders want, they would be advocating more “choice” magnet schools for the “strivers” as Petrilli calls them. If the “reformers” really believed in the philosophy they are promoting they would be just as happy to support choice or magnet public schools that are given the power that charters have now to rid themselves of any troublesome kids. But at least there would be some legal protections for those kids AND there would be more resources directed toward the non-magnet schools.
Instead, when I see the leaders of the reform movement saying large class sizes are fine because their charters’ success prove that every child can become a high performing student in classes of 30, I know that they have lost their way. And it is not surprising that the NAACP is rejecting the liars who are using the best of their kids to promote schools that have no interest in educating the ones who aren’t the best.
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NYC Parent,
your broken record is good music. Wisdom is never tiresome.
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Excellent! Thank you Jersey Jazzman.
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Jersey Jazzman, I love your work, thank you!
Do you want to see the pro-charter PR machine running in overdrive? Check out the following report for Imagine Schools (link below). It’s 40 pages of fluff with an advertisement for software tucked in the middle. It’s not really a corporate report at all. It’s an over-the-top brochure courtesy of American taxpayers.
Two pages of the report reveal how a large charter network can scam the public, even with all its purported success.
Page 11. Look at the split in revenue and assets between “Imagine Schools” and “Imagine Schools Non-Profit”. Presumably this quiet little separation makes loads of profit possible. The revenue flow is almost 4:1 to the for-profit side, and the assets are 36:1! The public is basically paying for private companies to purchase property, plus high salaries for administrators and who-knows-how-much cash flow to investors.
Page 9. Two graphs tell the real story about the charter network’s record in actually getting kids to graduate—and how it games the system with its scores. Look at those percentages of students in its K-8 and high schools. First grade has almost 15% of enrollment, and it drops to 6.6% by eighth grade More than half are gone! It’s worse for high schools. 38% of enrollment is 9th grade. By 12th grade, only 10%. Can it be that nearly 3/4 of the students are gone? This simply can’t be explained by the opening of more schools. With no published report for 2015, we can’t know (and probably the public is not supposed to know how bad the track record really is).
Thank goodness the NAACP had the courage to stand up for American youth. They did us all a favor, not only African-Americans. We need transparency and accountability for our public schools.
Here’s the brochure—er, report—described above:
Click to access Imagine_Schools_Annual_Report_2014.pdf
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In today’s visit to the echo chamber, here’s Education Next:
Charter school cheerleading and endless discussion of how to test, rank and measure public school kids and public schools. That’s it. That’s the sum total of “innovation”.
Apparently what’s “next” in education reform is more of the same they have given us for the last 16 years over two, 2-term Presidents.
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Jeffries is critical of the NAACP’s position supporting a moratorium on charter expansion because he is the token leader of DFER, and he is a paid spokesperson for privatization. It is interesting that Jeffries recently refused to debate Julian Vasquez Heilig. Maybe he has nothing to say that could be supported by facts? Maybe he is afraid of the truth?
Perhaps it is just easier to smile for the cameras and rely on the old hackneyed “reform” rhetoric. Then, he can get back to funneling dark money for the hedge funds that want to influence public policy and destroy public institutions for fun and profit.http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13065/how-dfer-leaders-channel-out-state-dark-money-colorado-and-beyond
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It was smart of DFER to hire Jeffries, who is a lawyer, not an educator. Now he gets called by the media to speak out against the NAACP, as if he were a civil rights leader, not the voice of Wall Street.
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He’s afraid of the truth, all right. It’s not what his masters want.
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DuBois may have called for elite education for the “talented tenth,” but it’s doubtful that included segregated, punitive, heavily regimented, Skinner Box boot camps for Black children, a la KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools and the other charter chains that are the intended inheritors of a big chunk of the public education budget.
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Nor would he have approved the firing of black teachers to make way for mostly white TFA staff with their six hours of training.
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And their shocking lack of real-life cultural understanding.
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The outlines of this assault,posing right wing destructive public policy’s as a civil rights issues, has a long nefarious history. Bayard Rustin the organizer of kings 63 march on Washington, discussed a similar assault in a 1971 Harpers article . “The Blacks and the Unions” One could easily substituent Public Schools for Unions and neo-liberals for Republicans so as to include those Democrats who are confused as to what party they should be in. This is a right wing assault on Public Education. (The excerpts come from a labor blog as that the original article is behind a pay wall at Harpers).
” The truth about the situation of the Negro today is that there are powerful forces, composed largely of the corporate elite and Southern conservatives, which will resist any change in the economic or racial structure of this country that might cut into their resources or challenge their status; and such is precisely what any program genuinely geared to improve his lot must do…
Of all the misconceptions about the labor movement that have been so lovingly dwelt on in the liberal press, perhaps none is put forth more often and is further from the truth than that the unions are of and for white people…the percentage of blacks in the unions is a good deal higher than the percentage of blacks in the total population…
Racial discrimination exists in the building trades. It is unjustifiable by any moral standard, and as to the objective of rooting it out there can be no disagreement among people of good will…
Why, in fact, would a President who has developed a “Southern strategy,” who has cut back on school integration efforts, tried to undermine the black franchise by watering down the 1965 Voting Rights Act, nominated to the Supreme Court men like Haynsworth and Carswell, cut back on funds for vital social programs, and proposed a noxious crime bill for Washington, DC, which is nothing less than a blatant appeal to white fear-why indeed would such a President take up the cause of integration in the building trades?..
The advantages to the Republicans from this kind of strategy should be obvious. Nixon supports his friends among the corporate elite and hurts his enemies in the unions. He also gains a convenient cover for his anti-Negro policies in the South, and, above all, he weakens his political opposition by aggravating the differences between its two strongest and most progressive forces-the labor movement and the civil rights movement.”
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JJ has done a wonderful job on the post.
I fear that this kind of historical inquiry with insights for the present will be hard to find if the reformers–now calling themselves “innovators” — have their way.
Also, I posted some observations about the “protests” at the NAACP meeting held in Cincinnati. The protesters came from Tennessee, a group called Memphis Lift. They were employed by the backers of the Memphis Achievement District and also enjoyed a free trip to the 25th anniversary of TFA held in Washington DC. The full post is on Mercedes Schneider’s blog, one of several of hers treating the NAACP resolution.
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