Adam Bessie (writer) and Erik Thurman (artist) have created a graphic essay that explains in a series of drawings the consequences of school choice and how it affected students with disabilities in New Orleans. Their graphic essay is especially pertinent at a time when the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is an evangelist for school choice and indifferent to the consequences.
I recommend that you see it. It illustrates the adage that a picture is worth 1,000 words.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This graphic essay beautifully depicts the reimplementation of Jim Crow education policies “rebranded and repackaged” as choice. It should be shared with social justice groups. It is unbelievable that America’s first African American president was supportive of these policies.
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It’s shocking that a charter school can get away with sending a letter to the parents of a rising senior telling them that their child would have to find another school due to his low GPA.
We now have a system in which a charter school claims “success” simply by kicking out the kids who hurt their scores.
It’s like cancer treatment centers who kick out cancer patients with a few weeks to live in order to claim that they have cure rates of 100%!
The only difference is that the journalists and scientific organizations would do what that the “scholars” in the education reform industry do not, which is point out the fallacy of ignoring attrition rates if you are trying to account for success.
And no scientific researcher worth his salt would ever have the chutzpah to say what the faux “scholars” in the education research industry say. Which is that it is important to compare attrition rates with high performing charters ONLY with the attrition rates of low performing public schools and not high performing public schools because that way the high attrition rate can be inpored.
Maybe if scientific researchers were as greedy as the people in the education industry they would start claiming that they agree with the for-profit cancer center’s 100% cure rates because that underfunded public hospital serving transient patients also lost patients and that’s all that they need to know to certify these cancer centers as 100% perfect and direct inordinate public and private funding to keep them at their “100% cure rates” because “so many” cancer patients are miraculously cured there.
The fact that so many researchers in education are owned by the billionaires who fund them is truly appalling.
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YES to this NYC Public School Parent: “The fact that so many researchers in education are owned by the billionaires who fund them is truly appalling.”
The billionaires have a GENE defect called the GREED gene. They are so empty, they can’t help themselves with their impulse of GREED, POWER, and PERKS. Jail them at Rikers. They can fight over who uses the toilet. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/nyregion/rikers-study-finds-prisoners-injured-by-employees.html?_r=0
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What was really sad was to read some of the comments that really had little understanding about the damage charter schools are doing to the public school system in general. The mantra seems to be all about high achievement (measured by standardized tests?) and nothing about education as a common good.
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