Astana Bigard, parent activist in New Orleans, reports that poor children are regularly suspended and expelled from charter schools because they can’t afford to pay for a uniform.
“When a New Orleans charter school made headlines recently for kicking out two homeless students because they didn’t have the right uniforms, people were shocked. They shouldn’t have been. Suspending poor students for “non-compliance” when they can’t afford to buy the right shoes, pants or sweaters is standard operating procedure in our all-charter-school education system. More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, poverty in the city is worse than ever, even as rents have doubled during the past decade. Yet students and their parents are routinely punished—even criminalized—just for being poor.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the years when I went to elementary and secondary school in Texas, the State was required to supply all required materials — paper, pencils, textbooks, the whole nine yards. We didn’t have uniforms, but if we did the State Supreme Court would have required the school system to supply them
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Jon,
That was true in Texas in the 1940s and 50s as well
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Sadly, this happens at a lot of charter schools all over. I’m a parent and employee of a charter school in South LA. I had to file a couple of UPC for similar reasons. Parents and students don’t know about thier rights to a FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION! At my work they were humiliating the students by making them wear some hideous bright yellow/orange uniform shirt and taking thier personal belongings as collateral. They would have them sit in the main office for hours missings valuable instructional time simply because they weren’t wearing a uniform.
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What does it mean to file a “UPC”?
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Sorry meant to say UCP – Uniform Complaint Procedure
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” I’m a parent and employee of a charter school . . . thier (sic) rights to a FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION!”
Sorry, Hilda, but no one has a “right” to a free public education when one attends a PRIVATE charter school business. I wish you luck in your endeavors, but private charter schools do not have to follow the same rules, regulations and requirements as community public shools.
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Unfortunately, most people that run charter schools are not trained educators. You cannot shame or threaten poverty out of students. In fact, this dunce cap mentality is an antiquated notion that hurts poor students’ self image.
In New Orleans the city government has worked to “rebrand” the city. Developers have created lots of upscale housing along with selective charters for yuppie children. The poor have been deliberately left behind. The city has refused to rebuild public housing, and they closed Charity Hospital, which was a life line for the poor. New Orleans didn’t even have a grocery store in the lower 9th ward until one of the residents created one for the community.
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a good description of the inner city gentrifying going on across the nation: get rid of the poor, not help the poor
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In many Newark public schools, administrators maintain a supply of uniforms in different sizes to accommodate children. Funds are raised mainly by teachers to assist families unable to afford uniforms. Shaming children is a disgrace.
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My students were poor ELLs. I can’t tell you the number of students that came to me for school supplies, field trips and other assorted needs. The teachers raised money for our children’s funds in a variety of ways. and the PTA helped out the poor so they could participate in field trips etc. Nobody was ever singled out for being poor.
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Well, that’s a start. The next step is to wonder why the students of Newark need uniforms in the first place. I bet the students of affluent districts don’t.
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Uniforms are widely viewed as a means of control.
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Uniforms might be viewed as a means of control, but if you taught where I taught for thirty years, a student wearing the wrong shoelaces (or cap, or jacket, etc.) in the wrong place at the wrong time could get him/her beat or killed. I taught in a district with high childhood poverty rates of 70 percent or higher and the local barrio that surrounded those schools had multi generational gangs that had been feuding, waging war, for generations.
We didn’t have a uniform, but we had a dress code that did not let the gang bangers wear gang related uniforms that were designed to identify the street gang they belonged to.
I witnessed drive by shootings from my classroom doorway as school was letting out. One night when I was working late with the student editors of the high school student newspaper, there was a shooting outside my classroom. One gang ambushed the member of another gang as he crossed the high school campus taking a shortcut home from his girlfriend’s house. they shot him in the gut with a shotgun. He died.
At lunch every day, a squad car from one of the local police departments drove on campus, up over the curb and on the grass and then parked where several thousand students during the 45 minute lunch time could see them and their shotgun. As soon as lunch ended and the tardy bell for the fifth period rang, then drove off campus.
It seemed that a month didn’t go buy that there wasn’t a shooting in the barrio and one of our students was killed or wounded. There were areas in the barrio that the police wouldn’t even patrol once the sun was down.
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Agree,we have churches, nonprofits, banks , that help supply uniforms for our public school students who must wear them and can’t afford them. There is also a uniform deposit where you can drop off outgrown uniforms and exchange them for the next size. Someone needs to use some common sense and assist these children.
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To hell with school uniforms in public schools. They’re an anachronistic mechanism of control of a time gone by. Hey, let’s MAGA by making the students conform-be uniform and standardized and being good little self-controlled robots from the start. What a bastardization of life, living and being!
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Punishing people for not wearing uniforms is perfect for neocons: It “helps moms off welfare” by “forcing them to get a job” and pay for new clothes. It forces them to buy selected brands (monopoly). It’s mean in spirit. It’s military in style. Perfect!
In reality, though, there are no academic or behavioral benefits from wearing matching clothes. Duh.
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The theory of uniforms is three-fold:
But if the school requires a uniform, the school should pay for it.
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You’re right about the theories. Many people believe in them, and not just charter apologists. When teaching in schools that required uniforms, I supported the practice to support the schools. The reality is, though, that uniforms are often worn in gang related, sexually provocative, and expensive ways. A student can wear two sizes too small and tight or too large and baggy; fold, cuff, and hike; and accessorize. (One of the most notorious gangs in LA wears Mardi Gras beads.) A school can try to clamp down on all those practices, but in my experience, a few parents get upset when their children get sent home, sign waivers, and in so doing start waiver signing uprisings. I do not see the benefit of uniforms.
Also, you’re absolutely right, if the school requires uniforms, the school should pay for it! In L.A., the families buy the uniforms. That is wrong. But it would be even worse if we started using our dwindling funds to buy clothes instead of supplies and reducing class sizes. Class size has a much greater impact.
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Diane: for the reasons you enumerate, we attempted uniforms years ago. This supplanted a uniform dress code that addressed all three concerns. The dress code actually was more successful in preventing provocative clothing than was the uniform policy.
The real reason for the adoption of the uniform policy was a sense that we had to be like Great Big High School. People visited GBHS and were impressed, and returned to us to tell us to be like GBHS. Its application turned into a royal pain. In our school it failed because the teachers did not understand its levitican regulations.
Top down reform always fails. The only way to dress it up is to use it to exclude marginal people who do not follow. Then make up some statement about not being able to please all of the people all of the time to cover for your failure.
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If those are the theories, why do affluent schools not usually require students to wear uniforms? The first might not apply so much in more affluent areas, but the second and the third most definitely apply.
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Elite schools usually have a dress code. Some may set rules about hair length, the color of shirts and pants, other things. Seldom a uniform in the same sense as “no excuses.”
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Again, to hell with school uniforms!
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This is a preview of the privatized ALEC and/or neo-liberal State where all public services, including the police and military, have been turned over the autocratic corporations to boost profits while there is no minimum wage, automation is replacing humans and the consumer economy sinks to the bottom of the Mindanao Trench.
The U.S. Constitution was written to protect the people from the government and the public sector agencies the government runs and not to protect the people from autocratic, profit driven corporations. What protection will the people have when the public sector is gone and the people have to deal with the bureaucracy of the corporate state.
For instance, have you ever struggled to get help from SEARS? I stopped shopping at Sears years ago because of its corporate bureaucracy. You call one number and that person gives you another number, etc., etc., etc. until five or six numbers down the line, you get the first number again, or you get that computer voice with all the choices: If you want this, Press 1. If you want that, Press 2.
If what you want is on the list, then you are put on a waiting list for a half hour with constant reminders that there is an automated system that can help you instead. Then just as your estimated time arrives, the connection is disconnected and you have to start over again.
And every word you say is recorded and sold to corporations gathering information on you, they can sell to other corporations. The people can vote to stop our own government from spying on us, but we can’t stop the corporations from doing the same thing.
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Every time, a company suggests that next time I might go online to resolve my concerns, I tell them in my most pathetic voice, “I am sorry. I am a dinosaur.” Then I thank them and promptly hang up.
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LOL
What I do is go online, and Google that company looking for the name of its CEO and his address. Then I write an old fashioned letter, print it and mail it through the US mail.
The results have been amazing with few if any exceptions. A traditional business letter format is written to the CEO. Not a phone call to an automation or an e-mail.
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I saw this in a school I worked in up in the North Bronx; it was a public school, but the principal, a product of the New York City Department of Education’s dismal “leadership academy” (lowercase deliberate), punished students for the crime of not living in a family that could afford school uniforms.
And yeah, this is cute.
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Ironic, since in two states that I taught in we could not require anything, because if it was required and the student couldn’t afford it, the school had to supply it. Of course, those were public schools… we wouldn’t make laws like that for charters….
>
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I wish there was a safe way to name the schools and the leaders of schools who are imposing these fees and penalties, without getting sued for doing so.
I am not sure that would help a lot but these anecdotal accounts, while part of the story, leave the real culprits out of sight and unaccountable.
I read some of the applications for charter school expansion grants at USDE. more than one requested funds for uniforms and branded supplies for “school spirit and identity.” These are the same proposals that had redacted (blacked out sections) information, because the information might provide another charter outfit a “competitive advantage.”
We have a non-profit that offers free school supplies for teachers who can apply for limited no-fee visits to the “store.” The teachers must have some proof that they teach in a school with a high rate of poverty. Almost everything in the store is a freebie, given by a corporation and as a tax benefit. What the teachers can get are a lot of materials out-dated promotional materials with corporate logos in plain view, yellowed and damaged reams of paper, Exceptions are the old computer systems (really old), a few copy machines, and furnishings, corporate desks, tables, chairs, and the like.
I would much rather see these corporate contributions made available to distributor not so narrowly focussed on schools and for the mega corporations in out community to desist from asking for tax breaks that diminish the funds for our public schools.
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Here is your main dish:
http://thelensnola.org/2017/07/07/charter-schools-refusal-to-admit-students-lacking-uniforms-wasnt-its-first/
Ms. Laura, would you like to see the desert menu?
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Why would anyone expect anything different? BESE and New Orleans media , e.g. the Advocate, dismiss the need for a search committee, for fully vetted resumes, and for adherence to published, agreed-upon job specifications, in the appointments of state school superintendents. In Louisiana, familiarity with the EEOC must be optional in state government.
Chiefs for Change are plutocratic lackeys.
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CALVANISTIC to the MAX.
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YEP!
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Jeff has not really cut loose on the History of St. Louis….but he offers a preview which I passed on the the readers of the Post Dispatch. This is also from Alternet…..Budget Austerity Treats Public School Parents Like Criminals
How parents who send their kids to free public schools became the latest in a long list of “takers”
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The alderman who was presenting a slide show of a sweetheart deal for some corporation compared st. louis parents with criminals….with the revealing phrasing “the project would “target tenants who are young professionals without children. Attracting that demographic to the city is crucial, he says, and after the tax abatement ends, the revenue windfall for the city will be significant.”
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Joe Roddy is that alderman. Yep, can’t have any children running around squealing with delight at being alive.
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