Here is an event you won’t want to miss:
CONSIDER IT: SCHOOL CHOICE AND THE CASES FOR TRADITIONAL PUBLIC EDUCATION AND CHARTER SCHOOLS
September 19 @ 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM Hilton Reading
Berks County Community Foundation
Panelists:
Carol Corbett Burris: Executive Director of the Network for Public Education
Alyson Miles: Deputy Director of Government Affairs for the American Federation for Children
James Paul: Senior Policy Analyst at the Commonwealth Foundation
Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig: Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and the Director of the Doctorate in Educational Leadership at California State University Sacramento
Karin Mallett: The WFMZ TV anchor and reporter returns as the moderator
School choice has been a hot topic in Berks County, in part due to a lengthy and costly dispute between the Reading School District and I-LEAD Charter School.
The topic has also been in the national spotlight as President Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have focused on expanding education choice.
With this in mind, a discussion on school choice is being organized as part of Berks County Community Foundation’s Consider It initiative. State Sen. Judy Schwank and Berks County Commissioners Chairman Christian Leinbach are co-chairs of this nonpartisan program, which is designed to promote thoughtful discussion of divisive local and national issues while maintaining a level of civility among participants.
The next Consider It Dinner will take place Tuesday, September 19, 2017, at 5 p.m. at the DoubleTree by Hilton Reading, 701 Penn St., Reading, Pa. Tickets are available here. For $10 each, tickets include dinner, the panel discussion, reading material, and an opportunity to participate in the conversation.
School Choice is a FALLACY. It’s about CONTROL and $$$$$ and Making America Undemocratic. There’s NOTHING about Charters that is democratic.
Many of those young adult racists who marched in Charlottesville are products of “school choice”. They are products of that portion of America’s school system that has been re-segregated by the charter school movement that became widespread at the beginning of the 1990’s…and there are tens of thousands more of them in the segregated charter school pipeline that keeps churning them out.
Racist re-segregation being fostered charter schools is clearly an issue that isn’t even on your radar of politicians who aren’t at all aware of the racist roots of charter schools or how they are re-segregating the education of America’s children. But the NAACP is very aware and has called for a total moratorium on charter schools. Here’s a thumbnail background on the racist roots of “school choice”, vouchers, and charter schools:
The racist roots of charter schools traces back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that required the racial integration of public schools. That triggered “white flight” from public schools and into private schools. But white parents found the cost of private schools was expensive, so the call went out for vouchers to enable white parents to have a “free choice” of schools. In 1959, just before the Court’s deadline for racial integration of public schools, a prominent newspaper in Prince Edward County, Virginia, published the outline for the charter school scheme to resegregate education: “We are working [on] a scheme [with members of Congress] in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to corporations, reopen them as privately operated schools with tuition grants [vouchers] from [the State of Virginia] and from Prince Edward County. Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with [the Supreme Court and non-whites].”
At the same time, a prominent Virginia attorney who was an advisor to Virginia politicians announced a corollary scheme for resegregating public schools by means of standardized testing: “Negroes can be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they can’t maintain. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches [from white parents].” That was the conceptual beginning and foundation of all the standardized testing we see today, many of which tests are are designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure. The test results were and still are used to “prove” that traditional public schools are “failing” — a claim abetted by drastic underfunding of public schools so that they lacked the resources to teach effectively. The “failing” test scores were and are also used to “prove” that unionized public school teachers are “ineffective”.
For more details, read the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project report “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards.”
But charter schools are even more insidious: They are also a financial scam. The thoughtful person must ask why hedge funds are so interested in expanding the number of charter schools. It certainly isn’t an altruistic concern for children. Here’s a hint: The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools are a risk to the Department of Education’s 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 and the skimming of tax money into private pockets, which is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
For example: One of the profitable charter school scams is to have the puppet private school boards lease buildings that are owned by real estate investment trusts (REITs) held by the hedge funds. The charter school board members, in exchange for kickbacks, pay lease rates far above the market rate, and the profit goes to the hedge funds. Another incredible scam is that in many states when a charter school buys things like computers for the students, the computers — even though purchased with taxpayer money — become the private property of the charter school. At the end of each school year, they sell the computers, pocket the money, and receive more taxpayer money to purchase new computers…and repeat the process year-after-year.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, 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. There is simply no such thing as a “public charter school” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Charter schools should (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 operator 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. These aren’t “burdensome” requirements for charter schools — they are simply common sense safeguards that public tax money is actually being used to maximum effect to teach our nation’s children.
I sent this to a cousin that teaches in Montgomery County and asked her to share it with colleagues. I would like many teachers and parents to be able to attend this debate. Is there any chance of having it videotaped for a later post?
I don’t know if it will be taped.
I’m so glad there will be 2 advocates for public schools there.
Public school kids deserve an advocate who values them and their schools. There are thousands of paid advocates for charters and vouchers. There should be advocates for public schools, too.
They both “know their stuff,” and Heilig just did a series of “school choice” debates in front of various impartial audiences. At the end of the debate there was a vote in which Heilig repeatedly trounced the opposition.