Tom Ultican is on a mission to document the tentacles of the Destroy Public Education movement.
In this post, he traces the career of Atlanta’s current superintendent, Maria Carstarphen, whose singular goal is to turn the school district into an all-charter district. She embraces not only charter schools, but TFA, Relay Graduate School of Education, school closures, and of course, is funded by the notorious Walton Family Foundation in her efforts to stamp out public schools.
Operating in a conservative state with a governor committed to privatization of public schools, she is in a friendly environment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So eventually no public schools in Atlanta.
But the law says that you have to go to school.
Problems ahead !!!
Carstarphen is like an itinerant snake oil saleswoman selling her reformy wares from coast to coast. This is a time for the people of Atlanta to stand up and assert the rights for their children to get a legitimate public education. It is not enough that the NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter expansion. “Reform” is a positively loaded word for more separate and unequal treatment of minorities. “Reform” will monetize their children so they may become a commodity producing cash flow in some billionaire’s portfolio. People need to organize, protest and refuse the stale, failed reform plan the state plans to impose on them. Atlanta should not become the next New Orleans where the takeover of schools has been an abject failure. The future of the young people of the city is in their hands. They must actively fight this anti-democratic takeover of their public schools.
Horrors.
Several years ago state legislators changed Georgia education law to require each school district to choose to operate in accordance with one of three so-called operating models: Charter System; Strategic Wavers School System (SWSS), originally named Investing in Educational Excellence (IE2); or, Title 20/No Waivers, originally named Status Quo.
The first two operating models, Charter System and SWSS, offered districts “a measured amount of freedom” [1] from Title 20, Georgia’s law for elementary and secondary education, in exchange to be held more accountable for results. A district wishing to choose either Charter System or SWSS had to apply to the state to enter into a performance contract with the state, understanding that failure to satisfy performance contract terms could result in sanctions.
A district wishing to remain Status Quo had only to notify the state of its decision. Only two of ~180 Georgia public school districts chose Status Quo; all others chose either Charter System or SWSS. By Carstarphen’s lead and machinations, Atlanta chose Charter System. Charter System aligns more perfectly with her ideological bent for destroying public schools.
Tellingly, only after a tipping point number of districts chose Charter System and SWSS did the state legislature drop the intentionally derisive name Status Quo and changed it to Title 20/No Waivers.
Now here’s the deal – pun intended – with Charter System. Although a Charter System performance contract is between the state and a district on the whole and not between the state and any individual public schools in the district, the performance contract incorporates by reference the Georgia Charter Schools Act of 1998 (“Act”) and so requires the Charter System district to operate each of its public schools in accordance with the Act.
This then means every Atlanta public school is now operated as if it were a charter school—again, operated as if it were a charter school.
Clear evidence this is the case is the fact that Carstarphen has pushed into every Atlanta public school a self-contained, anti-public engagement governance structure as required by the Act. To de-emphasize the reality so as to manipulate the public, Carstarphen calls the charter school governance structure applied to Atlanta public schools “Go Teams.” Each school elects its own Go Team members, just like charter schools elect their own governing board members.
[1] https://patch.com/georgia/buckhead/measured-amount-freedom
Thank you Ed. Your reply cleared up a few things up for me. It is very difficult to get a full understanding of localized attacks on public education because each state has such a unique education-law history. For me, the bottom line is that the main motives behind the attack on public education are religious agendas, private profits and reduced spending. These motives all undermine the promise of free high-quality public education for every neighborhood.
Thanks for putting up the good fight in Atlanta.
No, Puerto Rico will beat out Atlanta, I think.