Recently The Century Foundation issued a report about charter schools that are “diverse by design.” The report was intended to show that charters are capable of producing integration (more than public schools) because of their “flexibility.”
The report from this liberal think tank was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, a far-right, anti-union entity that spends $200 million every year on charter schools and so has a huge incentive to sell them, especially to liberals, who might otherwise be dubious about the non-union aspect of privatization by charter schools. (More than 90% of charters are non-union and rely on temp teachers from TFA, which is generously funded by the Waltons).
But as Julian Vasquez Heilig points out in this post, TCF found only 125 charters that were “diverse by design” in a charter universe of nearly 6,000 schools. That is about 2% of the charters examined for the report.
What is the point? He thinks that the report calls attention to the charters’ lack of interest in racial integration and unintentionally makes the opposite point from the one it thinks it is making.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If charters are not providing significant academic gains, and they are excluding students based on individual differences, what good are they? Our country is suffering from a serious racial divide. Isolation often breeds contempt. If charters are not willing to embrace all types of young people, who needs them? The money spent on them is harming the education of the schools that serve all comers. We do not need the enhanced segregation charters often provide. Students are better off when they learn to accept people that are different from them. We need to focus on fully funding our public schools.
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“If charters are not providing significant academic gains,”
Please, rt, define “significant academic gains”.
As it is that terminology is straight from the edudeformers’ and privateers’ playbook. I can’t stress enough not using their language and concepts. “Significant academic gains”? Really? A perfectly good nebulous concept that no one, nope, not anyone can be against, eh! “Significant academic gains”, gotta have them or else how can we prove that we are “continuously improving” all the time, 100% of the time, eh! “Significant academic gains” for everyone!!! “Significant academic gains”, maybe the acronym SAGs actually describes it as a logical concept, there is nothing substantive in the middle of that thought so it sags under the weight of scrutiny.
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Here is the definition of “diverse by design” that the Century Foundation uses:
A charter school with a disproportionately high number of white students and a disproportionately high number of middle class and affluent students and a disproportionately low number of at-risk students and economically disadvantaged students is “diverse by design”.
What is more disturbing is that so-called journalists are ignorant enough to accept that without question.
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SO CALLED journalists. Exactly.
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Charter: Divert$ by design
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What a pity that the term liberal has been reduced to market-loving. Old enough to have deep resentment that of this theft in meaning. AS for charters, they have long claimed civil rights as a mantle of sorts, so this study is actually a good one to illustrate that false as well as the desperation of the charter industry in scraping up plausible evidence of something, anything, that looks like good data. The study is pure publicity for the unwitting press.
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“The liberal use of Liberal”
The current use of Liberal
Is surely very liberal
And Liberals they ain’t
When Liberals they taint
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New study on the effects of the massive school closures in Chicago:
https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/school-closings-chicago-staff-and-student-experiences-and-academic-outcomes
It didn’t benefit public school students.
I’m thrilled there is at least one university that still bothers to consider the effects of ed reform on public school students, though. It’s rare that PUBLIC school students are mentioned at all in ed reform. Usually, they study exclusively charter and private schools with public school students left as a kind of amorphous “status quo” group that the Best and Brightest can’t be bothered with.
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On the subject of segregation, there’s this idiotic piece on Education post:
http://educationpost.org/did-brown-v-board-really-produce-better-outcomes-for-our-black-students/
A CEO of an organization promoting charter schools as the education solution for African Americans — and the size of whose six-figure salary is directly proportional to increasing the number of blacks attending all-black charters, and to the opening of more all-black charter schools — basically promotes Plessy vs. Ferguson’s “separate but equal is just fine and dandy” argument:
SUMMARY: (my paraphrasing)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
PARAGRAPHS 1, 2, & 3:
“Integrating schools was bad for blacks.
PARAGRAPHS 4, 5 & 6:
“Integrating schools is bad for blacks.”
(Then starts talking out of both sides of his mouth)
PARAGRAPH 7
“But I’m not against school integration… ”
(Err … but you just spent the first six paragraphs of this asinine op-ed saying you were against school integration.)
” … it’s just that all-black charters schools are a better way to go.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
What a money-motivated sellout-douche!
He’s seriously arguing that it’s better for African-American students to have no contact with non-African-Americans starting in Pre-K (age 3 or 4, depending on the birthday) all the way through to Senior year high school (age 17 or 18, depending on the birthday.).
Seriously?
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Here’s another similar EdPost piece — written by another African-American making his living off an all-black charter schools — trying to sell the same message — segregate schools are good for blacks, while integrated schools are bad for blacks(George Wallace would have loved this guy.)
I guess these guys get their marching orders, and go to work.
In this case, Andre Perry wrote a brilliant piece attacking the notion that the education of blacks cannot happen without integration … (The title of Perry’s op-ed says it all:
“Any Educational Reform That Ignores Segregation Is Doomed to Failure.”)
http://hechingerreport.org/any-educational-reform-that-ignores-segregation-is-doomed-to-failure/
… and then, in response, EdPost’s founder and leader Peter Cunningham starts writing checks to other pro-charter blacks to write op-eds saying otherwise.
What-ever …
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Wow…What a LIE!
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