Larry Lee writes about a small town in Alabama called Fruitdale. He describes the central role of the public schools in that community. It is the anchor of the community.
The charter lobby doesn’t care about Fruitdale, its history, its people, its future. They have dollar signs in their eyes.
He begins:
Sweet Jesus. It was hot, like really, really hot. But what do you expect on an August afternoon in the middle of a football field just 90 miles from the Gulf of Mexico?
I was there to watch the 2019 version of the Fruitdale Pirates practice. Fruitdale is one of five high schools in Washington County. It’s a 1A school, the smallest classification in Alabama high school sports. There are dozens and dozens of such schools across the state, places where Dollar General coming to town is a big deal. (Fruitdale recently opened one.)
Places where community and school are joined at the hip. Take away the school and you’ve jerked the heart from the community.
This August afternoon coach Johnny Carpenter was getting his 32 players ready for their first game against A. L. Johnson of Marengo County. Carpenter grew up just down the road in Citronelle, played football at Mississippi State and met a cheerleader in college who later became both his wife and an M.D. This is his first year as a head coach.
When you coach at this level, you do it all. From teaching class, to cooking ribs for a fund-raiser, to lining the field, to selling signs to merchants to help pay the bills and to actually coaching. His staff is another teacher/coach, John Hobbs. Former player Michael Dubose is a volunteer coach.
There was a pep rally before the first game. Elementary, middle and high school students sweated and yelled. Cheerleaders cheered. Players were introduced. Later that afternoon, fifth grade boys went home and ran around their yard with a football dreaming of the day they could be a Pirate scoring touchdowns and making tackles. Fourth grade girls jumped and pumped their arms and yelled for their team.
I know about dreams and memories. Fifty-nine years ago this fall number 83 of the Theodore Bobcats scored the only touchdown of his high school football career. Quarterback Charles Bryant threw a short pass to his left end, a 160 pound farm boy, standing in the end zone. That touchdown catch will always be mine. No one can take it away from me.
More than anything, that is what Fruitdale is all about. A small school in a small place where dreams are realized and memories are made.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please be careful talking about what privatizers “don’t understand”. I think they understand quite well. Either they don’t care or (worse, and, being cynical, I think more likely) they care very much and that’s actually why they’re doing it. I think one of the goals (or at least a very well known side-effect) of neoliberalism in general is to split people apart from any sense of community/solidarity. Divided, we have a much harder time organizing and are much easier to control.
“Choice” is intended to divide communities, making it harder to resist whatever cockamamie ideas the Disrupters are promoting.
We saw that in NYC, under Bloomberg and Klein. Twelve children in the same apartment building attending 12 different schools. No community to fight school closures.
You are right Dienne
The privatizers know full well what they are doing.
Never attribute to ignorance what is more plausibly attributed to purpose.
The charter pushers purposefully select rural communities because they think the local people are too stupid to see what is really going on and too ignorant to mount an opposition even if they did see it.
The charter pushers actually have contempt for the people they claim to be “serving”.
And it’s not just the charter pushers, but deformers in general who have contempt for the people they claim to be helping.
Not consulting with the people you are “helping” is a sure sign that you have no respect for them.
Neoliberals in general.
Take up the Billionaire’s burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought he us from ignorance
From joyous, blissful night?”
I see them as carrion-eaters. Just like Gordon Gekko buying that ailing plane mfr w/promises of injecting capital to save it, then tearing it apart & selling the nuts & bolts. They are a product of laissez-faire capitalism, whose casualties are left by the roadside to die.
I see them as Count Dracula and vampires, all feeding on the life essence of public schools and communities.
Right
Neoliberals — and also neonconservatives.
Pseudoliberals and pseudoconservatives would be much more descriptive terms.
And you are also right about the “divide and conquer” strategy that both these people employ, pitting rural against urban, liberal against conservative and Republican against Democrat, when most Americans have far more in common with each other than we have with the people exploiting us for their own gain.
Also pitting white against black and other minorities (and immigrants)
nicely said
Fruitdale H.S. is not a minority majority school. It is 81% white and about 12% black. It is an integrated school. However, the school is more than 61% free and reduced lunch. Community life revolves around the public school, the anchor of the community. I sincerely hope the community rallies around its school in the same way they have supported their football team. If they stick together and refuse to sign on to any private charter school baloney, they may be able to fight off the Texas privatizer. I sincerely hope that the successful alumni will help this poor community to fight off the assault. We have devolved into a society in which profiteers can target schools deemed “easy pickens,” where there is no regard for communities or students. https://www.schooldigger.com/go/AL/schools/0348001336/school.aspx
If this community wants to help its poorest students, it should demand more funding for its integrated public school. Studies in various parts of the country have found that increased funding helps poor students in academics. They are more likely to achieve and are more likely to attend college. https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/08/13/school-funding-spending-money-matter-latest-research-studies/
Theocracy is the ideal climate for predators forced to operate in a nation that has a constitution-like document mandating democracy.
Charter pusher, Bill Gates, “Discusses God…” (Relevant, 3-18- 2014).
(1) “Our kids have gone to the Catholic Church that Melinda goes to and that I participate in.”
(2) “What decision in your life you make differently because of (faith), I don’t know.” (This quote from Relevant was not found in other references summarizing the interview.)
Ignoring the role that influencers from religion have played in undermining public education is unwise.
Garrison Keillor wrote, “When you wage war on the public schools you attack the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.” Well, the vandals have invaded Fruitdale. I hope the good people there understand what’s at stake and stand up and speak out for their community’s school.
Pres.Obama described people turning to religion and guns when faced with economic deprivation. Religion has a history of promoting “property rights as paramount and laissez faire economic theories as sacrosanct. The resulting harsh consequences were defended as the working out of God’s will.”
The U.S. rich concentrated their wealth (like Bill Gates, Walton heirs and the Koch brothers) leaving nothing for the 99%, who then turned to religion for solace. Their church leaders steer the followers, politicians and government to the agenda of the rich.
The result is the U.S. has privatized public education when it used to be an asset of the people. And, vouchers fund churches, etc.
Rhetorically, what is the population percentage of evangelicals in Alabama?
I thought charters were having a more difficult time opening up in rural (and suburban) communities.
Their guiding principle is to pick off the least expensive and easiest to teach students, throw any of them back to public schools if they end up being more bother to teach than the charter wanted, and then announce that the students who leave are irredeemably violent and their parents simply despise high performing free public schools and prefer their kid attends the underfunding failing public school instead (presumably because the parents are complete idiots who don’t value their kids’ education).
But of course, charters that have used this recipe in urban areas generally depend on the racist beliefs of the media reporters to get away with such nonsense. When a public school is 80% white – even if the students in it are disadvantaged and at-risk – charters can’t use their racist tropes to imply that the students that they refuse to teach are simply unteachable due to their violent natures or their parents are ignorant fools. It is unlikely that the white education reporters would not let them get away with those kinds of ugly attacks on white students (even poor white students) that those white education reporters accept without question when the parents in charters are African-American.
The rise of BASIS Charters in Arizona — whose attrition rates mirrored the attrition rates of the so-called “top performing” no-excuses charters — is a good example of this. Never did BASIS try to demonize the students who left BASIS because those students were also likely to be middle class and white. Instead, BASIS simply made it clear that they were a charter school for students capable of passing AP Exams while still in middle school and only those students. They could do that because Arizona allowed charters for top students that excluded kids who weren’t accelerated learners. Other states already had those kinds of magnet public schools.
Any charter that opens in Fruitdale will likely have to exclude white students, too, the way BASIS did, and they can’t use the racist implications urban charters use to claim that those students needed to be excluded because they were violent, or that their parents were ignorant fools. It’s harder to do when you can’t depend on the racist beliefs of white education reporters to further you goal.
That’s why every study demonstrates that the only types of non-profit charters that are supposedly “higher performing” than public schools are those in urban areas. The ones in suburbs don’t demonstrate such a stark difference. It’s harder to prove superiority when you don’t have complete freedom to exclude students with no oversight and then have the freedom to demonize any student or parent who tries to call attention to what you do and call them liars.
I remember when Chris Christie was Gov. of NJ and helped some charter folks open charters to draw students from affluent suburbs. Those suburbs fought him and he had to back off and I believe those charters never opened.
Some rural charter schools are closing.
Unfortunately the local school board decided to close the Walton Rural Life Charter School in Walton, Kansas. The board decided the cost of renovating the building to bring it to modern standards (the school was built in 1963) was too high.
The school board is attempting to build another agriculturally based charter school in a town larger than Walton if the local citizens will approve the bond issue.
Why wouldn’t the school board simply build a vocational school that it runs itself? What is the point of spending money to build a school so that a private entity can profit?
That is what happened 40 years ago — perhaps a community wanted some different kind of magnet school or vocational school and the board might build it, but there was no competition since they were all part of the public system.
I guess that was before privatizers saw another way to get rich by robbing the taxpayers blind.
I’m sticking with carrion-eaters. The marketing methods change to suit the target market, but they’re all looking for “easy pickens,” as retired teacher says. Suitable targets are suffering from faltering economy – charters are a cheap way for govt to look like they’re doing something besides tax cuts for biz/ austerity for govt services.
NYC may seem to be thriving, but it’s an urb whose mfg failed the wkg class long ago, middle class industries being automated out, increasingly divided between rich & poor. The narrative that the govt/schools fail the poor/ minorities, coupled w/charter-friendly policies have made it easy pickens.
Rust-belt urbs have declining wkg/ middle-class jobs which = declining school enrollment. So do many rural areas. “Fruitdale” probably popped right up on a vulture search-engine, w/its name signaling thriving ag biz circa 1st half 20thC. Race irrelevant. Easy pickens.
This is one snapshot of America that greed wants to destroy.
I teach at a school like that. I have always considered the charter thing to be sort of far away. Why would we ever get on the charter radar? Hardly any money to make. Now this.
Tennessee recently changed the test that is used to wield the cudgel against schools like ours. Will the guarenteed failure of a PARCC imitation test bring these sleaze bags into our rural county? The second ammendment is starting to look a whole lot better.