Carol Burris dug into federal charter school grants and was appalled by what she discovered in North Carolina.
The Charter Schools Program Funds White Flight Schools in North Carolina We were appalled when we saw the list of charter schools funded by federal money through the CSP. The U.S Department of Education awarded a grant to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction that passed the money on to white flight charters to expand. Awards were given to schools that do not participate in the federal lunch program nor provide transportation, as well as schools that require parents to volunteer or make donations. One of the schools even uses corporal punishment. Eleven of the schools are or will be run by for-profits.
The Network for Public Education and more than 60 other national and local organizations wrote a letter to Secretary Cardona asking him to investigate and call back the grant issued by Betsy De Vos. We also filed a complaint with the Office of the Inspector General on irregularities we found.
Our complaints are under review. This blatant abuse of federal tax dollars, increasing segregation in the North Carolina public school system, cannot stand.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The South has a long standing tradition of “white flight academies.” Throughout the South there are small private Christian schools that mostly cater to white students. These used to be funded by the parents of the students. Now that federal money is flowing to privately operated organizations, the segregation tradition continues shamefully funded by our tax dollars.
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flowing is the operative word: every opportunist on the block now seeking a way in
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You gotta love it when the Religertarians (religious libertarians) like DeVos support funding all these private religious schools with public money.
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https://oese.ed.gov/offices/office-of-discretionary-grants-support-services/charter-school-programs/state-entities/
The federal government uses “high-quality” three times in this description of the federal charter funding process, and all ed reformers roboticallly repeat that they support “high quality charters” but there’s no “quality” evaluation at all.
One of the charter companies they just funded is owned by one person who then hired all his relatives to run it. In what imaginary world is this “high quality”? It’s junk. It’s already corrupt and the school hasn’t even opened yet. They think it will get less corrupt if they hand them millions in federal funding?
“High quality” is just another meaningless phrase in the ed reform echo chamber. Just something they all recite in unison as marketing and promotion of their privatized schools.
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Wait until the new voucher programs ed reformers designed and lobbied for get up and running. They’re going to make charter fraud look like small potatoes. They’ll be pushing hundreds of millions in public funds out the door to any entity that claims to offer anything even vaguely related to “education.
Completely unregulated, by (ideological) design. Ed reform is anti-regulatory because of their Right wing ideological beliefs. That’s why they create these “governance” systems that have no safeguards or oversight. Deliberately and carefully created by the ed reform echo chamber to forbid regulation. The huge voucher expansions are their newest experiment, and it’s all being funded by the public.
Remember- the ed reform echo chamber create these privatized systems. If the systems are riddled with fraud and corruption that’s 100% the responsibility of the echo chamber.
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And just wait for the Supreme Court to rule public funding of private schools legal. This court was picked not only for outlawing abortion but also to privatize public services and utilities. There’s a good reason better reason many on the left are advocating for Dems to pack this court while Joe Biden is president. There is no constitutional requirement that limits the number of justices on the Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court is now ruled by Religertarians (religious libertarians).
The only difference between these people and the Taliban is the head gear. Both wear flowing robes and both base decrees on religious dogma.
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The entire ed reform echo chamber only have one idea, and that idea is “privatize”:
“Sam Duell
Here is an idea called “parent-directed education spending”
It would allow parents to allocate education funding to third-party service providers like tutors, therapies, enrichments, and more.
I think school districts could do this right now.”
100 different ed reform orgs, thousands of full time employees, and the only “idea” they ever come up with is 500 different ways of saying “vouchers” or “charters”
“Parent-directed education spending” LOL. That’s why they’re paid 100k a year- to come up with ever-more misleading ways of saying “vouchers”
Is there any public school in the country who needs this “movement”? What value do they add to public schools? Hire them as consultants and you too can direct public funding to anyone who wanders in and claims they’re offering “educational services”? Couldn’t public schools just come up with privatization schemes on their own and skip this lavishly funded middleman part?
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The Conditions in the Schools Where Black Children Studied
Many school buildings for African Americans had leaking roofs, sagging floors, and windows without glass. They ranged from untidy to positively filthy, according to a study issued in 1917.
If black children had any books at all, they were hand-me-downs from white schools.
Black schools were overcrowded, with too many students per teacher. More black schools than white had only one teacher to handle students from toddlers to 8th graders. Black schools were more likely to have all grades together in one room.
There were not enough desks for the over-crowded classrooms.
Black teachers did not receive as much training as white teachers. On top of that, the salary for black teachers was so low that it was hard to find fully qualified ones.
There were limits on what blacks could be taught in school. White school leaders did not want black children to be exposed to ideas like equality and freedom.
Carter G. Woodson told how some black children in Southern schools were not allowed to use books that included the Declaration of Independence or the U. S. Constitution. These documents state that government should get its power from the consent of the governed. Reading them would confirm for African Americans that they were being denied the rights due to all citizens of the United States.
https://www.abhmuseum.org/education-for-blacks-in-the-jim-crow-south/
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The unequal conditions you describe are the reason MLK stated that “separate is never equal.” Funding often disappears in black and brown majority schools. Integrated schools tend to provide greater equity for students of color because politicians will be less likely to reduce funding to them. In integrated schools all students benefit from learning how to get along with a variety of different students.
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Re: “separate is never equal”
There is actually one case where separate IS equal: in algebraic equations, where the left hand and right hand expressions are separated by the equals sign.
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Get used to it. The United States has always been a cutthroat capitalist country and most if not all of the very wealthy see the workplace as losers because they didn’t win the game of wealth.
In 1900, when the US had its first progressive president, Teddy Roosevelt, about 40% of the population lived in poverty.
It took a few decades with some progressive presidents with a supportive Congress to lower the poverty rate and improve the lifestyles of the working class, but those golden years started to decline when the Koch brothers (I do not regret that David Koch is dead and I hope his brother Charles follows him soon) launched ALEC and funded the birth of the Tea Party movement.
Once the Kochs started stuffing working Americans into coffins, it took President Reagan (or was that Ray-Gun) to start nailing those coffins shut as they came off the assembly line.
The libertarians and most if not all Republicans have been at war since the beginning of the golden age of the progressive movement to end and roll back all the gains the working class earned.
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Actually the more “capitalist” the world has become the lower the poverty rate for the world. See https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/e20f2f1a-en
Here is a bit of the abstract for those that do not want to click the link: “For 135 years since 1820, more than half of the global population lived in conditions of extreme poverty. It took another 46 years to cut this rate in half, which only happened as recently as 2001. In the years that followed, the reduction of extreme poverty accelerated tremendously, and in 13 more years the global poverty rate was halved again.”
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You can see the same sharp reining in of extreme poverty in Eastern Europe and the former USSR 1920-1980. Not a “more capitalistic” period for the region, rather the opposite.
China might support your theory: according to a couple of indicators it looks like poverty decreased sharply after their second wave of market reforms started in early ‘90’s. But as explained in the report, there’s conflicting and unreliable data, which results in a 35% margin of error.
Interestingly, the report notes that “within-country income inequality” acts like a brake on the falling level of poverty that comes with increased GDP. The trend can be seen in the period 1978-2014. Spiraling income inequality is linked to unregulated capitalism.
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Thank the centrally planed economy of China for much of the recent reduction. Reducing extreme poverty from 2/3 of China’s population in 1990 to 1% today. Everything is relevant, a $1.90 a day not exactly living the life of Riley. And of course technology, as simple as increased crop yields would have nothing to do with the reduction ,would it?
https://www.oecd.org/indonesia/agriculturalprogressandpovertyreduction.htm
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Bethree5,
I am looking at a longer sweep of history. As Hans Rosling famously said, “It was the last 200 years that changed the world”.
If we focus in on the 1920-1980 period, the impact of centralization is most clearly seen in 1932-33 where the efforts to collectivize agriculture in the first five year plan resulted in a famine that killed an estimated 3.5 to 3.9 million in the Ukraine (some estimates go as high as 7.5 million), 2-3 million in Russia, and 1.5-2 million in Kazakhstan. There were many fewer poor people after the famine was over.
I recommend reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder about the experience of Ukraine and Poland between
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Joel,
The centrally planned economy of China killed an estimated 15-55 million people during Mao’s famine 1959-61. To understand the depth of suffering brought on by the collectivization effort I recommend reading Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter.
It is only with the decentralization of the economy (and several hundred million people openly defying state control of labor movement) that China has been able to bring large numbers of people out of absolute poverty.
If you are interested in what international poverty looks like, take a look at Dollar Street at Gapminder (https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street). You might also want to watch Hans Rosling’s famous TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen)
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No one on this blog has endorsed a centralized planned economy like the USSR or China. Red herring.
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Pun intended?
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Of course Joel said I should “thank centrally planed economy of China for much of the recent reduction. Reducing extreme poverty from 2/3 of China’s population in 1990 to 1% today.” Perhaps that is not an endorsement, but luckily those posters can speak for themselves. I look forward to to their responses.
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