Jersey Jazzman describes Race to the Top as “segregation gone wild.”
Strangely enough, the districts that applied for RTTT cash and mandates are mostly poor and minority.
Wonder if they know that none of the federal “remedies” has ever worked?
Wonder if they know their district is likely to spend more on implementing the mandates than the money it “wins”?
A Federal judge in Louisiana put a halt to the state voucher program and the new teacher hiring laws in one parish, saying they was likely to undercut the desegregation program.
The State Department of Education will appeal. TFA Commissioner John White believes that choice and privatization matter more than desegregation.
Remember when school segregation was considered a terrible thing?
Maybe you are not old enough to remember.
I am. I remember. I attended racially segregated schools in Houston in the 1940s and 1950s.
It was not okay.
The Supreme Court said it was wrong.
No longer.
EduShyster has discovered that racial segregation has become normal in certain schools in Boston.
Using humor, this blogger raises a very important issue.
Why is it we don’t care about racial integration anymore?
Why is it okay to open schools with a citywide pool that ends up almost 100% black?
Ruckus C. Johnson, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, has published studies showing that black students who went to desegregated schools for at least five years had higher graduation rates, high entry rates to college, higher college graduation rates, higher lifetime income, and healthier lives.
Desegregation is good for our society.
It prepares children to live in a diverse society.
Why is it no longer the civil rights issue of our time?
A teacher in Memphis writes about how parents in her school reacted to the announcement that it would be taken over by the Achievement School District and turned into a charter school. Her school is poor but it has made steady growth and is not one of the lowest performing schools in the city. The media in Memphis, she says, is not reporting the genuine rage of the local black community:
First, see this article in my local paper about the state takeover of 10 more schools and the meetings about that takeover:
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/nov/07/10-more-memphis-schools-to-be-taken-over-by/
I am a teacher at one of those schools in Frayser, a neighborhood the Achievement School District (ASD) seems to have targeted since they took over three schools there last year. The article notes that 6 of the 10 schools taken over will be run by charter operators.
I attended the meeting last night at Pursuit of God in Frayser, an impoverished and predominantly black neighborhood. The crowd was angry that their children’s teachers were going to be fired and that their children would have to adapt to a whole new school. They spoke about the great current teachers in their schools. They wanted to know what was going to make these schools better, and there was no one from the ASD who could explain that.
There was also concern expressed by a 30-year veteran teacher and resident of Frayser that this was an attempt to segregate the poor black neighborhood of Frayser from the rest of the county in the upcoming merger of Memphis City and Shelby County School Systems.
The community at the meeting was very antagonistic to state takeover. I overheard an employee of the church comment, “We got a tough crowd tonight,” and the ASD people were clearly uncomfortable.
I expected an article in the local paper to mention the atmosphere at the meeting.
The media ran this segment: http://www.wmctv.com/story/20049306/tn-asd-getting-set-to-take-over-more-memphis-schools
And the paper did not report on the events of the meeting. The shot of the crowd was purposefully taken while most of them were in the other room getting refreshments. There was no other coverage of the meeting in the media.
Dr. Camika Royal explains here that the term “achievement gap” is offensive. She says that the comparison between whites and African Americans is inherently demeaning to the latter and ignores the reasons for what it claims to address.
Use the term “opportunity gap” or “wealth gap.” But, please, she says, stop using the term “achievement gap.”
My thoughts, Dr. Royal: This phrase (“the achievement gap”) is used cynically by self-proclaimed “reformers” who have no genuine interest in closing the opportunity gap or the wealth gap. In fact, if you mention the causes of test score differences, they will accuse you of making excuses. They don’t want to talk about poverty or segregation. They don’t want to hear anything about causes, only about test scores gaps. They will point to schools that get high test scores by operating as boot camps. They say that black children need a “different” kind of education, an education where they are taught to obey, to conform, to listen in silence, and to do as they are told without question.
They think that days on end of test prep is the right kind of education for black children, but not for their own.
Until the Wall Street guys, the high-tech titans, and the foundation moguls demand that poor children get the same quality of education that they want for their own children, with experienced teachers, small classes, excellent facilities, ample resources, and a rich curriculum, I can’t take seriously their talk about “closing the gap,” no matter which adjective it takes.
Now that President Obama has been re-elected, supporters of public education must redouble our efforts to end educational malpractice and rejuvenate American education.
It’s time to stop the privatization of public education.
It’s time to stop using invalid methods to judge teacher quality.
It’s time to stop high-stakes testing.
It’s time to stop closing schools.
It’s time to stop teaching to the tests.
It’s time to end the obsession with data and test-based metrics.
It’s time to support students and teachers and public schools.
It’s time to enrich the curriculum with the arts, history, civics and foreign languages for all children.
It’s time to think about what’s good for children, what will really improve education, and what will truly encourage creativity and ingenuity.
It’s time to think about reviving the spirits of educators and the joy of teaching and learning.
The election is over. The struggle for the heart and soul of American education continues.
Motoko Rich of the New York Times has written a good article about the Georgia charter referendum.
We already knew that big donors from out of state funded the pro-charter vote. What I learned from this article was that charter corporations also funded the Yes vote.
She writes:
“The roster of contributors in Georgia includes several companies that manage charter schools, including K12 Inc., Charter Schools USA and National Heritage Academies. In all, committees supporting the ballot measure have collected 15 times as much as groups opposing the measure, according to public filings.”
The charter corporations listed here operate for profit.
Somehow this seems unethical. Isn’t it like a payoff or a sort of legal graft to buy support for a measure that benefits the corporation?
Yes, I understand that it happens all the time. I understand that tobacco companies and oil companies spend money to win public support and contracts. I’m not naive.
But I never imagined that for-profit charter corporations would give money to candidates and ballot questions to get contracts. If the referendum passes, they make money.
It just smells bad. It stinks.
It’s not about education. It’s about greed.
Kevin Huffman, the TFA Commissioner of Education in Tennessee, demands that the Metro Nashville school board authorize a charter in an affluent section of town. The Arizona-based charter, called Great Hearts, expects parents to offer a cash gift of $1200-1500 at the beginning of the school year to defray various costs. The school board worries about lack of diversity and lack of transportation.
The board has rejected Great Hearts four times. Huffman is punishing Nashville by withholding $3.4 million in state aid. The Republican-controlled legislature has threatened to adopt vouchers because of the Nashville board’s insistence on a desegregated school.
As the following article shows, Huffman knows exactly what he is doing.
http://blogs.knoxnews.com/humphrey/2012/09/huffman-on-charter-schools-use.html
Huffman on Charter Schools Used for ‘Ghettoizing’
Long before he became Tennessee’s education commissioner, Kevin Huffman penned an article on charter schools that a reader points out as interesting in light of his recent decision to withhold $3.4 million from Nashville’s schools because the local school board rejected a Great Hearts Academy application.
A key reason for the Metro Nashville board’s rejection of Great Hearts application was concern that it would be lacking in diversity. Huffman’s 1998 article for the October, 1998, New York University Law Review focuses on the possibility of litigation over school choice legislation.
In doing so, Huffman observes that a charter school can be designed to effectively exclude enrollment of poor students, either by location, which without provisions for transportation restricts availability to those in the neighborhood, or by limiting dissemination of information on the schools to the children of “quick-acting, better-informed parents… leaving children of poor and ill-informed parents behind, consigned to suffering the deterioration of neighborhood schools.”
“In such a scenario, the children of informed and quick-acting parents have a choice while those “out of the loop” have no choice at all,” he writes.
Here’s the article’s “conclusion” section:
Charter schools will play a prominent role in public education during the coming decade. They suit the political agendas of many and hold great promise for developing innovative approaches to public education.
Charter schools have the potential to reinvigorate the public schools in districts that desperately need a boost. However, as states quickly move forward with charter school legislation, they risk establishing a process that merely provides further opportunities for well-informed families while ghettoizing the poor and uninformed.
The movement toward deregulation allows schools to exclude the neediest students, either through explicit policies or simply through lack of adequate information. .Ultimately, plaintiffs will have a difficult time showing that charter schools or state enabling acts violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment….However, state constitutions and successful school finance litigation in state courts indicate that state challenges to charter school legislation have a higher chance of success.
Most significantly, several policy changes would allow states to mandate a strong, autonomous charter school movement without depriving access to the schools. Greater state oversight of admissions policies and dissemination of information would close potential avenues of litigation while maintaining the legitimacy of charter schools.
These changes would add some costs to charter school legislation, but they would ultimately allow charter schools to reach greater numbers of at-risk students.
It would be a terrible waste of resources if charter schools were consistently tied up in litigation. It would be an even greater waste, though, if the charter school movement failed to reach the neediest public school students.
Meanwhile, Joey Garrison has written a detailed analysis of people and politics involved in the Great Hearts flap.
Posted by Tom Humphrey on September 24, 2012 at 11:06 AM
Copyright (c) 1998 New York University Law Review
New York University Law Review
NOTE: CHARTER SCHOOLS, EQUAL PROTECTION LITIGATION, AND THE NEW SCHOOL REFORM MOVEMENT
October, 1998
73 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1290
Author
Kevin S. Huffman *
Excerpt
As the quality of public education, particularly in large urban school districts, has declined, activists and politicians from all points on the political spectrum have proposed school reforms. Many reformers have suggested versions of “school choice” programs. These efforts propose to alter the school assignment systems common to most public school districts, in which students attend neighborhood schools without regard to preference. While some activists seek parent choice just among the area public schools, others would expand the notion of choice to private or even parochial schools, giving tuition vouchers to students choosing to attend private schools. 1 School choice activists have argued for nearly three decades that opening the public school market will both stimulate competition and increase school quality. 2 While the choice movement has found support among political conservatives, 3 full-scale voucher programs have been defeated largely by the efforts of teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party. 4
The continued woes of public schools have forced even the staunchest defenders of the status quo to examine new methods of improving school systems. Many districts strapped for personnel now hire teachers without degrees in education or teaching certifications. 5 Both the Bush and Clinton administrations have moved to redefine public school goals with the aim of increasing quality through national standards. 6 Furthermore, as states’ rights became a more prominent issue on the political agenda, school reformers followed suit, advocating a shift in control from state and local bureaucracies to individual schools. 7 Many …
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results is said to be a form of insanity.
Paul Thomas of Furman University in South Carolina shows how this definition of insanity applies to what is called “education reform” today.
Thomas’s error in this chart is assuming that the goal of the current restructuring of education is to improve or reform schools. If you think of the goal as privatization, it all makes perfect sense. That’s why I have changed my own vocabulary to use the word privatization to describe this movement.
Anthony Cody has a stunning article this week about what is happening in Louisiana.
The expansion of vouchers and charters will facilitate the re-segregation of the schools, he predicts.
Governor Jindal eliminated all funding for public libraries in his new budget.
The TFA Commissioner has put a young and unqualified TFA alum in charge of teacher evaluation.
The freight train of reform (aka privatization) is running full blast in that unfortunate state.
Arne Duncan will be there any day now to congratulate Governor Jindal on the progress made in “reforming” the schools.
And lots of thanks to the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and Teach for America for turning the clock back to 1950 and calling it “reform.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 