If you listen to the GOP, Democrats have failed black people. They argue that they’ve only given lip service to improving the black community, at the same time they argue that it has been Democrats who have used “Identity Politics” in order to divide and conquer the electorate and dominate the African-American vote.
They’ve said that African-Americans should give Republicans “A Chance” — yet the truth is that they’ve already had a chance and we’ve already seen much of what they bring to the table. Most notably they are hellbent on dismantling public institution and replacing them with private entities funded by public dollars. We’ve seen them do this with our military in terms of private entities like Blackwater/Xe who may have had a perfect track record protecting State Dept personnel in Iraq, they also produced the Nisour Square massacre of unarmed civilians. They turned standard military KP duty and construction services over to the like of KPR which produced high profits for that corporation but also killed at least 18 soldiers due to improper electrical work performed by the company.
When it comes to Americas failing public schools, the GOP and Donald Trump have insisted on the magic fix-all solution of “School Choice”, which is simply a euphemism for privatization and channelling public tax dollars into privately owned Charter Schools.
And just how well has that worked out so far?
It’s fair of course to point out that there have been some success stories with charter schools particularly in Urban areas.
Charter schools are controversial. But are they good for education?
Rigorous research suggests that the answer is yes for an important, underserved group: low-income, nonwhite students in urban areas. These children tend to do better if enrolled in charter schools instead of traditional public schools.
There are exceptions, of course. We can’t predict with certainty that a particular child will do better in a specific charter or traditional public school. Similarly, no doctor can honestly promise a patient she will benefit from a treatment.
Social scientists, like medical researchers, can confirm only whether, on average, a given treatment is beneficial for a given population. Not all charter schools are outstanding: In the suburbs, for example, the evidence is that they do no better than traditional public schools. But they have been shown to improve the education of disadvantaged children at scale, in multiple cities, over many years.
On the other hand some of that success just might be attributed not to an improve meant in the schools, but their ability to cherry-pick the best potential students.
Getting in can be grueling.
Students may be asked to submit a 15-page typed research paper, an original short story, or a handwritten essay on the historical figure they would most like to meet. There are interviews. Exams. And pages of questions for parents to answer, including: How do you intend to help this school if we admit your son or daughter?
These aren't college applications. They're applications for seats at charter schools.
Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.
"I didn't get the sense that was what charter schools were all about - we'll pick the students who are the most motivated? Who are going to make our test scores look good?" said Michelle Newman, whose 8-year-old son lost his seat in an Ohio charter school last fall after he did poorly on an admissions test. "It left a bad taste in my mouth."
So it’s not really the case that a student and their parents get to choose the schools, the schools get to choose the students who make us “look better?”
This seems to be a trend that’s in keeping with George Bush’s disastrous “Leave No Child Behind” program which accomplished the opposite by incentivizing schools to improve their standardized test scores, and hence teachers salaries, by shoving the low performing students completely out of the school, leaving them without viable future.
According to researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin, Bush might want to more correctly rename “No Child Left Behind” to “Lets Leave a Lot More Children Behind”. Their recent study found that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates, especially for minorities. Teachers and administrators are essentially rewarded when minority students drop out, so retention efforts are now virtually non-existent. Why retain students that make it impossible to comply with NCLB, is the unspoken question with a no clear answer.
By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students, the study found that 60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent. The researchers also+ found that NCLB is directly contributing to these unusually high dropout rates.
Although some fixes have been applied to NCLB the promise of improved education has become for more elusive in fact in many school districts that have gone almost fully to charter schools, particularly in Detroit.
Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.
While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.
Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.
“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”
If in fact funds are being siphoned from public coffers for these schools who are not designed to provide education to all students, but only to those students who are already the most advanced and the most prepared — what exactly is left in funds and resources for all the rest of potential students who by definition are now the most challenging and difficult to help?
What happens to everyone else? Isn’t the illusion of “school choice” where the schools get to make the choices effectively segregation by another name?
The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.
Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school segregation.
Our analysis of the 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students reveals that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. While examples of truly diverse charter schools exist, our data show that these schools are not reflective of broader charter trends.
Republicans argue the problems with our public schools are largely on the backs of teachers unions, and that government inflexibility is stifling innovation. Well, that’s one view. Another is that the schools are creating even greater racial stratification while dodging standards and lowering ability of public oversight of how these view exactly how and where the schools operate. With nothing more than a profit motive, treating students like cash-cows, there is an incentive for these private institutions to cut costs while inflating their actual student attendance. A point that was made quite eloquently this week by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. [And I highly recommend you watch this all the way though, if you do — you’ll be off the Charter School train for life.]
2015 news segment: This charter school suddenly closed its doors in the middle of the day. Different news segment voiceover: In Orange County, this charter school suddenly closed its doors without notice. Different news segment voiceover: The local charter school is suddenly and unexpectedly closing its doors. Voice of mom: On our dining-room table my son left these two notes to us. One says, ‘Dear mom, is the school going out of bisnose?’
Oliver: Yes, yes, you are right. That kid spelled business ‘bisnose,’ which I’ll argue is a much better way to spell it. Now that that school was actually shut down just six weeks into the school year so to be honest, they probably should have been much better at bisnose. And charters in some states can have an alarming failure rate. Two years ago, a Florida paper found that since 2008, 119 charter schools have closed there, 14 of which had never even finished their first school year. So 14 schools in Florida were outlasted by NBC’s ‘Mysteries of Laura…’ The point is when schools close that fast it’s shocking, because you would assume someone would rigorously screen a school before it was allowed to open, making sure it was financially and academically sound. But that is not always the case. Take for example IVY academies, which shot down after just seven weeks due to a lack of, among other things, a school.
Voiceover from news segment: The schools are repeatedly kicked out of their buildings, shuttle students among multiple sites. … They also bus students on daily field trips because they didn’t have enough classrooms.
Oliver: Daily field trips? How’s that even possible? Surely by day 10 you’ve run out of ideas and are taking kids to Marshall’s to return a belt. ‘Pretty great, right, kids? I’ll probably get store credit, so put on your adventure hats! We’re about to go on a magical $12 scavenger hunt.’
Just we saw with Blackwater, KBR and other privatization efforts, all is not exactly well in Denmark. We do have significant challenges in providing quality education to all of our students regardless of who or where they are, or what the local tax base can support. But perhaps the automatic adoption of Charter School as the “magic bullet” to solve these problems may have been more than a tad bit premature and could in the end have some very serious consequences to our overall education system over the next generation.
Although it could be argued that many Democrats have aided and abetted the growing charter school movement, that hasn’t been the case for all Democrats, if fact if anyone is bringing up some of the limitations and failures of charter schools, it’s certainly not the GOP — it’s been Hillary Clinton.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded less like a decades-long supporter of charter schools over the weekend and more like a teachers union president when she argued that most of these schools “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.”
Her comments in South Carolina came straight from charter school critics’ playbook and distanced her from the legacies of her husband, former President Bill Clinton — credited with creating a federal stream of money to launch charters around the country — and President Barack Obama, whose administration has dangled federal incentives to push states to become more charter friendly.
The change in tone on charter schools mirrors other moves Clinton has made to nail down the support of liberal blocs in the face of the progressive challenge of Bernie Sanders, including her recent decision to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And like her reservations about free trade, her new rebuke of charter schools suggests she’ll be less willing to challenge core Democratic constituencies than either her husband or Obama.
Some Charter Schools have shown promise, but we need to keep vigilant and make sure that our standards don’t fall of the cliff because unlike other industries where when on company fails you can simply pick up with a competitor, when a Charter School fails their students — they’re going to have an increasingly difficult time picking back up and catching up to others who haven’t been poorly served in this way.
This isn’t survival of the fittest because we really can’t afford to have any school, or any student — Fail.