New York
Related: About this forumCorporate charter school hijackers destroying public education
Carmen Dixon
New York City has become a hotbed for education reformers making promises to ready Black and Brown children for college and their careers, even as young as kindergarten. Wealthy philanthropists have committed to transforming failing urban public schools into world-class learning centers. Their strategy? Use privately managed charters, vouchers and frequent standardized tests to measure student achievement and teacher quality.
This strategy would seemingly yield schools that have the freedom to experiment, increase available options, assess students and hold teachers accountable. At least that’s what we’re told. In reality, the results of school reform have been devastating to communities of color.
As an organizer, I’ve learned that people act out of self-interest—what is most important to them. So during my brief stint organizing at a prominent education reform advocacy group, I found it hard to believe that our billionaire board members were suddenly model altruists for Black students in Harlem.
http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2014/may/22/corporate-charter-school-hijackers-destroying-publ/#.U39iitvD9ct
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TheBlackAdder
(28,209 posts)The school was planned to be a K - 8 elementary/middle school, which BTW caused concerns about having 8th graders around Kindergarten kids.
1) They initially selected K-5 to implement.
2) They would take 3-4 kids out of every grade from every elementary school in the district.
3) After 2 years, they would then target the three middle schools.
4) Higher people without teaching degrees at barely above minimum wage since staffing is not under state control.
Here's the problem:
Problem 1) 3 - 4 kids would be taken from each grade level of each elementary school. That means that there could not be classroom consolidation because the classes were already optimized. This means that $16,000 in funding plus the $800 in transportation funds for each child would get pulled from that school while their expenses stayed the same. This equated to roughly $336,000 taken from each elementary school while the school could not save any costs, besides a few incidentals (books, misc. overhead, etc).
Problem 2) Since the town would be down several million dollars in funding, which it could not make up, there would be two alternatives: 1) cut more staff; 2) raise property taxes. Since the school district went through several years of drastic cuts to almost all programs, the cutting of teachers, staff, etc... the only option was to raise property taxes.
Problem 3) Chris Christie put a cap of 2% increase in taxes for the municipalities, after he had already slashed educational funding, kicking costs back to townships so he could grand those making over $400K a year $1.2 Billion in tax savings. These taxes would need to be met with state approval and most who have requested it met with abject failure.
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This is how school systems get slowly destroyed. Pull out a small group of students from each grade level so the schools cannot consolidate expenses while they are faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue shortfalls.
This is winning by fiscal attrition. It's a 5-10 year plan to destroy the public school system.
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Meanwhile, these charter schools are not held to the same standard, regarding staff, testing, anything. There are no standards that could be used to compare the performance of a charter to a public school system, It is only after 5 years or more does this failure manifest itself... when the kids go to high school and flounder.
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)
valerief
(53,235 posts)Same with the Post Office. Their union elects Dems. That's why Congress makes them keep so much of their money in reserve for pensions--to drive them out of business.
