Charter schools now leading Chicago and New Orleans in Jim Crow schools...
Despite his relentless self-promotion, almost in a Trumpian way, Paul Vallas is not the master of rebuilding schools that he and his promoters (including the Chicago Tribune) claim. In New Orleans, Vallas oversaw the elimination of the largest union of public workers in Louisiana (the New Orleans Federation of Teachers of the AFT) and promoted charter schools which further segregated the already segregated city and system following hurricane Katrine. In Chicago, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Haiti, and Chile Vallas promoted union busting privatization schemes and segregation while promoting himself and his minions as a special group of "proven" school "reformers." At one time charter schools were viewed by some in the media and in the corporate "school reform" leadership as a way of providing educational equity and choice for parents and students. Many in those quarters held that charter schools would give children a better chance to succeed. "Jim Crow Schools" describes how charter schools have failed three cities: New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. The book’s authors are Raynard Sanders, David Stovall and Terrenda White. There is a foreword by Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. The authors point out that charters are in poor or working-class neighborhoods, usually African American and Latino.
An intriguing part of the charter school narrative was how a major hurricane changed the whole educational system in New Orleans. Sanders reports that the New Orleans educational system was beginning to produce better outcomes when the storm hit and people were evacuated from the city. Sanders says that test scores were up, and parents had a voice in their children’s education.
In the days after the evacuation, the Governor and superintendent of schools, along with the legislature and interested parties, according to Sanders, illegally changed the laws and the whole educational system. People came back to find a charter school system, without public input and with wasteful spending by officials in charge. This would be a fascinating story that would be hard to make up if it wasn’t so sad. Sanders states that, “On September 7, 2005, the Heritage Foundation released a memorandum on Gulf Coast recovery urging Congress to suspend a law requiring federal contractors to pay their workers the prevailing wages, to repeal or waive portions of the Clean Air Act, to eliminate or postpone various taxes, and to promote “new educational options,” including “charter schools as well as private and religious schools... and with this announcement New Orleans became a perfect city for school profiteers”
David Stovall describes how corporate greed helped bring charter schools to Chicago. Stovall describes charter schools as “educational sharecroppers” who were offered potential land ownership in exchange for false promises that “never materialized.” Stovall compared Chicago’s charter schools as a relationship between sharecropper parents who “have few options for parent leadership and participation in school governance. Instead, like sharecroppers, parents sign contracts that limit their ability to contest any action taken against students, including expulsion…”
Often parents chose charter schools as a politics of desperation. Charter schools were enabled by an appointed school board and the two years under Governor Rauner in which Illinois had no budget and services were cut, including, social services, mental health clinics and $46 million cut from Chicago Public Schools. Stovall decries the robber baron mentality of CEO Milki of NNCS (Nobel Network of Charter Schools) who charge fines for minor infractions.” Parents United for Responsible Education, a community group for transparency and accountability within CPS, reported that NNCS “collected $386,745 in fines from students between 2009 and 2012 for disciplinary infractions.”
Most of the charter students were from black and Hispanic neighborhoods with low incomes.
Terrenda White writes that early charter schools in New York’s experiment were in Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and South Bronx. All were “independent, stand- alone schools that partnered with youth -development groups and arts-based initiatives.” The mission was to offer “culturally and linguistically inclusive curricula, including dual-language programs, project-based and or “field-based “learning the community and real-world problem solving, and expressed a desire to nurture the “whole child,” with emphasis on helping students gain cultural knowledge of their community.”
These three neighborhoods were made up of mostly black and Latino families with poverty rates almost twice the New York city average. Today’s corporate charter schools do not reflect early goals of stand alone schools. These lofty ideals have been replaced with “no excuses” which is a form of inflexible punitive policies of accountability with an emphasis on test scores. Students are taught to be passive and conform in order to be succeed. Sanders, Stovall and White agree that corporate charter schools are driven by financial interests. Corporate charters situate themselves as “public” to secure tax money and still hide data about enrollment and salaries.
Ashana Bigart, an Educational Advocate in New Orleans describes todays charters schools this way:
If a goal of charter schools was to teach children to appreciate their community, it is failing miserably. “ No excuses” policies teach children to understand plantation culture and that they are the bottom of the scale and don’t deserve anything and they should be controlled and subjugated. .
