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What "choice" is this?

1/29/2015

 
'School Choice' and Disenfranchising the Public
by Peter Greene, originally posted at Curmuducation and shared with kind permission

"School choice" is one of those policy ideas that just never goes away, and it probably never will. For some people, it is an irresistible way to unlock all those public tax dollars and turn them into private profits. For others, it's a way to make sure their children don't have to go to school with "those people." Other people are justifiably attracted to the idea of more control over their child's education. And still others have a sincere belief that competition really does create greatness.

Voucher fans and proponents of modern charters like to focus on those promises. They're much quieter about one of the other effects of a choice system.

School choice disenfranchises the public.

Our public school system is set up to serve the public. All the public. It is not set up to serve just parents or just students. Everybody benefits from a system of roadways in this country -- even people who don't drive cars -- because it allows a hundred other systems of service and commerce to function well.

School choice treats parents as if they are the only stakeholders in education. They are not. We all depend on a society in which people are reasonably well-educated. We all depend on a society in which people have a reasonably good understanding of how things work. We all depend on a society in which people have the basic abilities needed to take care of themselves and the people around them. We all depend on dealing with doctors and plumbers and lawyers and clerks and neighbors who can read and write and figure. We hope for fellow voters who will not elect a politician because he promises to convert straw to gold by using cold fusion. We all depend on a society that can move forward because it is composed of people who know things.

This is why everybody votes for school board members -- not just the people who have kids in school. Everybody has a stake in the students who come out of schools, and every taxpayer has a stake in the money spent on schools.

A choice system says, "No, you only get a say in how education works if you have a kid."

Reformsters like to make the argument that schools need to be more responsive to what employers and businesses are looking for in graduates, but in a choice system these employers have even less say than they currently do. Charter operators and other choice beneficiaries don't have to listen to anybody except the people who affect market share.

This has the potential of serious long-term harm for the choice schools themselves. Most notably, disenfranchising the public literally removes them from the list of stakeholders. It will vastly increase the list of people saying, "Well, I don't have a kid in school. Why do I have to pay taxes anyway?" The day those people make a large enough group is the day that choice school operators suddenly find the money pie shrinking as voters decide they're tired of paying for a system they've been cut out of.

But the biggest damage will come to communities themselves, because choice and charter systems are based on business principles, not education or community principles. And the most basic business principle is to close up shop when you aren't making money.

There has been a lot of shock and surprise around the country as charter schools just close their doors. (Columbus, Ohio, saw 17 charters close in just one year.) People tend to assume that part of being a school means staying open in your community, and they keep being surprised to discover that a charter school is not a school but a business. Charter and choice systems don't just disenfranchise the public in saying how schools in the community should work; charter and choice systems also take away any choice about whether there are schools in the community or not.

A public school system cannot suddenly just close its doors, even just a few of its doors, without answering to the taxpaying and voting public. But when it comes to decisions about whether charters stay open or not, even the parents themselves are disenfranchised. A choice system in your community doesn't only mean that the public has lost the ability to decide what kind of schools they'll have today. A choice system also means they've lost control over how much longer they'll have any schools at all.

That's the trade. A few people get to have a choice about schools today, and in return, nobody gets a choice about what schools, if any, to have in the community tomorrow. And in some cities, school-choice advocates have solved some of these issues by taking all authority away from the elected school board, sacrificing democracy itself.
To read more by Peter Greene about charter schools, we highly recommend that you click HERE for his "Choice & Charter Digest."

To read more by Peter Greene about charter schools, we highly recommend that you click HERE for his "Choice & Charter Digest."

KIPP's secrets

1/5/2015

 
A politician told one of the TN Parent writers how they toured a KIPP charter school in TN and were so impressed... how the students were well-behaved little angels, the teachers were young and energetic (and wore tight skirts), how the school was just perfect and he wanted those schools in his own district.

Well, now we know the secret...

The charter schools and ASD leaders certainly don't want you to know about this, and they spend a lot of energy and PR dollars trying to cover it up, but truth has a way of finding the light...


On the Schools Matter blog, Jim Horn of Cambridge College interviewed a former KIPP teacher.  He writes:

You have heard about KIPP's padded cells for kindergartners and KIPP school leaders putting garbage cans on children's heads and making them bark like dogs, and you've heard about children forced to sit on the floor for days until they have earned desks, but now comes, yet, another KIPP abuse strategy.  

On VIB (Visitor in Building) days, at least one KIPP school puts up to 30 problem students in the empty basement for hours until the visiting investors, dignitaries, or politicians have left the building.  Also during this time, no class changes occur, even though visits might last three hours.  Children are, in essence, in lockdown mode in their classrooms so that no infraction or non-compliant behavior during class change may be seen by outsiders. [emphasis added]

The teacher tells in detail about when visitors were in the school building:

We used to have a special schedule when we had visitors in the building. For instance, sometimes we’d have, you know, investors or big-wigs walking through the building. And so we would have a separate schedule where we would pick out all the behavior issue kids and take them down into the basement for the duration of the visitors’ visit, to kind of keep them out of the way. So you know, that’s one very, like, clear example of sweeping something under the rug.

So in the morning, we would receive an email or a special schedule that said VIB schedule, Visitor in Building schedule. And it would basically list all of the students that needed to be in the basement area, and it would tell us the specific times that they were supposed to be there. And we would also, for instance, we would not transition from class to class if there was a visitor, because the transitions from class to class would sometimes be, you know, kids are kids, and so they would sometimes not listen, or they would run, or whatever the case is. And our administration didn’t want the visitors to see anything less than perfection. And so we would hold students in the classroom when normally they’d be transitioning from class to class. So the visitors didn't get the impression that the school was anything less than very well managed. 

So, legislators and important people, hidden beneath your very feet and in classrooms out of your sight were the "problem students." 

Horn's interview of this former KIPP teacher is quite enlightening.  The teacher admits there was "a lot swept under the rug as far as things that also aren't so great."  The teacher tells of "cultural things like, I can only speak to what I experienced in my day-to-day, and so that was a lot of yelling, a lot of berating students, a lot of, you know, physically confronting students."

Also interesting is a comment below the article:


I am a former KIPP teacher. (I worked there before the internet was a big deal) I am glad that the public is now able to see the treatment that KIPP students and staff face at these schools. I can personally attest to the fact at the KIPP school where I worked that students did in fact "loose" their desks due to misbehavior and had to sit on the floor. Kids who misbehaved had to go "on bench" which means they had to turn their uniform shirt inside out for the day and no other students were allowed to speak to these kids. If regular public schools tried to pull this crap it would be all over the news.

Click HERE to read the rest of this insightful interview.  You can also read much more of Jim Horn's detailed research on KIPP schools, including how their grade retention rates are higher than public schools and how KIPP kicks out low-performing students to boost their stats, by clicking HERE. 

The bottom line is that the "miracle" of the KIPP charter school model is riddled with deception and questionable practices.  Smart leaders should question the well-oiled PR from KIPP.

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