Hearings on Charter Schools in NY Focus on Corruption
Valerie Strauss at WaPo has posted Diane Ravitch's testimony yesterday before the hearing called by State Senator, Bill Perkins. And while Ravitch provides good facts within her thumbnail history, she misses three crucial points that have to be considered in assessing any program receiving public dollars:
1) Charter schools operate without public oversight and are anti-democratic. Teachers, parents, and children are subjected to the will of a corporate CEO (non-profit or for-profit) and a hand-picked Board that is chosen for its capacity to rubber stamp CEO decisions.
2) Charter schools have a documented segregative effect on communities, a fact that has been documented by two recent studies (press release page here and here) and thoroughly ignored by everyone from Diane Ravitch to Arne Duncan.
3) Charter schools seek to destroy public education and replace it with a deregulated form of corporate welfare that will make our schools worse than they are now (see Wall Street).
With that, here's a clip from Ravitch's comments:
1) Charter schools operate without public oversight and are anti-democratic. Teachers, parents, and children are subjected to the will of a corporate CEO (non-profit or for-profit) and a hand-picked Board that is chosen for its capacity to rubber stamp CEO decisions.
2) Charter schools have a documented segregative effect on communities, a fact that has been documented by two recent studies (press release page here and here) and thoroughly ignored by everyone from Diane Ravitch to Arne Duncan.
3) Charter schools seek to destroy public education and replace it with a deregulated form of corporate welfare that will make our schools worse than they are now (see Wall Street).
With that, here's a clip from Ravitch's comments:
