Public Efforts to Slow the Charter Steamroller
Over the past 9 years of the NCLB orgy of tabulation, public schools with large numbers of poor children have been subjected to unceasing public scorn, expensive and worthless corporate tutoring interventions, and conversion to corporate charter school status without public oversight. These alterations to public schooling in America have been enabled by school testing policies that effectively identify those poor schools by using tests and testing targets that reliably rank schools according to family income and wealth. (There is no state where test scores do not reliably reflect the wealth of the community that schools serve.)
With almost no exceptions, the poorest children reside, of course, in communities with the lowest tax revenues, which correlates, then, to neglected school facilities, lower salaries for teachers who struggle there, and weaker learning resources that mirror the economic disadvantages of the surrounding community. Poor parents, then, become ripe pickings for Business Roundtable reformers with their only alternative to malignantly neglected schools with overcrowded classrooms: corporate charter schools that reflect a commitment to free-market
With almost no exceptions, the poorest children reside, of course, in communities with the lowest tax revenues, which correlates, then, to neglected school facilities, lower salaries for teachers who struggle there, and weaker learning resources that mirror the economic disadvantages of the surrounding community. Poor parents, then, become ripe pickings for Business Roundtable reformers with their only alternative to malignantly neglected schools with overcrowded classrooms: corporate charter schools that reflect a commitment to free-market
