Charter Schools and the Destruction of Public Education
Monday, 14 April 2014 09:05By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Every injustice in American life can be laid at the feet of the richest people in the country and the politicians who do their bidding. Nowhere is that terrible dynamic more obvious than in the destruction of public education by the charter school system.The fix is officially in for charter schools in the state of New York. The legislature finished its session by giving these privately funded “public” schools more protection than they have almost anywhere else in the nation. Charter schools are allegedly public schools but that label is nothing more than public relations gimmickry. In March a New York state Supreme Court judge ruled that the comptroller had no standing to audit charter schools because they are educational corporations and not “units of the state.” The charter school executives who usually insist that they are running public schools were strangely silent and for once didn’t disagree when someone said their schools are not public after all.
Charter schools are a scam inflicted on black and Latino children and are meant to turn education into just another profit center. These schools take public money without being accountable to the public and they are funded by organizations like the Walton Family Foundation of WalMart fame and hedge fund chieftains. There is no data which proves that they provide superior education. They don’t have to accept children with special needs and often expel children who are struggling academically because they may bring down the all important test scores they use to justify their access to public dollars.
Bill de Blasio, New York City’s newly elected mayor, promised to slow down the process of co-locating schools, shoving charter schools into real public schools and depriving children of physical space and resources. At Public School 149 in East Harlem, special education students will literally not have a place in that school. A Success Academy charter school already in residence is expanding and the disabled children at P.S. 149 will have to be moved elsewhere.
Teachers at charter schools are akin to fast food workers. They are the least experienced and have a high rate of turnover, all of which happens by design. The hedge fund honchos and the Walton Family Foundation want to get rid of the teaching profession and make educators as insecure in their work lives as everyone else in the country.
The protections recently given to New York state charter schools are the result of cynical collusion between governor Andrew Cuomo, big money political donors and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the last weeks before he left Charter Schools and the Destruction of Public Education: