The Charter School Profiteers
by Allie Gross
(Beth Fertig / SchoolBook)
This is the second installment in our two-part series looking at charter schools in New Orleans and Detroit. The juxtaposition is no accident — these two cities have the highest percentage of charters in the country.In New Orleans, charters have almost entirely replacedtraditional public schools; in Detroit, about half the schools are charters. Both cases show the perils of privatization and the way in which elites manipulate crises to transform social goods.Similar themes are explored in Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook, a joint project of Jacobin and the Chicago Teachers Union’s CORE. The booklet can be downloaded for free, and print copies are still available.
Jenay* crouches on the carpet, her spine curved into a lowercase “c” as she concentrates on the flimsy picture book in her lap. Every few minutes her fingers slide off the page, tapping the floor until she locates a bottle of purple soda. She never breaks eye contact with the book.
It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday in Detroit, and the fifth grader is staying after school to work on her reading. Jenay is reading at a second-grade level. She has been placed in summer school each June since the third grade, and every September she is promoted to the next grade. It is the unspoken truth all students know: Getting held back is an idle threat. It could lead to families The Charter School Profiteers | Jacobin: