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Sunday, January 18, 2015

Koch brothers/charter school nightmare: “White kids get to go to a school with a Montessori approach while children of color get eye control” - Salon.com

Koch brothers/charter school nightmare: “White kids get to go to a school with a Montessori approach while children of color get eye control” - Salon.com:



Koch brothers/charter school nightmare: “White kids get to go to a school with a Montessori approach while children of color get eye control”

A fight over education in Nashville might come your way next: It's a proxy for dangerous right-wing education ideas








“We know we need to do something about students who are not achieving in our schools.”
That anxious appeal – along with its many variations – has become the refrain now firmly embedded in speeches and opinion columns about American public education.
Yes! Do something. About those kids.
Only this time, the anxious appeal is coming from Jai Sanders, an African-American parent in Nashville, Tennessee, who has a stake in the matter: The something about to be done is aimed squarely at him and his children.
Sanders, pausing briefly before assembling a bagel with lox and cream cheese, explains, “But what we’re currently doing is throwing solutions at the wall to see what sticks, without any research or any consultation with the people who are affected the most.”
His tone of voice doesn’t carry a trace of the anger or resentment that could be inferred from what he just said. Actually, Sanders exudes affability. With a green ball cap tipped slightly back from his cherubic face, he gestures broadly and smiles incessantly. His impossibly well-behaved 3-year-old daughter seated beside him only occasionally diverts him as she carefully navigates her bagel.
They live with mom and the rest of the family in the same house where Jai grew up – the third generation of Sanders to live in their home in East Nashville.
Sanders, who attended both public and private schools while growing up in East Nashville, has chosen, along with his wife, to send their children to their neighborhood public school, Inglewood Elementary. Inglewood was “the default for us,” he says.
An older daughter who attends the school has been identified gifted and talented which has enabled her to be included in a program where she is provided with an Individual Education Plan so she receives specific attention to her abilities.
Yet now Sanders finds himself and his family swept into a raging Music City controversy. Conversations about public education – where you send your kid to school, where other parents send their kids, and who gets to decide – have exploded into acrimonious bickering, full of charges and counter-charges.
The debate pits parents against parents, schools against schools, and communities against communities. School board meetings have turned into raucous events that sometimes descend into boisterous demonstrations. And public officials swipe at each other in social media and opinion columns, accusing one another of having ulterior motives.


“None of this was in the “dad manual” when I started a family,” Sanders explains, making quote marks in the air. “I’d much rather go back to being a PTO dad planning the Christmas party rather than going to meetings and shouting my head off to save our school.”
“We love Inglewood Elementary,” Sanders says, although he admits, “not all parents agree with me.”
Apparently, neither does the state of Tennessee.
We’ve Made Your School a “Priority”
As state media outlet The Tennessean reported recently, low scores on student standardized tests and other indicators led the state to designate 15 Metro Nashville Public Schools, including Inglewood, as “Priority Schools.”
“Priority Schools are the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in Tennessee,” according to the state’s education department, making them “eligible for inclusion in the Achievement School District or in district Innovation Zones. They may also plan and adopt turnaround models for school improvement.”
The plain English translation of that benign bureaucratic speak is that Inglewood has been labeled a failure by the state, which gives the state or district power to do something to it. Often, the something that gets done to a Priority School in Tennessee is to fire the school’s principal or teachers, hand the school over to a charter school management organization, or a mixture of the above.
One of the potential options the district has chosen for Inglewood is for the school to be taken over by the KIPP nationwide charter school management organization. The Koch brothers/charter school nightmare: “White kids get to go to a school with a Montessori approach while children of color get eye control” - Salon.com: