"MORE CHARTER SCHOOLS AHEAD?" MORE ILLUSION OF IMPROVEMENT IN PUBLIC EDUCATION
In reporting the "Broad Foundation seeks an expansion of L.A. charters to boost student success..," yet again Los Angeles Times "reporter" Howard Blume uncritically swallows the Broad, Keck, and Walton Foundations completely unsubstantiated- and in fact- clearly contradicted claims that more charters would be better than traditional public schools- instead of finally addressing and pragmatically fixing our long failed public education system.
The fact that traditional public schools remain de facto segregated- and shunned by Whites- with their 90% undereducated Latino and African American student body is never mentioned, even though continued segregation remains the predominant factor in maintaining the continued failure of public education as was clearly pointed out in a recent two-part series on NPR entitled, The Problem We All Live With.
First the corporate and foundation dictated dominant narrative sets up the strawman of longstanding and purposefully failed public education systems- like LAUSD- and then Blume yet again reports the corporate-public-education-charter-privatization party line story that presupposes charter schools do better, when the clear and uncontradicted data show exactly the opposite:
"A study done by Stanford University found that charter schools on average perform about the same or worse compared to public schools."
True integregation would turn things around more than charters, but that option is never on the table 61 years after Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) said segregated education is "inherently unequal."
Another fact worth mentioning and yet completely ignored by Howard Blume and others like him in a corporate pre-digested media is that the vast majority of charters are well over 90% Latino or African American with few, if any, Whites.
Given these circumstances it is no surprise that the vast majority of the several hundred charters in the Greater Los Angeles area already do as bad or worse than the LAUSD schools from which they are drawing their population. So now, you have a failed LAUSD that can only do worse as student average daily attendance money (ADA) is drawn off to equally abysmal charters, where the well being of their vendors of goods and services at inflated over fair market prices continues to take precedence over the academic needs of students.
Now in fairness to charters, their are some organizations like the KIPP Charters that have succeeded beyond expectation- KIPP Comienza had a 978 Academic Performance Index (API) in 2013- in raising the level of their students coming from the same ethnic and low socio-economic areas- be they LAUSD or charter- where the vast majority of students continue to "MORE CHARTER SCHOOLS AHEAD?" MORE ILLUSION OF IMPROVEMENT IN PUBLIC EDUCATION - Perdaily.com:
