4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: PARENTS, YOU’RE VOLUNTEERED: Charter schools' volunteer demands may discourage needy students + smf’s 2¢

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: PARENTS, YOU’RE VOLUNTEERED: Charter schools' volunteer demands may discourage needy students + smf’s 2¢:

PARENTS, YOU’RE VOLUNTEERED: Charter schools' volunteer demands may discourage needy students + smf’s 2¢

BY THE L.A. TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD | HTTP://LAT.MS/14ZPOFP

January 8, 2015  ::  Charter schools must welcome all children, not just those whose parents can commit to volunteer hours

Charter schools in the Los Angeles area have enrolled their share of disadvantaged students, and for the most part those students have done well, graduating at a higher rate and with higher standardized test scores than children in traditional public schools. But not all the credit goes to the charter schools: Their students tend to have more involved parents. In many cases, the very act of enrolling in a charter school means that parents must be engaged enough to locate and compare charter campuses and sign up their children for the attendance lottery. Parent involvement is an important factor in how well students fare in school.

Many charter schools require parents to volunteer a certain number of hours each year, often working in classrooms or school offices or helping at campus events. (Los Angeles Times)

But many charter schools demand more than that, requiring parents to volunteer a certain number of hours each year, often working in classrooms or school offices or helping at campus events. The practice has been around for years, but only now is it being challenged. Public Advocates, a nonprofit organization that has promoted equal education for disadvantaged students, recently released a report showing that the practice is widespread.

The group found that about a third of the charter schools it surveyed in California required parents to commit to a set number of volunteer hours before admitting a child. Seventy-three of the schools are in Los Angeles County, including many of the well-known Green Dot, Alliance and KIPP schools. There were many more schools that firmly suggested volunteer time or called for keeping work logs and minimum hours, without stipulating that the work was mandated.

In many cases, charter schools may have only the best intentions in encouraging parents to be engaged. And the California Charter Schools Assn. says it doesn't know of any schools that excluded or expelled a student because of a parent's failure to work as a volunteer.

But that's not enough. The requirement itself, even if it isn't enforced, might discourage families from applying and should not be allowed. As charter schools frequently point out, they are public schools, funded with public dollars. That means they should be welcoming to all children. But not all children have parents who are able or willing to volunteer. Some have multiple jobs, child-care responsibilities and so forth. Others simply might not be interested in volunteering. Children in group foster homes have no one to volunteer on their behalf. Rules about volunteer work might leave out the children most in need, intentionally or not.

Once children are enrolled, it's fine for schools to encourage voluntarism as a way of engaging parents in their children's education. But setting discouraging rules should be prohibited. The state Board of Education should impose firm rules to stop schools from requiring unpaid parental labor; California students are guaranteed the right to a free and public education.

THE PUBLIC ADVOCATES REPORT

Forced Parent Work Policies

Issue: Education

Topic: Charter Schools

Case Date: January 14, 2014

Read the report: Charging for Access: How California Charter Schools Exclude Vulnerable Students by Imposing Illegal Family Work Quotas

• Appendix A: Methodology & Results 
• Appendix B: Policy statements from selected charter schools 
• Appendix C: Charter Schools with Forced Labor Policies by County 
• Appendix D: Hersher Memorandum

Public Advocates researched 555 charter schools in California and found that almost one-third of them (30%) require parents to do work at the school for a set quota of hours. This practice is illegal under the California constitution and the Education Code. In our report, we expose the extent of the practice and explain why it is illegal. We have sent a demand letter to the California Department of Education and the State Board of Education urging them to take immediate steps to abolish the practice. Below, we provide a list of all the charter schools we found that have such a practice, with a link to their policy documents.

Charter Schools researched in Los Angeles County
Academia Moderna Academy of Science and Engineering Alain Leroy Locke College Prep Academy (Green Dot) Alliance Cindy & Bill Simon Technology Academy High School Alliance College Ready Alice M Baxter Alliance College-Ready Academy High School #16 Alliance College-Ready Academy High School #5 Alliance Collins Family College-Ready High School Alliance Dr. Olga Mohan High School Alliance Gertz-Ressler Alliance Health Services Academy Alliance Judy Ivie Burton Technology High School Alliance Marc & Eva Stern Math and Science School Alliance Media Arts and Entertainment Design High School Alliance Ouchi-O'Donovan 6-12 Complex Alliance Renee & Meyer Luskin College-Ready Academy Alliance Susan and Eric Smidt Technology High School Alliance Tennenbaum Family Technology High School	Animo Avalon Charter Middle (green dot) Animo College Prep Academy (Green Dot) Animo Ellen Ochoa Charter Middle School (Green Dot) Animo Inglewood Charter High (Green Dot) Animo Jackie Robinson Charter High (Green Dot) Animo Jefferson Charter Middle (Green Dot) Animo Leadership High Animo Middle School #2 (Green Dot) Animo Middle School #3 (Green Dot) Animo Middle School #4 (Green Dot) Animo Pat Brown Animo Ralph Bunche Animo South Los Angeles Animo Venice Charter High Animo Watts College Preparatory Academy Animo Westside Charter Middle School Aveson Global Leadership Academy Aveson School of Leaders ICEF Frederick Douglass Academy  ICEF Frederick Douglass Charter Middle ICEF Inglewood Charter Middle Academy ICEF Lou Dantzler Preparatory Elementary School ICEF Lou Dantzler Preparatory Middle School	ICEF View Park High ICEF View Park Prep Accelerated Charter Middle  ICEF Vista Elementary and Middle Charter Academy Ivy Academia Keck Early Learning Center KIPP LA Prep KIPP Philosophers Academy KIPP Scholar Academy Life Source Charter School Los Angeles Big Picture High School Los Angeles Leadership Academy (LALA) Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts Metro Charter SChool Multicultural Learning Center New Academy of Science and Art New Heights Charter School New West Charter North Valley Military Academy Oscar de la Hoya Animo Charter High (Green Dot) Pacoima Charter School Palisades Charter Elementary Palisades Charter High School Prepa Tec Rise Kohyang Middle School Rowland Heights Charter Academy Santa Clarita Valley International (SCVI) The Accelerated Charter Elementary School The Accelerated School Today's Fresh Start Charter School Valley Charter Elementary School Valley Charter Middle Vista Charter Middle Wallis Annenberg High School

Note: The policy statements listed here were available publicly as of Nov. 20, 2014, when this report was released. Some charter schools may have changed their policies since then and may no longer state that parent work hours are required. We plan to release an update to the report and to this web site in early 2015 to reflect those changes. 

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Welcome to this discussion, LA Times Editorial Board – this “recently released” report is one-week-shy of a year old!

The issue itself is complicated by the fact that charter schools by their very nature require additional parent involvement – parents elect to send their children to charters; they fill out an applications and go through an application process. Charters are schools of choice and conversely: Choice parents choose them.

Charter school parents have acquired the taste for the Kool Aid and have decided to wait for Superman!

The argument that charters don’t really enforce their requirement for voluntarism is bogus in the extreme. Of course they don’t – they know its illegal and absolutely 

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: PARENTS, YOU’RE VOLUNTEERED: Charter schools' volunteer demands may discourage needy students + smf’s 2¢:

Teaching Children How to Think Instead of What to Think | The Mind Unleashed

Teaching Children How to Think Instead of What to Think | The Mind Unleashed:

Teaching Children How to Think Instead of What to Think

THE MIND UNLEASHED

on 7 January, 2015 at 10:47

Right now our education system is doing more to indoctrinate our children than to educate them. In fact, that has been the case for quite some time. Our young minds are being told to accept authority as truth instead of truth as authority, and teachers talk at the students instead of with them.

Teachers have become repeaters of information. They are merely regurgitating everything they once learned from their own teachers, and perpetuating the recycling of information; information that has managed to evade scrutiny for generations. Children are no longer the masters of their own learning, and instead, their minds are being treated as storage containers.

The factory model of education, with its focus on academic and economic elitism, is churning out obedient workers for the system, encouraged to conform every step of the way. We are not being treated as organic, creative, investigative human beings, but instead as parts in the machine. The education system is filtering out the inquisitive nature of our being, with the ultimate goal being to prevent dissent against the system. The system doesn’t want thinkers. It doesn’t want people toquestion its methods. It wants a population that can be easily manipulated and controlled so as to relinquish all its power to the elite.

There are those who say that critical thinking skills cannot be taught in schools. Socrates would likely scoff at that notion, were he still alive today. It was Socrates who said, “I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.” If we’re going to solve the problem of indoctrination in our school system, we have to learn to begin asking questions instead of giving answers. Real learning is achieved through the investigative process. Children have to be encouraged to search for the answers themselves. It is up to the teachers to provide the tools and resources necessary for the children to conduct these inquiries and make meaningful discoveries. One well-formed question will do more to inspire than any number of answers. In every facet of our educational pursuits, it becomes crucial to begin an open dialogue with our students, to encourage healthy debate and to have them form their own conclusions.

The importance of teaching philosophy in schools cannot be underestimated. In a world where most of humanity is running on the treadmill with the blinders on, it is paramount that we re-evaluate our own perspectives from time to time, and look at the big picture. What teaching philosophy does is it gets us thinking, it gets us questioning, and it gets us contemplating. Without these skills, humanity Teaching Children How to Think Instead of What to Think | The Mind Unleashed:

“Stupid, absurd, non-defensible”: New NEA president Lily Eskelsen García on the problem with Arne Duncan, standardized tests and the war on teachers - Salon.com

“Stupid, absurd, non-defensible”: New NEA president Lily Eskelsen García on the problem with Arne Duncan, standardized tests and the war on teachers - Salon.com:

“Stupid, absurd, non-defensible”: New NEA president Lily Eskelsen García on the problem with Arne Duncan, standardized tests and the war on teachers

Arne Duncan has met his worst nightmare -- an NEA president armed with facts and guts. She tells Salon what's next

JEFF BRYANT

Lily Eskelsen García, Arne Duncan (Credit: NEA.org/AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

For years, politicians and policy leaders have been running the nation’s public education system basically by the seat of the pants, drafting and passing legislative doctrine that mostly ignores the input from classroom teachers, research experts and public school parents.

Just the latest example of this fly-by-night leadership came from Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky and expected GOP presidential contender. According to the Politico newsletter, Paul is “planning a major push on education reform, including ‘education choice, school choice, vouchers, charter schools, you name it.”‘

Gotta love the “you name it” proposal, don’t you? So reassuring to parents. “Relax, we’re enrolling your kid in the ‘You Name It’ program this year. Everything will be fine.”

In an astonishing display of incoherence, he told the Politico reporter how much he, and his children, had benefited from traditional public schools – “I grew up and went to public schools. My kids have gone to public schools” – and then suggested we create something that looks nothing like them.

“Have one person in the country who is, like, the best at explaining calculus … teach every calculus class in the country,” he rambled, in belief, somehow, that having “2 million people in the classroom” would ensure more children “have a teacher that may be having a more hands-on approach.” Really?

Have education policies from the Democratic Party been any better?

Apparently, most teachers don’t think so. As Politico, again, reported, teachers are organizing at an unprecedented level. Through their unions, teachers have amassed “tens of millions in cash” and have acquired “new data mining tools that let them personalize pitches to voters,” in an effort to “run a huge get-out-the-vote effort.”

Education Week suggested that a “new era” in teacher organizing has begun, with “a remarkable policy convergence, portending what could indeed be a more unified response to national and state education issues.

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“The convergence, observers say, is the product not only of the unions’ need to assume a defensive posture in the face of legislative and legal attacks, but also of the pressure brought by internal factions that have urged the unions to take a tougher stance against market-based education policies.”

What’s got teachers stirred up? How real and potent is this upsurge of their activism? Why should people who identify with progressive causes care? Salon recently posed those questions, and others, to Lily Eskelsen García, the new president-elect of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, at the recent Netroots Nation conference in Detroit.

First of all, congratulations on becoming the new NEA president.

Still president-elect. I take office Sept. 1. We have an incredible president, Dennis Van Roekel, who basically said a transition period should be a transition period, not go stand in the corner. So he gave me the president-elect title and told me I would take the press “Stupid, absurd, non-defensible”: New NEA president Lily Eskelsen García on the problem with Arne Duncan, standardized tests and the war on teachers - Salon.com:

NYC Public School Parents: Public Advocate and Class Size Matters legally challenge DOE on authority and transparency of School Leadership Teams

NYC Public School Parents: Public Advocate and Class Size Matters legally challenge DOE on authority and transparency of School Leadership Teams:

Public Advocate and Class Size Matters legally challenge DOE on authority and transparency of School Leadership Teams

Yesterday, Public Advocate Letitia James and Class Size Matters filed papers in court, requesting to intervene in a lawsuit in which the Department of Education is arguing that School Leadership Teams are not subject to Open Meetings Law because they have only advisory powers. 

In April of 2014, Michael P. Thomas, a retired teacher,  tried to attend a School Leadership Team at a middle school on Staten Island,  and was prevented from doing so.  In an earlier case, teacher Francesco Portelos, was also prevented from attending his school’s SLT meeting.  In that case, a Judge wrongly found on the side of the DOE that SLTs are not public bodies because they are only advisory.  

Yet the DOE's position is wrong for at least three reasons.  First of all, School Leadership Teams, made up of half parents and half school staff,  have more than advisory powers, and they make critical decisions for each school, as clearly delineated in Chancellor’s regulations and in New York State law. In 2008, when then-Chancellor Klein rewrote the regulation on SLTs and tried to strip them of their powers, Class Size Matters helped Marie Pollicino, then a member of the Community Education Council in District 26, file a complaint with the State Education Commissioner. (Here's a Daily News article and our blog about this complaint.) Marie's complaint was later joined by Mel Meer, an active Queens parent and Community Board member, and the UFT.

In his decision, Education Commissioner Mills ordered the Chancellor to rewrite the regulation, because it “strips the SLT of this basic, statutorily mandated authority” to develop the school’s Comprehensive Education Plan, which contains the fundamental goals of each school and the roadmap for achieving them.  Principals must align the school-based budget with the CEP, and if they do not, SLT members have the right to issue a formal complaint.  (Here's an article about this decision from our blog, and Chalkbeat, then called GothamSchools.) The SLT’s ultimate authority over the CEP was subsequently reinserted not only in Chancellor’s regulations but also in the 2010 state law pertaining to New York City school governance.

Secondly, the DOE errs in its definition of a “public body.” There are many public bodies that are subject to Open Meetings law, such as Community Boards, Commissions and other official bodies that may have only advisory powers but have a mandated role in governance.  Public bodies perform a governmental function for the state, an agency or department, must follow certain set procedures and require a quorum to operate.  This is also the case with SLTs, which according to state law, must meet monthly, have a quorum to make decisions, and  must “provide notice of monthly meetings that is consistent with the open meetings law.”   Even a DOE powerpoint during Walcott's chancellorship NYC Public School Parents: Public Advocate and Class Size Matters legally challenge DOE on authority and transparency of School Leadership Teams:

Proposed Teacher Prep Legislation Needs Changes! Badass Teachers Association:

Badass Teachers Association: Proposed Teacher Prep Legislation Needs Changes!:

Proposed Teacher Prep Legislation Needs Changes!

The Badass Teachers Association calls for changes to be made to the Department of Education’s recent legislative proposal to attach student test scores to the effectiveness of new teachers and their credentialing programs. This proposal, under the guise of providing access to more meaningful indicators of teacher preparation program performance, proposes to create a continuous feedback loop of communication between school districts and institutions of higher learning to facilitate program improvement and provide information that can be used by potential employers to guide their hiring decisions as well as prospective teachers to guide their application decisions.

We disagree with the premise that teacher preparation programs are not adequately preparing teachers. The trend of a higher attrition rate for new teachers has little to do with how well they are educationally prepared and armed with theoretical knowledge of classroom management and teaching skills. This is yet another false narrative created in an attempt to disguise the fact that the over-management of the classroom by people who have little educational background or training is one of the biggest causes of stress for any educator and therefore, one of the leading reasons teachers leave the classroom. This legislation fails to acknowledge the very people that it proposes to assist - new teachers and underserved student populations. This new proposed rule sets in motion the construction of yet another data analysis system that fails to address the real issues that are faced by the new teacher in socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.  

The Department of Education is seeking to define “high-quality teacher program” through statutory regulation in an attempt to provide limits and definitions for the purpose of establishing TEACH Grant eligibility. Authorized under title IV of the HEA, the TEACH Grant program provides aid to students and institutes of higher learning who are preparing to become teachers. In return, a student must teach in a low-income school and in a high-need field for four years. Effectively, the groundwork is being laid for a decimation of the TEACH grant program. If a teacher that is teaching in a low-income or high-need school, the fact that is still being ignored is that student educational achievement is directly related to a student’s socio-economic status. Research shows that student growth scores will not be measurably increased in these areas until the issues of poverty are dealt with; the perceived effectiveness of schools that educate teachers to teach in these urban and rural areas will not be rated highly and grant eligibility will likely be revoked. The DOE does not need to Badass Teachers Association: Proposed Teacher Prep Legislation Needs Changes!:

Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All The Way To The Bank

Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All The Way To The Bank:



Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All The Way To The Bank

The people who wrote and pushed Common Core on the nation are making bank while the nation’s kids, teachers, and parents writhe in the grip of their curriculum contraption.

 NPR recently came out with an image-repair article profiling one of Common Core’s five coauthors, former Bennington College professor Jason Zimba. Moms and dads tearing hair out at their kids’ math homework and Environmental Protection Agency regulation reading assignments (yes, that’s really Common Core-recommended) should feel sorry for him, because it says Zimba was frequently up until 3 a.m. devising their family torture device. Somehow, I’m not that surprised or sympathetic to hear Common Core has mysteriously not improved math instruction at Zimba’s daughter’s school. Because it hasn’t improved it much of anywhere else, either.

Even as Zimba and his colleagues defend the standards against cries of federal overreach, they are helpless when it comes to making sure textbook publishers, test-makers, superintendents, principals and teachers interpret the standards in ways that will actually improve American public education, not make it worse.

Like McCallum, Zimba agrees with the North Carolina dad that the question on his son’s Common Core-labeled math quiz was terrible. But as long as Americans hold to the conviction that most of what happens in schools should be kept under the control of states and local communities, the quality of the curriculum is out of his hands. ‘Like it or not, the standards allow a lot of freedom,’ he said.

The real problem with Common Core is that it’s not prescriptive enough! I’m so sorry, fellow Americans, but there’s this little thing standing in the way of applying my education omniscience to all children—it’s called “truth, freedom, and the American way”!

It’s now clear that everyone but the people who wrote and thrust Common Core upon the nation will bear the blame for its failure. First on the list of bumbling idiots: Teachers. Second: Curriculum developers. Neither apparently can understand what Common Core wants them to do. One wonders if it’s written in English? Because, you know, we use language to communicate? It can actually be very precise. Ah, right, even a quick look at Common Core will reveal that it is not, in fact, written in English. Design flaw? No, no: Blame the teachers who can’t read non-English!

Common Core Coauthor Jason Zimba

To the point: NPR further reveals that Zimba gave up his professorship to devote his time to writing Common Core curriculum through an organization he co-founded with two other Common Core coauthors. How much does Zimba make through his public service through this nonprofit? Well, its 2012 IRS form 990 (the latest available—I’ve been through a lot of these babies, and they are usually quite outdated) says he made a cool $332,263. That’s probably not his entire annual income, as he travels to show teachers how to do Common Core right.

Zimba isn’t the only person making a lot of money from constructing a disaster. In fact, everywhere you look, people intimately involved with creating or pushing Common Core are making a lot of money despite having demonstrated exactly zero proven success at increasing student achievement. How convenient for them.

David Coleman, Zimba’s Partner in Crime

David Coleman is another of the five Common Core coauthors, and he and Zimba go way back. They were both Rhodes scholars. Zimba worked at the college Coleman’s mother runs. They started Student Achievement Partners(SAP)—the nonprofit where Zimba now works—together. They wrote a report calling for national curriculum mandates that got them noticed and hired by education nationalizers to write Common Core, for a still-undisclosed sum and under still-undisclosed conditions (apparently, NPR’s reporting only goes so far as the material Zimba and Coleman wish to feed Ten Common Core Promoters Laughing All The Way To The Bank:

The worst possible way to push kids into studying science, math and engineering - The Washington Post

The worst possible way to push kids into studying science, math and engineering - The Washington Post:

The worst possible way to push kids into studying science, math and engineering

A 1961 reform doubled the number of Italian students graduating with STEM degrees.

It’s an old debate in education: what skills should we be teaching students? In some circles, it’s not a debate at all; President Obama has perennially championed science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) as key fields for the economic success and competitiveness of the economy. This, too, is an old faith, one that dates to the Sputnik anxieties of the Cold War.

The tech industry, of course, is a huge booster of STEM education efforts. By their account, the nation suffers from a dire drought of technical workers, and in addition to training more at home, we should also lift the caps on importing engineers from China and India. A Brookings report from July found that openings for STEM jobs indeed seem harder to fill. The postings stay up for longer, especially those that call for specialized programming knowledge.

Since there appears to be a shortage of tech workers, what sort of market failures or policies are to blame? And how can we go about fixing them?

These days, for instance, it’s recognized that lack of opportunity holds back many students who might thrive in STEM occupations. The Obama administration has pledged to recruit more low-income students into STEM fields, which would also help them gain access to the middle class.

For some illumination, it’s helpful to look at how other countries have responded to the pressure to techify their workforces. A new study from Stanford looks at what happened in Italy, when a 1961 law doubled the number of students in STEM majors graduating from the country’s universities.

Italy’s big push on STEM

In postwar Italy, the obstacles were — quite literally — a set of fascist rules left over from the Mussolini regime. At age 14, students enrolled in specialized high schools. Only those in college-prep programs had full access to college; students in technical or vocational schools were limited to specific, non-science majors. A 1961 reform law loosened some of these restrictions, and for the first time, students from technical high schools could go to college for a degree in fields like math, physics and engineering.

To study the consequences, Nicola Bianchi, an economics PhD student, collected transcripts from public high schools and universities in Milan between 1958 and 1968. (At the time, students who went to high school in Milan overwhelmingly chose to stay in Milan if they wanted to attend college, so Bianchi got a full portrait of their academic lives.) Bianchi then used tax data from 2005 to see what these same students were earning at the height of their careers.

The first surprise: College seemed to provide no financial benefit to the students from the technical schools, who typically came from less-educated families. These charts show what happened (Bianchi calls people from technical high schools “Type B” students):

After they were granted the opportunity to major in STEM fields, students from the technical high schools signed up for university courses in droves. It used to be that about 8.2 percent of them finished college. The lifted The worst possible way to push kids into studying science, math and engineering - The Washington Post:

The ugly segregationist history of the charter school movement - Salon.com

The ugly segregationist history of the charter school movement - Salon.com:

The ugly segregationist history of the charter school movement

Popular education "reform" measures are rooted in white resistance to Brown v. Board of Education

CHRISTOPHER BONASTIA, ALTERNET

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present.

The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.

Two years before a federal court set a final desegregation deadline for fall 1959, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall shared white county leaders’ strategy of resistance with Congressman Watkins Abbitt: “We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program,” he wrote. “Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with ‘em.”

Though the county ultimately refused to sell the public school buildings, public education in Prince Edward County was nevertheless abandoned for five years (1959-1964), as taxpayer dollars were funneled to the segregated white academies, which were housed in privately owned facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge. Federal courts struck down this use of taxpayer funds after a year. Still, whites won and blacks lost. Because there were no local taxes assessed to operate public schools during those years, whites could invest in private schools for their children, while blacks in the county—unable and unwilling to finance their own private, segregated schools—were left to fend for themselves, with many black children shut out of school for multiple years.

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Meanwhile, in less blatant attempts to avoid desegregation, states and localities also enacted “freedom of choice” plans that typically allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools, but forced black students to clear numerous administrative hurdles and, not infrequently, withstand harassment from teachers and students if they entered formerly all-white schools. When some segregationists began to acknowledge that separate black and white schools were no longer viable legally, they sought other means to eliminate “undesirables.”

Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned, “Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches.” (Mays vastly The ugly segregationist history of the charter school movement - Salon.com: