State Takeover Failure: Financial Mismanagement & Student Harm
Today the Center for Popular Democracy is releasing the report State Takeovers of Low-Performing Schools: A Record of Academic Failure, Financial Mismanagement & Student Harm. The report is an important compendium of information about hostile state takeovers of urban schools. The Center for Popular Democracy is,
a high-impact national organization that builds organizing power to transform the local and state policy landscape through deep, long-term partnerships with leading community-based organizing groups nationwide.
They work to,
create equity, opportunity and a dynamic democracy in partnership with high-impact base-building organizations, organizing alliances, and progressive unions. CPD strengthens our collective capacity to envision and win an innovative pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda.
I was asked by the Center for Popular Democracy to write a forward for the report.
Politicians have recently focused on implementing policies to create achievement districts in cities across the country. These are districts populated by schools which are privately controlled, yet operated with public money. Achievement districts are a highly contentious, top-down down policy that essentially amounts to a hostile state takeover of local schools. In Detroit and Tennessee, achievement districts have initially impacted only a minority of schools. However, politicians are now trying to close entire districts and turn them over to State Takeover Failure: Financial Mismanagement & Student Harm – Cloaking Inequity: