Another Disaster of the Accountability Era? State Takeovers of High-Poverty, Majority-Minority Schools
These takeovers often include reconstituting schools as charters, replacing entire faculties and administrations.
Louisiana and my home state of South Carolina both share a historical struggle with high-poverty, racial minority public schools. In recent years, however, New Orleans has become a model for a drastic form of education reform, in which the state takes over schools and entire districts from local control.
These takeovers often include reconstituting schools as charters, replacing entire faculties and administrations, and even handing over operations to private entities — which is precisely what is now being proposed in Charleston, SC, where education and poverty were given close examination via the 2006 documentary Corridor of Shame: Neglect of South Carolina's Rural Schools.
In that film, South Carolina novelist Pat Conroy narrated his own experience teaching in a high-poverty, majority-black school on a coastal SC island. The experience, Conroy explains, “shook me to the core”; the extreme poverty and failure of formal education Conroy witnessed during the late 1960s to early '70s included children who had no lived experiences beyond the coastal islands they inhabited and literacy skills that suggested their futures would be dim.
By the 1980s, my home state had made a decision about how to treat education inequality: South Carolina became one of the first states to adopt high-stakes accountability for education reform, and in effect, committed to the belief that in-school only reform could overcome the negative consequences of poverty and racism.
Unsurprisingly, nothing changed. By1993, high-poverty districts were suing the state over inequitable education funding — the very suit that is the basis of the documentary Conroy participated in.
It took over two decades for the courts to rule finally in favor of those districts, Another Disaster of the Accountability Era? State Takeovers of High-Poverty, Majority-Minority Schools | Alternet:
