Tuesday, February 19, 2019

From Portugal, with no Love from the Education Reformers | Cloaking Inequity

From Portugal, with no Love from the Education Reformers | Cloaking Inequity

FROM PORTUGAL, WITH NO LOVE FROM THE EDUCATION REFORMERS
I was invited by Steve Nelson, faculty member at the University of Memphis, to be the discussant for a panel entitled School Choice and Black Communities: Discussing Educational Equity and Educational Racism Beyond Test Scores. The researchers in the panel (go the the third photo in the instagram post above) discussed how market-based school choice has limited self-determination in the African American community. As you might expect there was quite a bit of pushback after the presentation from the audience that included leaders from EdChoice, Cato and other neoliberal supports of education privatization. In fact, the pushback basically came at us throughout the conference— during lunch, in the hallways etc. Pretty much the same experience that I had when I attended AEI education reform workgroups in past years (ask me about being in the room at AEI next time you see me and how I managed to get disinvited from their events— has something to do with Nazis, I am NOT lying).
Here are my remarks that I prepared, but not necessarily as delivered. I’ll follow the text with a YouTube video of the remarks.

The United States has not yet realized the 1954 mandate of Brown v. Board to address segregation and deep-seated education inequity across our nation.
Today, more than 60 years later, schools across the United States are still profoundly separate and unequal based on race and class.
As these papers demonstrate, our failure extends disparities across the spectrum of education including education law, performance, access to school boards, and how school discipline is administered.
It’s a national shame that the state-sanctioned sabotage of human potential is readily apparent in communities in Louisiana, Tennessee, Michigan and other states across the nation.
As these papers demonstrate, these issues are being amplified, in fact, made worse, by the school privatization and private-control movement, which #WeChoose community campaign has called the illusion of school choice
The NAACP and other community-based activists have called upon education reforms to refocus on inequality CONTINUE READING: 
From Portugal, with no Love from the Education Reformers | Cloaking Inequity
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