The New York Times Is Spreading Charter School Lies
The New York Times is still fawning over them, but the charter school experiment has been an abject failure. People are clamoring for well-funded public schools, not billionaire pet projects.
any people have written to me to complain about an article that appeared Wednesday on the front page of the New York Times, saying it was pro-charter propaganda. The article claims that black and brown parents are offended that the Democratic candidates (with the exception of Cory Booker, now polling at 1 percent) have turned their backs on charter schools.
This is not true. Black parents in Little Rock, Arkansas are fighting at this very moment to stop the Walton-controlled state government from controlling their district and resegregating it with charter schools. Jitu Brown and his allies fought to keep Rahm Emanuel from closing Walter H. Dyett High School, the last open-enrollment public high school on the South Side of Chicago; they launched a thirty-four-day hunger strike, and Rahm backed down. Jitu Brown’s Journey for Justice Alliance has organized black parents in twenty-five cities to fight to improve their neighborhood public schools rather than let them be taken over by corporate charter chains.
Black parents in many other districts — think Detroit — are disillusioned with the failed promises of charter schools. Eve Ewing wrote a terrific book (Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side) about resistance by parents, grandparents, students, and teachers in the black community to Rahm Emanuel’s mass closings of public schools to make way for charter schools; Ewing called their response “institutional mourning.” When Puerto Rico teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, parents, teachers, and students rallied against efforts to turn the island’s public schools over to charter chains.
The article’s claim that “hundreds of thousands” of students are on “waiting lists” to enroll in charters links to a five-year-old press release by a charter advocacy group, the National Alliance for Charter Schools. In fact, there has never been verification of any “waitlist” for charters. Although there are surely charters that do have waitlists, just as there are public schools that have long waitlists, there is no CONTINUE READING: The New York Times Is Spreading Charter School Lies
