Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity - Public Enemy Number 1Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity
Power used the Tampa Bay Times' Pulitzer tagline to strip mine Florida's public schools. It largely ignored the Orlando Sentinel's better, further-reaching voucher reporting. Why?
Part 1: Welcome to Jeb Crow Florida, 2021
Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else
Part 3: How to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child
Today’s Part 4 is a comprehensive history and accounting of the consequences from Florida’s two most important pieces of newspaper journalism since 2015. Both concern education; and both illustrate how power determines the impact of journalism, in different ways. This article may be truncated in email delivery; so you should plan to click through to the website.
It would take a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, to which I am a subscriber, a couple of days at most to go through the Step Up for Students website and compile a spreadsheet of voucher schools for the counties in their coverage area — with the same information I put together in this spreadsheet. (I will send you the full sheet if you want it, TBT, for a template.)
I would bet my house that every county would have a giant list of racially and ESE-segregated voucher schools with no accreditation or oversight or capital. These voucher schools exist only because of direct taxpayer funding or because big corporations get a public dollar-for-dollar tax break for funding them directly rather than funding real public schools.
In Polk County, 16 voucher schools have enrollments that are at least 76 percent black. Twelve of the 16 schools are at least 95 percent black or greater. Six are 100 percent black. Not one of those schools has accreditation, of any kind. More than 800 black children attend these segregated, no-capital “schools.”
Beyond purely black segregation, 30 out of 65 Polk voucher schools are at least 70 CONTINUE READING: Segregation factories, pt 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity - Public Enemy Number 1
