Corporate Colonizers, Behavioral Sterilization, and Charter Schools: The Final Solution for Urban Public Schools – @ THE CHALK FACE knows SCHOOLS MATTER:
by Jim Horn
Three Friday afternoons ago, Bloomberg testocrats belatedly reported that parents had discovered new examples of Pearson’s shoddy test scoring that affected thousands of kids trying get through the racist and classist tests that the City uses to choose the “gifted.” And yesterday, Chancellor Walcott announced another batch of errors by Pearson. ”Deeply embarrassing disturbing,” Walcott […]
by Kuhio Kane
So, the accountability is that teachers use it all as they are told to? So, a new, better package comes the next year if the numbers are not right? Kris, this is a clear article. You are always informative. I respect your knowledge of how all this chicanery works. However, I grow increasingly narcoleptic hearing […]
by Jim Horn
In 2014 it will be 60 years since Brown vs Board of Education, the landmark case whereby SCOTUS decided by a margin of 9-0 that “separate schools are inherently unequal.” When we look today at urban schooling in America, what changes do we see over this 59 years and counting?
Well, first we may note that the highly qualified black teachers and principals who taught in those black segregated schools of 1954 are long gone, even if the segregated schools are not. They have been replaced today by large numbers of white middle class nonprofit corporate missionaries who are trained for a few weeks in the brutal No Excuses pedagogy that KIPP has made infamous. And the corporations that indoctrinate these missionaries are paid handsomely with public funds for their efforts, and they use the proceeds to market their oppressive corporate service industry to other naive Ivy Leaguers looking for something to do in a dead economy that can simultaneously assuage middle class guilt while inculcating its ideology.
Sixty years after Brown, we also see that the black and brown segregated schools are no longer public in terms of governance or oversight but, rather, corporate schools of “choice” that soak up public money and require revocable contracts that students and parents must abide by to demonstrate their fealty to the reform school methods. Meanwhile, the remaining public schools of urban America are black, too, and that is where the children who can’t get their minds or their test
