Hostile Charter Takeovers Sideline Communities
What the education reformers’ policies (charters, vouchers, high-stakes testing, Common Core, VAM etc.) have in common is that they are top-down and focus on private control and privatization. I discussed these common denominators during the Cambridge Forum that was syndicated nationally on NPR last year.
Cambridge Forum Lecture on Privatizing Education (NPR radio version) https://t.co/eLnboo3kle— JulianVasquezHeilig (@ProfessorJVH) April 30, 2015One of the top-down, private control education reformers most prominent tenants are hostile takeovers of neighborhood schools and turning them over to charter corporations. They have undertaken the approach writ large in New Orleans and in piecemeal fashion in Detroit and Tennessee. I discussed the research on these takeover recently in DC at a US House briefing entitled Closed for Learning: The Impact of School Closures. (Check out the post Ghastly Impact of Closing Schools on Students and Communities)
This week I believe that the Center for Popular Democracy will be releasing a new report entitled State Takeovers of Low Performing Schools: A Record of Academic Failure, Financial Mismanagement and Student Harm that is an excellent aggregation of information across these communities. I wrote the introduction to the report and found it comprehensive and informative. Keep a look out— I’ll blog about the report when it comes out.
The top-down, private control education “reformers” like to frame their takeover policies as empowering “parental” and “community” choice. Are they really? Ezra Howard, a doctoral student at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Education, and a former Memphis, TN teacher emailed me these comments detailing how the hostile charter takeovers empower by the politician’s Achievement School District have sidelined communities instead of empowering them.
In Tennessee, education reformers are conducting hostile takeovers. In 2010, the state legislature created the Achievement School District (ASD) with the charge to rapidly turn around student achievement in schools located on the “priority list,” those in the bottom 5% of the state. In 2011, with list in hand, the ASD began operation with a mix of direct-run schools and those operated by charter management organizations (CMOs). Four year later, the results have been generally poor. While some schools are off the priority list, a recent Vanderbilt study found the results of the ASDHostile Charter Takeovers Sideline Communities – Cloaking Inequity:
