Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: More on Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's charter school system

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: More on Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's charter school system:

More on Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's charter school system

Here's a follow-up on yesterday's post about Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's "choice" system, a system of charters and vouchers that she's practically paid for. DeVos recently named Florida's "choice" system as her "model" or "blueprint" for the rest of the country. Republicans are currently drafting legislation that would take the state's tax-credit (voucher) system nation wide.

But a closer look at that system exposes it as part of the problem rather than a solution for failed schools.

Let's start with DeVos' faulty premise that school vouchers (tax credits to pay for private and religious school tuition) and the state's vast network of privately-owned charters are needed as escape routes from the state's "failing" public schools.

Failing schools in Florida's racially-segregated school system, means those schools graded F, based on student FCAT scores. Since those standardized test scores correlate more with concentrated poverty that anything going on in the classrooms, "failing" has become a code word for poor, black or Latino. The A-F grading system in turn, drives the state's real estate market, pushing up home prices around high-scoring schools and reinforcing segregation in both schools and housing.

Sociologists call it social-reproduction, a system that replicates and widens racial and class Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: More on Betsy DeVos' love affair with Florida's charter school system: