"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Charter Industry Sends Out Their A Team Against Civil Rights Leaders, Part II

So Professor West is puzzled:
It is puzzling, then, that a coalition of prominent civil rights organizations last week issued a statement criticizing the Obama administration’s current emphasis on chartering as a strategy to turn around low-performing schools and bemoaning the heavy concentration of charters in high-minority areas.
Let me see if I help you out, sir, to understand why every major civil rights group in the U. S. opposes RTTT and charter schools.  It is not, as you and Peterson suggest in your Wall Street Journal op-ed, that they have been paid off by the teachers' unions.  Nothing could be more ridiculous except your own pretenses.

Do you think that such deep and wide civil rights opposition to charters could have anything to do with documented segregative effects that have been amply noted in two separate research studies earlier this year?  Do you think that those in favor of the civil rights should embrace segregation?  Really? 

Do you think that those who support civil rights do not know that the segregated behavioral chain gangs like KIPP are doing serious damage to children's minds with their total compliance regimes and cruel interventions that white parents would never allow for their own children? 

Do you think that civil rights leaders want black children who grow up brainwashed and blaming themselves for their poverty, rather than working to transform the racist and classist system that now has them isolated and contained?

Do you think that civil rights leaders want your white missionary Ivy League women administering an anti-cultural curriculum to these African-American children?

Do you think that civil rights leaders want untrained white females learning to teach on black children who need the best teachers from Day One?

Do you think that civil rights leaders want schools for black children without libraries, gyms, art rooms, music, guidance counselors, or cafeterias?

Do you think that civil rights leaders support schools where CEOs make hiring, firing, admissions, and due process (or lack thereof)  decisions without public oversight or input?

Do you think that civil rights leaders will accept teaching aimed at test prep and non-thinking, which leaves children unprepared to for more demanding studies and college that require them to write and think?

Do you think you would see support for charter schools if there were a real public school choice, rather than the continuation of the malignantly neglected crumbling ruins that you or Peterson have no interest in fixing or renovating?

Finally, Professor West, do you think that when parents learn of the realities of the charter chain gangs, rather than the rosy picture you paint in your "objective" survey questions and your propaganda office that gives Harvard a name, that they, too, will not join their civil rights leaders in demanding the kinds of educational opportunities that the best public schools offer in communities with jobs, housing, hope, success, money, grocery stores, and the rest of the social capital that you couldn't care less about providing the children stuck in your dead end testing boot camps?  Get a grip, Professor West, and stop trying to defraud the public.

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