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

Monday, October 04, 2010

Duncan Decries Segregation While Rewarding Apartheid Charters

The audacity of Arne Duncan was on display again Saturday, as Arne spoke before the ABA in Chicago:
. . . U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan said if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he’d be disheartened to see so many schools still effectively segregated.


“Dr. King would have been angered to see that too often we underinvest in disadvantaged students, that they still have fewer opportunities to take rigorous college prep courses, that many black and brown and low-income students are still languishing in aging facilities,” the former chief of the Chicago Public Schools said. 
Dr. King would be angered to see the Secretary of Education offering up an endless stream of bromides and platitudes about civil rights while providing billion of dollars to incentivize the destruction of public schools in urban America and the creation of apartheid corporate charter schools to replace them.  I would guess, enraged, might be a better term.  Adding to his rage, no doubt, would be Arne's ardent support for the total compliance KIPP testing camps for those willful black and brown children, camps staffed by white missionary temps from Teach for Awhile America whose on the job training comes at the expense of poor children of color.  What a mockery:
Duncan also said reforms are needed at colleges of education, e.g. providing more opportunities for on-the-job teacher training, and increasing efforts to recruit minorities and men to reflect the diversity of classrooms, where just 1 in 50 teachers are black men. 
 Is there a nickel of the $4 billion of RTTT aimed to reward states or cities who put together plans to end segregation or for creating new integrated schooling models? Or any money for recruiting and educating black males to become teachers?  No and no.

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