"It is not legally or morally acceptable that these so-called “schools of choice” that are concentrated in urban communities and supported with public funds, should be permitted to operate as segregated learning environments where students are more isolated by race, socioeconomic class, disability, and language than the public school district from which they were drawn." — COPAA (Charter Schools and Students with Disabilities p. 42)
On the heels of the recent damning Southern Poverty Law Center report Special Education in New Orleans Public Schools, which further exposed the lucrative charter-voucher industry as a bastion of discrimination, comes this equally condemnatory paper from the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA) illustrating how the "market model" of charters and vouchers abjectly and utterly fails the most vulnerable and disadvantaged of all students.
Charter Schools and Students With Disabilities Final
This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasizing testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build. JH August, 2005
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