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

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Focusing the Microscope to View Los Angeles Charter Schools

Rebecca Klein has a piece at Huffington Post entitled "The Los Angeles Teachers Strike Puts Charter Schools Under The Microscope." Apparently, Rebecca has borrowed her microscope from the Gates Foundation, which offers a very fuzzy image, indeed. 

Rebecca's only "authoritative" quote comes from Robin Lake, director of the Gates think tank, Center for Reinventing Education.  Lake, who claims to have studied the Report of Independent Financial Review Panel (2015), downplays the impact of charter schools on the hemorrhaging of LAUSD student over the past 20 years. Apparently, Robin did not study very closely this chart, which shows the correlation of charter school population growth with public school enrollment losses.

Rebecca summarizes impressive-looking gains in "days of learning" from the 2014 CREDO study of LA charter schools, but she avoids sharing the fact that more charter schools in LA are doing no better or worse than the public schools, and significant percentages of charters are doing worse (p. 37).


 The neoliberal control of the media continues unabated.

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