If you follow our model,
you'll be a winner. By the time these kids are in ninth grade, I don't have to
call them idiots anymore. --Ben Chavis, founder of AIPCS
Ben Chavis is the foul-mouthed right wing thug turned schoolmaster, founder, and overseer (think plantation) of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland (AIPCS).
AIPCS openly disparages
multiculturalism and openly advances the philosophy of Milton Friedman.
Consider this
teacher recruitment ad from the AIPCS website that became part of
a story in 2009 by Landsberg in the Los Angeles
Times:
“We are looking for
hardworking people who believe in free market capitalism . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators
need not apply.”
The history of abuse, brutality, and mistreatment goes back years. Here is a clip from the
SFChronicle almost 6 years ago:
. . . .The 130 students at the school, in grades six through nine, follow strict
rules. They must wear waist-high dark-colored pants with white shirts -- no
jewelry, makeup or brightly colored hair accessories.
Most of the school day is spent in one classroom with one teacher, who
moves with the students to higher grades. The day begins with three hours of
math and language arts, followed by a 20-minute lunch. Forty-five minutes a day
are devoted to physical education.
Arts are allowed only after school. And there are no computers. Chavis
believes they bring mischief -- theft, pornography and unforeseen costs.
Students have hours of homework most nights, and two weeks of summer
school are mandatory.
Those with good grades and perfect attendance all year are rewarded with
spending money from Chavis' own pocket -- up to $100 depending on the
student's age. Breaking a school rule, such as not completing homework, being
tardy or breaking the dress code, means an automatic detention.
Repeat offenders are subject to public embarrassment. Those students must
stand in front of other classes as Chavis or a teacher exposes their
misconduct.
"An eighth-grader hates to be sent back to a sixth-grade class," Chavis
said. "I want them to be embarrassed. I'm preparing them for the real world."
But it's the most extreme forms of discipline that have thrown the school
into the critics' line of fire.
With parental permission, Chavis cut the hair of a student accused of
stealing. A boy who admitted to calling his classmate a derogatory name was
pinned with a note that read "I'm an (expletive)" in front of other students.
Chavis said incidents of such discipline are isolated. Still, one led
Monica Peoples-Brown to withdraw her sixth-grade son, who was pinned with the
note after a heated conversation with Chavis that included name-calling and a
threat to call the police.
"My child was traumatized," Peoples-Brown said. "It hurt me to sign him
out. My child was really learning. But I can't deal with an administration that
is a dictatorship."
Some take issue with what they call Chavis' inappropriate use of racial
stereotypes, cursing and name-calling to embarrass students at the school.
Floundering students become the public targets of labels like "stupid" and
"lazy Mexican."
"I tell the students, if you don't do your work, people are going to call
you a lazy Mexican. You're black, they expect you to be an idiot," said Chavis,
who is Native American. "I use it to motivate the kids."
The school loses about 10 students a year. Chavis said most of them moved
out of the area. Disgruntled parents say they and others were pushed out or
became fed up with Chavis' inappropriate language and overly aggressive
discipline.
Rachael Huang disagreed when her daughter was assigned to retake Algebra I
in September. After a series of intense discussions with school administrators,
she said her daughter came home with a list of other Oakland schools
photocopied from the phone book.
She took the hint and removed both her daughters from the school.. . .
Just days ago AIPCS's charter came up for renewal amidst allegations and a ton of evidence that Chavis and his wife have treated the school's account as their private piggy bank. From
the Mercury-News:
Staff members with the
Oakland school district's charter schools office cited a host of reasons
for the recommendation to reject the school's charter school renewal
application. At the forefront is an ongoing state investigation into
allegations of fraud and other illegal activity at American Indian Model
Schools, the organization that manages this charter school and two
others. School district staff say investigators with the Fiscal Crisis
& Management Assistance Team are reviewing more than $3 million in
questionable transactions by the organization during a recent three-year
period.
Late last year, a former employee's claims of financial
misappropriation and cover-up prompted the district and county
superintendents to request a special audit. The former employee said
funds for an after-school program were redirected to a company owned by
Ben Chavis, the organization's director.
And this from the SFChronicle last week:
Superintendent Tony Smith recommended the board shut down the charter
based on a separate district staff review and 2,100 pages of
documentation that found a lack of "responsible governance" and "poor
financial accountability," as well as a lack of services for special
education students and English learners. It also found teachers were
hired without credentials, as required by law. The district findings
mirrored the issues raised in the state audit.
So let me end the suspense. The School Board voted 4-3 to grant this chain gang another 5 year charter, as Chavis and his corporate sponsors looked on.
Do you think a school board in the leafy suburbs would ever allow this kind of evil, abuse, fraud, and brutality to occur in their communities? With the safety and welfare of Seth and Caitlin at stake? Not quite, but it is perfectly fine as long as poor kids are being manhandled, abused, miseducated, and humiliated. This is a contemporary example of moral breakdown on a colossal scale, and what Arendt called the
"banality of evil" in our midst:
. . . Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews
which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the
Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated
unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no
consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. The human
dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination
of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically
assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann and his cohorts.
Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of
exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims’
suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence
of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral
dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Eichmann failed to
exercise his capacity of thinking, of having an internal
dialogue with himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the
evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use
self-reflection as a basis for judgement, the faculty that would
have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate
the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his
victims. This connection between the complicity with political evil and
the failure of thinking and judgement inspired the last phase of
Arendt’s work, which sought to explicate the nature of these faculties
and their constitutive role for politically and morally responsible
choices.
