Re: The Economist: The Bloomberg-Klein "grand plan to charterise the entire city school system"

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Let's "charterize" the world while we're at it - that's the political 
mentality.

You don't like charter schools, more power to you, but lots of parents 
and kids do like them.  There are about 4,000 charter schools and 
around a million children attend them.  There are unarguably bad 
charter schools, and they should by all means be shut down, but there 
are also beacons of promise such as KIPP and Excellence in Bed-Stuy.  
If chartering is bringing us schools that parents and children like and 
that seem to be of high quality, the reasonable thing to do is learn 
what works in chartering and keep on doing it.  Nobody could be against 
that, right?

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Horn, James <jhorn@monmouth.edu>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 8:21 am
Subject: [arn-l] The Economist: The Bloomberg-Klein "grand plan to 
charterise the entire city school system"

 The Economist: The Bloomberg-Klein "grand plan to charterise the 
entire city
school system"

Whoops! The cat is officially out of the bag, with the account of how 
Bloomberg
& Klein plan to privatize the New York City Schools.

It will not be simple sell, however, to convince the public to turn 
over the
Schools to the corporate curriculum writers bought by Eli Broad, Bill 
Gates, and
the Walton family, in schools where tenure is abolished and teachers do 
test
score piece work, where the civic responsibility of providing for our 
children's
educations has been relinquished to those who have have reduced the 
value of
life to the formulae provided by consumer capitalists and their mantra 
of global
competitiveness, where a child becomes a "scholar" in the bogus data 
factory
that has replaced the idea of school, where she works overtime toward a 
future
that poverty and racism will most likely disallow.

To get this charterising done, Bloomberg and Klein must hold up an 
example to
show a skeptical public how they can tame poor black children while 
choking high
test scores out of them. This is the miracle of KIPP, where children 
and parents
must sign a contract that assures compliance and no complaining if a 
child is to
be allowed to be brainwashed into believing that his future simply 
depends upon
how hard he works, how nice he is. Otherwise, complainers or behavior 
problems
or slackers are booted out, and in comes the next eager face from the 
waiting
list of children whose parents are desperate for something other than 
the
standard fare that Bloomberg and Klein provide to the poor of NYC. And 
if the
child remains compliant, by the time he comes to see through the 
illusion, he
will have learned that he, himself, must have not worked quite hard 
enough or
that he was somehow less than nice to deserve the fate that he, indeed, 
could
not have created.

A clip from The Economist:

    THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the 
Excellence
charter school in Brooklyn's impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. 
To
promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly 
black
and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are 
encouraged
to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a 
plaque, with
the name of a teacher's alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case 
of the
kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.

    Like the other charter schools that are fast multiplying across 
America,
Excellence is an independently run public school that has been allowed 
greater
flexibility in its operations in return for greater accountability, 
though it
cannot select its pupils, instead choosing them by lottery. If it 
fails, the
principal (head teacher) will be held accountable, and the school could 
be
closed. Three years old, Excellence is living up to its name: 92% of 
its
third-grade scholars (eight-year-olds, the oldest boys it has, so far) 
scored
“advanced” or “proficient” in New York state English language exams 
this year,
compared to an average (for fourth-graders) across the state of 68% and 
only 62%
in the Big Apple. They did even better in mathematics.

    This is the sort of performance that the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, 
now wants
to extend from New York's 60 charter schools to all of the city's 
schools. On
November 5th, the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, 
announced what
is in effect the final piece in their grand plan to charterise the 
entire city
school system. As charter schools remain politically contentious, 
though, they
have been careful not to use that phrase in public.

    When Mr Klein took the job in 2002, having led the Clinton 
administration's
efforts to break up Microsoft, The Economist joked that he should try 
to do the
same thing to New York's schools monopoly. He more or less has. Under 
the new
scheme, every school run by the city will receive a public report card, 
with a
grade that reflects both academic performance and surveys of students, 
parents
and teachers. The first grades were given out this week. . . .
-------------------------------------------------------
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