CONSIDER THIS-Reporting that the "Broad Foundation seeks an expansion of L.A. charters to boost student success..," Los Angeles Times writer Howard Blume uncritically swallows the Broad, Keck, and Walton Foundations’ completely unsubstantiated, clearly contradicted claims that having more charters than traditional public schools would be better. They do this instead of finally addressing how to pragmatically fix our long-failed public education system.
The fact is that traditional public schools remain de facto segregated, and even shunned by Whites. Their 90 percent undereducated Latino and African American student body is never mentioned, even though continuing segregation remains the predominant factor in the failure of public education as was clearly pointed out in a recent two-part series on NPR entitled, “The Problem We All Live With.”
First, the dominant corporate- and foundation-dictated narrative sets up the strawman of longstanding and purposefully failed public education systems -- like LAUSD -- and Blume again reports the corporate-public-education-charter-privatization party line story that presupposes charter schools perform better, when the clear and uncontradicted data show exactly the opposite.
True integration would turn things around more than charters, but that option is never on the table 61 years after Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) ruled that segregated education is "inherently unequal."
Another fact worth mentioning and yet completely ignored by Howard Blume and others like him in the corporate pre-digested media, is that the vast majority of charters are well over 90 percent Latino or African American with few, if any, Whites.
Given these circumstances, it is no surprise that the vast majority of the several hundred charters in the Greater Los Angeles area do as badly or worse than the LAUSD schools from which they draw their population. So now, you have a failed LAUSD that can only do worse as student average daily attendance money (ADA) is drawn off to equally abysmal charters – and where the well-being of their vendors (whose costs for goods and services are inflated over fair-market prices) continues to take precedence over the academic needs of students.
Now, in fairness to charters, some organizations like the KIPP Charters have succeeded beyond expectation. KIPP Comienza had a 978 Academic Performance Index (API) in 2013, raising the level of their students coming from the same ethnic and low socio-economic areas as many LAUSD or charter schools -- where the vast majority of students still continue to fail miserably, putting them in subsequent jeopardy of joining the 2.4 million current prison population in this country, 60 percent of whom are Black or Latino.
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The now perverted for-profit initial purpose of charters was to serve as a proving ground for new and potentially better educational methods. It was never anticipated that they should supplant the traditional public schools, but only augment their effectiveness. Looking at an almost $2 trillion a year national public education budget, greedy corporations are trying to get at least a 40 percent taste of this privatized charter "public education system" they now control for their own financial benefit. Remember, failed LAUSD ex-Superintendent John Deasy now works for the Broad Foundation.
And to make matters worse, "Charters are exempt from many rules that govern traditional schools...and most are non-union." This only makes the pilfering of public education for profit all the easier. Try and share this message with your own personal network. It cannot be clearer that the corporate-dominated mainstream media will not do so.
If you, or someone you know, have been targeted and are in the process of being dismissed and need legal defense, please get in touch.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 65
Pub: Aug 11, 2015
