EDUCATION POLITICS-When it really comes down to finally fixing public education once and for all, I seriously doubt that those with the power to effectuate necessary reforms would want to do so, since they would be the first to go.
Notwithstanding the incessant bantering in the media, critically relevant factors that should be part of any public education “fix” are either completely ignored or suspiciously supplanted by what is wholly irrelevant or completely untrue. To do otherwise would threaten the corporate pigs feeding at the LAUSD $8 billion feeding trough – the place where those in power have ignored LAUSD's fundamental mandate to educate students.
A classic example of ersatz public education “reform” based on false assumptions is the recent proposal by the Broad Foundation to make half of all the LAUSD schools charters in the next few years. But nobody in academia, government, or the media seems to have bothered to look at existing charter schools to see if they are actually any better than the 50 percent of LAUSD schools this proposal would supplant in the next few years.
With few exceptions charters are not better by any measure. Calling a school a "College Ready Charter" or some other disingenuous name or putting uniforms on students who continue to be socially promoted without grade-level standards mastery does nothing to change this reality. And that is that the majority of students in the District cannot write a coherent sentence and are profoundly behind grade level in all academic subject standards...just like the LAUSD schools they are scheduled to replace.
This situation is easily verifiable by anybody who bothers to go into a charter school classroom and look. None of the well-paid "experts" that tout charter schools or critics of these schools seem capable of just going to charter campuses and witness for themselves the abysmal level on which most of these schools continue to function.
There is a small minority of great charter schools like KIPP Comienza, where the needs of all students -- low, normal, and high functioning -- are addressed in a timely manner, allowing them to be fully engaged and academically successful. But there is nothing being done in charters like KIPP that couldn't be implemented in other LAUSD schools. The fact that it isn't, speaks volumes.
Most people do not understand that the initial raison d'etre for opening charter schools -- which were never supposed to be stand-alone schools replacing regular public schools – was to be a proving ground for best practices that could subsequently be rolled out in existing public school districts like LAUSD.
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What changed this was when corporate interests -- who realized they could take as much as 40 percent of the almost to $2 trillion dollars a year that is now spent nationwide on public education – became suppliers of goods and services to schools at inflated well over fair-market-value prices.
What regular and charter schools now have in common is the privatization of the supply process. For-profit companies have been given monopolies by the powers-that-be who have ignored their fiduciary duty to schools, students and teachers.
While this is disturbing in and of itself, what is more disturbing is the amount of power corporations are able to wield over all levels of government and the media. This allows them to define and exclude other ideas that question their agendas. These corporations serve as gatekeepers to what can be known by the public in all areas of the public education debate.
Regrettably, this phenomenon is not limited to public education, but is becoming more pervasive in other important matters of public concern, where a free and open debate of all issues is no longer allowed.
A recent example of controlling public dialogue is seen in the recent Presidential debates, specifically how the media has handled and continues to deal with the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. From the beginning, Sanders has never been treated as a serious candidate by the media, in spite of the popular positions his campaign has promoted – ideas that other candidates like Clinton have either ignored or glossed over…including Sanders’ initial success in the polls and debates!
Due to control by the corporate-owned and filtered media, Sanders’ ideas have not been allowed to fully resonate. What could develop into a Sanders majority may just remain a disheartened majority with no public voice in what is supposed to be our publicly accountable democracy.
(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]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 88
Pub: Oct 30, 2015
