This is devastating for nashville, and implicates that nashville is looking to privatize and turn its public schools over to privately managed charter schools, who are in the interest of making money not equitably educating all students in our community. please do not misunderstand me, i know many excellent teachers who work in charter schools who are in it for the right reasons, i know many families who choose to send their children to charter schools for understandable reasons, and i know the students who attend there work hard and deserve their success. the charter school movement as a whole, however, represents none of these things. it represents the trend in american politics as a whole that is moving further and further away from a democracy, where politics and policy is a reflection of money rather than constituent values and beliefs...and all at the expense of those with lower socioeconomic status, which further widens the gap between the haves and the have nots rather than supporting a solid middle class, and creating a sense of civic duty towards those who are not part of the middle class. but i digress. register has called for east nashville to become a purely choice system...this means we will have no more zoned schools. every family will need to enter a lottery. every family will be unsure of where their child will attend school. every school will suffer from increased mobility rates and lack of consistency. his justification is that reward or higher performing schools in east nashville that are successful on standardized tests are charter schools, while zoned schools in east nashville are undercapacitated and marked as priority schools according to standardized tests. this is exactly what privatizers sought to accomplish...first, bring test scores to the forefront of educational policy, so as to have data with which to justify your claims that public schools are failing and we must privatize in order to create competition that will improve such failing schools. then, open just enough charter schools in east nashville that those students with more engaged families will be bled from the public schools to create a pseudo two-tiered education system...charter schools who are not accountable to anyone, who may recruit and retain the students and families of their choosing, and who are not required to educate every student who walks through their doors...and public neighborhood schools, who become undercapacitated and as a result of this segregation have a high concentration of the neediest students and families without the necessary resources to address these needs. then, criticize zoned schools for not being able to get the same tests scores as the charter schools, despite this segregated two-tiered systme. make the claim that more charter schools are necessary, bc they are successful and zoned schools arent. finally, convert the zone to an all choice and all charter zone with the rest of the city to follow. when this does happen, however, we will still have the neediest children and families, who will struggle with the same issues related to poverty, will still perform poorly on standardized tests, and will continue to have their needs go unmet. by the time this comes out in th wash, however, those seeking to privatize will have made their money and get out, leaving the city of nashville to clean up the mess. or, they will just close and reopen charter schools, which will leave our neediest children in an endless cycle of unstable and ever-changing schools when what they need most are consistent, stable, supported, and strong community schools. finally, while charter schools do educate students labeled as below the poverty level, there are differences and nuances within such a label that create vast differences in reality for these families...mainly those of family involvement and social capital. lumping them altogether and labeling them as the same, below the poverty level, and thus likening their experiences as being the same is degrading and offensive. to speak as if educating students below the poverty level at charter schools, whose parents are able to place them there, is the same as educating many students at zoned schools who live in vastly different situations is untrue. to speak as if charter schools are educating the neediest students, and know how to address their needs adequately is untrue. it is time for east nashville to organize and rise up...jesse register wants this to happen next year. we will lose our community schools, we will lose our system of public education, and we will lose our tax dollars. more to come. tennessean/story/news/education/2014/09/09/jesse-register-calls-swift-shake-struggling-schools/15370817/
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:04:12 +0000
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