should the following be a Panic or should for the Development and Re-Development of existing & New and emerging Latino communities Charter Schools be/are the answer to the vast culture differences that are effecting collaborative academic success ratios in the Public Schools. Panic should not be the issue here but Research than can justify ethnic Elementary, Middle Second Education in the United States. The Skeptics and naysayers may disagree, Charter Schools for Cultural & Ethnic Enrichment for our Children so that when they enter Vocation and or Academic Institutions for Career Education Development, the focus will be just that. Re-directing mileage taxation if practical in all probability will enhance and maintain the future of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. Review and Share and Employ both Urban and Rural
The state Board of Education meets Friday and the agenda includes a couple of issues that bear on nothing less than further erosion of Brown v. Board of education and the end of the public education system as we once knew it.
I've written a column for the Times this week on the board's review of the performance of the 12-year-old Academics Plus charter school in Maumelle and the proposal for a new Quest charter middle school in Chenal Valley.
A-Plus was a charter pioneer, founded with the intention of reaching out to a diverse racial population and committed, they said, to reaching the minority children on the wrong side of the achievement gap in Pulaski County public schools. It's seeking continued approval of its charter (and probably will get it), but the board is at least going to ask some probing questions. Many are presented by its own report. Here it is. It remains a white-flight haven for predominatly white, middle-class Maumelle. Its enrollment of black and poor children remains small. But, what's worse, the neighboring Maumelle schools — with much higher enrollments of poor and mionrity students — do a better job, particularly in the problematic middle school years. Where's the innovation and performance that charter schoolswere supposed to deliiver? After a dozen years, does accountability ever kick in?
Then there's Quest, to be run by a Texas private organization faulted in a national study by a charter school-friendly research outfit at Stanford for its poor performance with lower-end students. Not that those kind of students are really anticipated in western Little Rock. There'll be a lottery for admissionif demand exceeds seats, but with a pittance budget for transportation it will be a miracle if it doesn't reflect the higher incomes and lower black percentages of the neighborhood elementaries potential Quest parents now attend. They don't want to go to majority black/poor nearby middle schools with lagging test scores. Some are improving, Forest Heights, particularly, and there are plans to make it an academic magnet, but it's a risk the parents are reluctant to take. Too bad, because it's project-oriented model sounds truly innovative.
Innovation? Look at Quest's application. It's full of meaningless education-speak gobbledygook. It promises to "feel like a private school," but be free. I think you and I both know what "feels like a private school" means. The application also says bluntly that, since the Little Rock deseg case is over, neither they nor the state needworry one bit about whether the kids they draw from the Little Rock school district will add to segregation there or create a segregated publicly financed school surrounded by the dregs of truly public education.
Education reformer Diane Ravitch, a lonely voice against the Walton billions backing Quest and other charter schools to bust up the Little Rock School District, says it right. By intent or not, charter schools segregate by race, class and social status. The parents don't seem to mind, not even when resulting performance follows routinely along the same old depressing lines — schools with students from more advantaged backgrounds "succeed"; those with poor students often do not.. Separate and unequal public schools, 60 years after Brown, is now a marketing tool for the billionaires' charter projects. In post-racial America, only the occasional sorehead like me objects.
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Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Thursday, January 9th 2014 at 3:50PM
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