Michelle Liu Photo
Steve Perry testifies at the NAACP hearing.
Black students get a chance they deserve. Or black students get shortchanged by semi-private schools that drain traditional public schools of needed money.
Those two views were on display as the national debate over charter schools — and their impact on communities of color — roared into New Haven.
The occasion was a hearing at the Omni Hotel Saturday held by the Connecticut NAACP.
It was the first of seven such hearings planned across the country in response to a resolution passed in October by the national NAACP calling for a moratorium on new charter schools.
And it lasted four hours. With passionate testimony on both sides.
Debating the merits of these charter schools for minority students in particular, traditional public school advocates suggested that charter schools only deepen divides between and sap resources out of public schools in minority and low-income communities. Those on the pro-charter side argued that these alternatives to public schools provide viable options for the black, Latino and poor communities that need them the most.
The civil-rights group’s moratorium call has been controversial exposing two divergent strains of thought in the black community about the best direction for improving public schools.
Paul Bass Photo
The Amistad High walkout.
Members of the NAACP’s National Task Force for Quality Education, created alongside the resolution, heard testimony from teachers, parents, students and experts on both sides of the divide at the Omni Saturday. The hearing kicked off a process that will culminate in a set of recommendations from the task force.
The prevalence of charter schools in primarily urban areas with concentrated black and Latino populations makes this issue especially pertinent to the task force, said Connecticut NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile said.
Race has been a flashpoint at New Haven’s charter Amistad High School, where black students staged a walkout May 31 to protest the lack of black teachers. Read about that here, and the passionate debate it generated here. (The school organized some of those students to testify in favor of charters at the hearing.)
Michelle Liu Photo
The Omni hearing.
In his testimony at Saturday’s New Haven hearing, Steve Perry of Hartford pointed to wait lists into the hundreds at Connecticut’s Capital Preparatory charter schools, which he leads, as a marker of the demand for charters and their importance to parents.
Likewise, the right to choose, a central tenet in pro-charter arguments, surfaced as Perry made a comparison to private universities (for which students can still receive federal aid).
“If you had a student who got into Yale University, you’d probably tell them to go,” he said.
In Massachusetts, the people have spoken decisively against charter schools, said Jessica Tang, a teacher in Boston’s public schools and an organizer in that city’s teachers union. She pulled up the map on how the state voted on Nov. 8 for Question 2, a ballot question on whether the state board of education should be authorized to expand the cap on charter school expansion throughout the state. While 68 percent of voters voted “no,” the remaining 32 percent were overwhelmingly from the “whitest, wealthiest upper-class” communities, Tang said. On the other hand, in Boston alone, black and Latino communities like those in Roxbury voted against the question.
“The narrative that black and brown families want charter schools … was completely proven untrue by voters’ rights,” Tang said.
Even a factoid — the $11,000 allotted per student in a charter school in Connecticut — took on different interpretations. Some said the money per student meant charters couldn’t be siphoning funds away from public schools, others said it put greater pressure for public schools to continue paying teachers, maintaining infrastructure and supporting special education students who don’t get admitted to charters.
Shonta Browdy, chair of the NAACP Greater Hartford branch’s education committee, claimed that local charter schools cherry-pick their students, holding onto troublemakers until Oct. 1 — the day on which a public school like those in Hartford submit head counts to the state for its yearly funding.
And on Oct. 2?
“They come in droves,” she said of lower-performing students pushed back into the public school system, to a chorus of incredulous cries in the audience.
Jeremiah Grace, the state director for the Northeast Charter Schools Network, argued that charter schools, regulated by the state, are just as “public” as traditional public schools, noting that the increased flexibility charters receive is matched with increased accountability.
Grace, like other pro-charter advocates, said that while many underperforming district schools continue to operate, charter schools “can, will and should be closed if it fails to perform academically or financially.
New Haven Board of Education member Ed Joyner (pictured) argued that it is inaccurate to say public school districts, like New Haven’s, don’t offer choice, citing themed magnet schools like the city’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School just a block away downtown. Students also have academic flexibility within schools, as well as a slew of co- and extracurricular options, whether that’s the orchestra or intramural football.
“You name it, we have it,” Joyner said, noting that these schools are modeled after schools in the South from Joyner’s childhood, “which were black and poor but strong and proud.”
Jennifer Alexander, CEO of the New Haven-based pro-charter advocacy group ConnCAN, decried the dichotomy set up by the hearing, pointing out that those who wished to testify had to sign up under a “pro-public” or “pro-charter” column. Instead, she spoke to the idea that the state’s new economy will increasingly require college educations of its workers, emphasizing the pluses of charter schools in preparing students for these new jobs, she said in an interview.
Other experts suggested the black-and-white nature of such a debate was taking energy and time away from more important issues at hand: James Comer (pictured), a professor of child psychiatry at Yale’s Child Study Center, said it was not the type of school, but rather the experience a school provides for a child’s development, that is the problem.
Smith: Charter schools inspire college dreams.
Jermaine Smith (pictured), an eighth-grader (and a budding orator) at Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Bridgeport, attributed his and his siblings’ college and career aspirations to his charter school education, saying he wanted to be “challenged in the classroom.”
“Now my brother, who transferred, who’s been in public school all his life, wanted to be a boxer. Which is fine! But now that he goes to a charter school, and it’s his second year —”
“And now he wants to be a mechanical engineer,” Smith finished, to snaps and claps.
Esdaile, also a member of the task force, called the hearing a “great beginning.” He maintained that the task force has no bias against charter schools in spite of the moratorium call. The task force’s next stop will be in Memphis on Jan. 7.
Esdaile, on his part, said he believes the solution may lie somewhere in the middle of the two poles. He looks forward to hearing more int he next seven cities.
“I want to get to the bottom of this,” Esdaile said. “I want to work to try to move the needle for public education for black students in this country.”
Charter school advocates are among the biggest scam artists in politics.Charters are the ideal deal, where the public takes all the risk and the corporations can't lose. Anyone who believes that the Lords of Capital would finance anything that puts real power in the hands of poor parents, is in serious need of remedial education.
Glenn Ford
Give me a break.All Charter School are cash cows and are the inventions of rightwing corporations, There is zero oversight for taxpayer money doled out like candy. Charter schools will turn out to be the biggest and most expensive fraud ever perpetrated on the taxpayers.But there is a noble goal in mind, To undermine and destroy the teacher's union and to line the pockets of people like this.These are the puppet masters who are behind the Charter School take over. Read this.
The Plot Against Public Education
How millionaires and billionaires are ruining our schools.By BOB HERBERT
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-plot-against-public-education-111630.html#.VH9usMnmkqO
The Faces of School Reform
https://indypendent.org/2010/01/29/faces-school-reform
Now the NAACP should have had Paul Buchheit at this forum.
New Layers of Dirt on Charter Schools
Submitted by Paul Buchheit
Despite ever mounting evidence to the contrary, corporate media and corporate-bought politicians continue to proclaim the superiority of charter schools. Meanwhile, "nearly 2,500 charter schools closed their doors from 2001 to 2013, leaving over a quarter million kids temporarily without a school." The New Orleans school privatization experiment has clearly failed, as has Detroit. Yet, the charter myth persists, backed by big money and lies.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/dirt_on_charter_schools
Part One.