Jersey Jazzman: Destroying Public Schools to "Save" Them
Jitu Brown #FightforDyett from Michael Elliot on Vimeo.
That's from the terrific filmmaker Michael Elliot, who was the creator of The Other PARCC, which is also well worth watching.
As Peter Greene recently explained, parents don't want "choice" nearly as much as they want great schools. So when you underfund schools, then demoralize staff and students with an incessant focus on standardized tests (that were designed so that low-income schools will fail), then refuse to listen to the communities you serve, then create chaos through a "reform" plan of constant upheaval and disruption...
You shouldn't be surprised when families "choose" to send their children to schools that have resource advantages, even if they lack transparency and accountability to the communities they supposedly serve.
As I've said before, charter wait lists (even inflated ones) are in no way proof of the desire for "choice" among urban families. They are, instead, marks of shame for those politicians who have allowed large parts of our cities to descend into economic and social crisis.
In Chicago, the exodus to charter schools is not an embrace of Rahm Emanuel's reforms; it is, instead, a rebuke. In a sane world, he would have been forced to resign in shame long ago for the damage he has done to that city's schools.
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