In Fred Grimm's column today in the shitty Miami Herald:
Gus Barrera wondered, as the Miami-Dade School Board voted 7-0 Wednesday to ask Gov. Charlie Crist to veto the bill, whether the real intent of SB 6, coming in the wake of so many school budget cuts, was "to destroy public education. Make them all charter schools. Or privatize them."
Gus, I agree with you, I think that is exactly what is going on. The question is why? I researched charter school demographics in Miami-Dade County a few years ago and found something interesting which might account for their popularity in Florida. Almost all the charter schools were made of students from one race. They were either predominately White, Black or Hispanic. Are charter schools a return to segregated schools?
10 comments:
It's not a "return" to segregation. Apparently, we never stopped it:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100413/us_nm/us_usa_race_segregation_1
Thanks - Here is the article:
Judge tells Mississippi schools to stop segregating
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky Jeremy Pelofsky – Tue Apr 13, 3:36 pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Tuesday ordered a rural Mississippi school district to comply with a nearly 40-year-old order and halt long-disputed practices that led to racial segregation in its schools.
The Justice Department accused the Walthall County School District in rural Mississippi of annually permitting more than 300 students, most of them white, to transfer to a school outside of their residential area, shifting its racial makeup.
Further, administrators at three other schools grouped most of the white students into their own classrooms "resulting in significant numbers of segregated all-black classrooms at each grade level," the U.S. government said in a court filing.
The case comes in a state that was at the heart of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s. In 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, an incident that helped prompt Congress to pass a law banning racial segregation in schools, work and public places.
The school district was ordered in 1970 to stop segregating its schools. But in the late 1980s officials were confronted by the Justice Department with concerns about student transfers to other schools that undermined the desegregation efforts.
While the district made some changes in the early 1990s, the Justice Department said the practices continued and the schools became "significantly more segregated." The district did not respond to the government's lawsuit seeking reforms.
In fact, the county school board in 2009 rejected a tentative settlement with the government that would have overhauled the district's transfer policy and prevented students being assigned to classrooms based on race.
LIMIT TRANSFERS
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tom Lee, in Jackson, Mississippi, ordered the school district to significantly limit transfers. Lee also ordered the district to stop assigning students to classrooms that resulted in segregation, demanding that it use a software program to randomly assign them.
"It is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools," said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
In 2008, the Walthall district had about 2,550 students -- of whom about 64 percent were black and 35 percent were white.
At four schools, less than a quarter of the students were white while at least 73 percent of the students were black in 2008, according to the government court filing. In 1992, the racial makeup of those schools was between 59 percent and 70 percent black and at least 30 percent white.
Meanwhile at another school, Salem Attendance Center, 66 percent of the students were white while a third were black students in 2008. That was a dramatic shift from 1992 when a majority, 58 percent, were black and 42 percent were white.
The change in the school racial makeup was not because of population shifts, but rather "the product of unlawful district transfer policies that permit hundreds of white students" to transfer each year, the Justice Department said.
The superintendent for the district declined to comment on the judge's ruling.
(Editing by Will Dunham)
How does this bill shift money to charter and private schools? I haven't seen anything reported on that?
Isn't the Bill SB 6 just about rewarding good teachers?
Who wants bad teachers encouraged to stick around? Why should bad teachers get undeserved pay raises? Longevity raises? Who gets those in the private sector?
Should not the best teachers get rewarded?
People need to know who voted for this sneaky and punitive bill in Tallahassee, aligning themselves with the big interests against out teachers, in the State House:
Esteban L. Bovo District 110
Anitere Flores Dist. 114
Erik Fresen Dist. 111
Eduardo Gonzalez Dist. 102
Carlos Lopez-Cantera Dist. 113
David Rivera Dist. 112
They didn't care to listen to the people who would be affected the most, they just went ahead with the Party line regardless. The strings in their backs are well attached.
It doesn't hurt that one of the mouthpieces and supporters of this proposal is State Rep. Erik Fresen, whose brother-in-law is the president of one of the largest and most successful charter school operators in S. Florida. In fact, on his spare time, Erik is a lobbyist for the charter schools.
(20) SERVICES.—
(a) A sponsor shall provide certain administrative and
educational services to charter schools. These services shall
include contract management services; full-time equivalent and
data reporting services; exceptional student education
administration services; services related to eligibility and
reporting duties required to ensure that school lunch services
under the federal lunch program, consistent with the needs of
the charter school, are provided by the school district at the
request of the charter school, that any funds due to the charter
school under the federal lunch program be paid to the charter
school as soon as the charter school begins serving food under
the federal lunch program, and that the charter school is paid
at the same time and in the same manner under the federal lunch
program as other public schools serviced by the sponsor or the
school district; test administration services, including payment
of the costs of state-required or district-required student
assessments; processing of teacher certificate data services;
and information services, including equal access to student
information systems that are used by public schools in the
district in which the charter school is located. Student
performance data for each student in a charter school,
Page 12 of 61
above LEVY anonymous:
How do you determine a good teacher? By students taking a test? Not a good indication.
Raquel Regalado has been advocating against SB6, her radio show is in Spanish but it has been very informative. She has interviewed those that voted for and against the bill as well as teachers that were not allowed to voice their opinions in Tallahassee. She asked a good question when this started in March, why if so many members of the school board have said that they are against it haven't they taken an official vote and an official stand? I’m glad Barrera is speaking up, but it may be too little too late.
If you want something to fail - defund it. Then it will. When that failure occurs, you can measure the failure, complain about how terrible the failure is, and then promote a better solution. If the better solution includes helping your friends to open charter schools or get contracts to grade standardized tests, all the better. Hey, its a free market of ideas, right. (Meanwhile, the upper crust will send their kids to private schools.)
How I wish I had Marco Rubio on tape a few years ago when he made statements where he explained why he wouldn't think of sending his kids to public school. Does anybody have a tape of that meeting at the Dice House.
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