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Blog Post #2 Jake Greenberg
February 3, 2015 | Leave a Comment
During this past Spring, Seminar 2, we spent a significant amount of the course discussing charter schools, so much of this information isn’t new to me. That being said, all though the stances of these articles were familiar, the questions raised by them and the points established were refreshing and sparked my interest. I feel that this will be a recurring theme throughout this course but, again, the manipulation of statistics in order to show favorable results plays a big role in this discussion. By stunting the diversity in the abilities of the students, you cannot give a fair evaluation of Charter schools vs. Public schools. The same can be said when Charter schools are simply receiving much more funding and with less strings attached in placing where the funds go. Charter schools are token systems that compete against Public schools which are in a far lower weight-class, and try to compare results. The two systems are incomparable in structure, circumstance, situation, and practicality.
In Pedro Noguera’s article, the topic of transparency is discussed and that is one of the bigger issues with privately funded education systems. Public and private money is coming in, with no regulations or accountability for explaining the budget, and is disappearing. Many cases suggest fraud and even more cases suggest the focus being on making a profit and managerial salaries rather than strong educational funding for more students and services. They speak of Charter schools originally being implemented to inspire ingenuity and yet many programs pride themselves on their discipline, stern punishment, and rule following. Watching some videos of students in the schools looks more like a scene of the clones from Star Wars playing a harsh game of “Simon says”. Conformity, NOT ingenuity or innovation. Look no further than Sillicon Valley where leisure, strong moral support, wiggle-room between deadlines, and a friendly, vague chain-of-command system has lead to true innovation and inspired great advancements in technology. In no instance does being creating cogs lead to anything more than more cogs.
Trymaine Lee’s article on co-location is where the issue truly gets disgraceful and blatantly contradictory. The article depicts scenes where biased gentrification is happening WITHIN a divided, single location. A public school with thousands of students looks on as boundaries are set up within the building and a select few, in the low hundreds, receive the newest infrastructure, technology, resources, and content in front of students whom don’t have working sinks, tattered or simply non-existent books, contracted extracurricular programs and underfunding. It is truly like the “white” and “black” bathrooms during segregation, only now it is based on class (or sometimes simply a skewed lottery) rather than race. And for imposing on the pre-existing public schools buildings they receive generous government and private grants, while they stay there rent free.
In both the, “Charters Change Lives” article and the article by Bev McCarron, there seems to be such guise and opaqueness in the accomplishments of these Charter schools. At People’s Prep, the funding allowed for a tutor per 11 students which is unheard of at any public school due to a lack or resources and a much larger student body. With the individual care, structure, and rigidness applied to the 95 students it seems there would be very little chance of someone slipping through the cracks or straying off task. Although there were some difficulties throughout the year, none of the 95 students was a special needs student which definitely skews the results. The results were also from tests created by the school rather than standardized national tests. With the other article, they picked one exceptional student to be the case and point of the school and I have never seen a more structured response than what that student wrote. It felt and read as planned, cold, and, if completely true, an outlier example of what this style of schooling does for students.
I have many questions and thoughts and concern on this topic, but I will end with this: Why isn’t more focus and funding (including private funding) going towards reconstructing public schools and the socio-economic problems in these struggling areas so that a significant portion of students obtain the necessary tools to apply themselves in education rather than awarding a selecting a few with extreme benefits at the expense of the masses? Also, in creating the rigid and disciplined atmosphere, funded by the private elite (the Waltons, Bill/Melinda Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg) how can we actually believe there will not be favorable bias in the education while teaching the kids to do as they are told and never get out of line?
-Jake
