truth bombs

sarahell, i'm sure there are good ones in the area, but the overall impact has been negative in my opinion.

― wmlynch, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 12:49 PM (one minute ago)

I work/ed for non-profits doing arts ed programs in both public and charter schools ... granted most of my experience was in logistics and uh, trying to get OUSD to pay us when they said they would.

xp - isn't that a Challop?

though i wonder what you call a truthbomb filled with straw

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver,

blanket criticism of charter schools surely fits this description

ugh i'm sorry to hear that. i've been dealing with ousd trying to get them to build a new school in our neighborhood. it's two years delayed and double its original budget, and ousd administrators lie to us every chance they get. xxp

to me, it's kinda like saying "Abolish AAA, that way we can make the DMV better! "

that's a good one

blanket criticism of charter schools surely fits this description

― the late great, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 8:56 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

u rite! it took a queer anarchist pal who spent years working in a charter in dc to help me grok the nuance

ah. well, my work here is done.

xp (which is just to say One Can Be Surprised by the sources of arguments for charter schools)

Actual purpose of charter schools is to provide the effectively non-integrated educational environment that white parents demand, iirc.

i've been dealing with ousd trying to get them to build a new school in our neighborhood. it's two years delayed and double its original budget, and ousd administrators lie to us every chance they get.

yeah, that sounds like them ... so many large city of Oakland agencies are like that ... I constantly have to remind myself that not all cities are like Oakland

I guess 'abolishment' is maybe not the best way to approach it but it's more like if public education was functioning optimally then charter schools would kind of be rendered unnecessary.

xxp no you're confusing charter school and honors classes

Set up two schools, one focused on advanced study for “gifted” kids, and the other on “discipline and leadership” and the “problem” such as it is takes care of itself

Actual purpose of charter schools is to provide the effectively non-integrated educational environment that white parents demand, iirc.

― Dan I., Wednesday, November 28, 2018 3:01 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Again, true in some cases but most def not in others.

u rite! it took a queer anarchist pal who spent years working in a charter in dc to help me grok the nuance

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 1:00 PM (three minutes ago)

I actually was just thinking about this issue re: anarchist beliefs -- like, in some ways the charter schools thing fits with mine, and in other ways it doesn't ... but it's not like I'm a socialist trying to reconcile this stuff

i actually worked at a (progressive, project-based) school that had a massive influx of non-honors white students who weren't bought in at all to the mission or purpose of the school. the parents just couldn't get their kids into honors classes so they pulled them out of mainstream high school rather than put them in majority brown non-honors classes

boy were they pissed when we decided that our main focus of improvement for our first five-year accreditation cycle would be to increase diversity and recruit minority students to make our school look demographically more like the surrounding district

this is kinda a standard ilx thing -- I remember going through this re the US income tax system, and dayo wisely said, "you're too close to this topic, you should let it go" (or something to that effect)

it's funny how many issues i had direct experience with where i drifted from the hivemind consensus.

xp

Set up two schools, one focused on advanced study for “gifted” kids, and the other on “discipline and leadership” and the “problem” such as it is takes care of itself

― Dan I

can't tell if you're joking tbh

xp - like in theory government-sponsored schools are vested in reproducing the means of production/reinforcing the values of government oppression ... if you could have an alternative institution that doesn't do that, then, why not try to do so?

I kinda regret posting that now, but I think this debate is really interesting and kinda wish there was a thread for it. tlg makes many fair points about how charters can be good (and I have friends who teach in charters or went to them, all positive experiences afaict), but I'm not sure the benefits outweigh the bad actors (cough religion cough) and overall impact on the public sphere/tax base. I get that govt can be dysfunctional in the worst way but I'm not convinced that privatization (correct me if this isn't exactly what charters are) is a good way out of that mess.

I don’t know about elsewhere but in Minneapolis it seems pretty blatant. There are charter schools that are obviously designed to attract (or absorb) very specific ethnic groups. Beyond the academic-focused white school and the discipline/leadership black school, the language-focused ones are even more blatant: what do you think the racial makeup of schools devoted to learning German or Hmong are like? I mean, this shit gets me all “As A taxpayer...”

rich white ppl can send their kids to private schools

well then why don't they

in my city, there was a group of immigrant somali families in a particular neighborhood who wanted to open a school that taught arabic and islamic and somali history and culture. so they got together, hired some educators, created a charter, constituted a board, recruited students, and opened a school in their neighborhood. so their taxpayer education dollars got to be spent exactly how they wanted them to be.

what do you think of that story?

they do xp

and you think that's a good thing LG?

rich white ppl can send their kids to private schools

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 1:18 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well then why don't they

― Dan I., Wednesday, November 28, 2018 1:19 PM (one minute ago)
they do xp

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 28, 2018 1:20 PM (five seconds ago)

lol

xp i'm asking you what you think, dan i

i didn't say one way or another what i thought of it, i'm trying to understand your POV

i'm interested in his understanding of the data bc he seems to be arguing that charter schools mostly exist for white parents to take their white kids out of public schools and send them to charter schools instead and afaiui that is not substantiated by the demographic information tho maybe tlg can speak better to this

well man, I think it’s a bad thing! I kinda think any scheme that works to defeat public school integration is a bad thing. Xpost

xp well, i'm certainly not going to argue that that never happens, because i have seen that happen firsthand!

I kinda think any scheme that works to defeat public school integration is a bad thing

honors classes?

even if the integrated schools disadvantage the already disadvantaged? And the charter schools have the potential to provide greater equity?

that's only true given the already dire state of public school underfunding, IMO. ideally the district where the Somali parents live could afford an immersion program!

It is a really weird feeling being in the position of having to argue that school integration is a good thing

ha, as sarahell notes it is a big internal conflict for someone who mostly identifies as anarchist (like myself)

there's so much money, it just all goes to the military. there could be federal matching funds out the wazoo if we had our priorities straight. it's usually the elephant in the room when discussing the limitations/failures of the public sphere.

ideally the district where the Somali parents live could afford an immersion program!

that's the thing (also see yr next post) -- it's an issue of pragmatics -- if the ideal doesn't exist, and you don't have the ability to implement it, what then?

I'm probably not capable of formulating the anti-charter arguments I have in mind as well as this guy I know, who thinks about this stuff professionally: https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&context=mhlr

xp also a fair point! I guess my answer would be "bar religious orgs from getting into the charter business" and start there.

sleeve & hoos - have either of you read Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules"? ... it's interesting in this context, in that government bureaucracies are posited as products of utopian thinking, in the way that it seems integrated public education / anti-charter school politics are also

Which article he basically summarizes here (xposts)

Since the NY Times wrote today about charter schools as a vehicle for segregation, I guess it's as good a time as any to share my most recent article, published last month: https://t.co/JhJRkQn1VU pic.twitter.com/UEj7sVlCl9

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) August 15, 2018

xp no I saw you post abt that on FB, I will look into it!

education is really a field of dilemmas. it's like a rug, you push down one corner and the other pops up. i consider myself a physics and chemistry teacher, not a social engineer. nobody is saying school integration is a bad thing! but to what degree do you decide to pursue integration? these kids were living in a low-income urban area, mostly second-generation hispanic and african american. from their perspective, integration would have meant competing with native students with native language skills and very different cultural norms. they didn't *want* to integrate that quickly. should they have been forced to? would it have been enough to integrate into their own neighborhoods, or should they have been bussed to affluent white suburban neighborhoods? what would be the proper degree of integration for a tight-knit community of recent immigrants? (who, by the way, were feeling a lot of islamophobic prejudice in the wake of 9/11)

it's a bit uneven, but the first part is really great -- he has a great anecdote about the Direct Action Network being given a car as a donation and how anarchist/radical org structures are challenged by things like that

The argument that minorities prefer segregation does not resonate with me, personally

i'm interested in his understanding of the data bc he seems to be arguing that charter schools mostly exist for white parents to take their white kids out of public schools and send them to charter schools instead and afaiui that is not substantiated by the demographic information tho maybe tlg can speak better to this

I’ve written at length about this professionally — but the essence of it is there are two mechanisms by which charters enforce de facto segregation in urban areas

A) through admissions protocols that favor whites
B) by skimming students of color from public schools through i.e. “leadership academies”

are you a minority, Dan?

xp

In the end, the chartering body of this school didn't really have the professional skills or educational leadership necessary to run a school. they had a lot of trouble with programming the schedule and with budget, and they had trouble attracting good teachers. they lost their accreditation and the school unfortunately folded within a few years of opening.

so in the end, no i don't think it was a good thing. but i don't think it was a good thing for pragmatic reasons - the kids didn't get a good education! - rather than ideological ones.