Charter School Failure (The Schools, Not The Kids)

Pacific Press via Getty Images President-elect Donald “Hardly-a-Landslide” Trump and nominee for Secretary of the federal Department of Education, Betsy “Voucher Queen” DeVos, are championing vouchers and charter schools as ways to dismantle public education, subsidize private and religious schools, provide a financial windfall to shady edu-businesses, break teacher unions, and support segregation academies. To people who say give Trump and his legions a chance, if their plans are realized, the public school system, a hallmark of democracy in the United States, may never be rebuilt. Once broken, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. In November, I participated in a community forum at Medgar Evers College-CUNY in Brooklyn discussing why the NAACP called for a freeze on new charter schools. Defense of the NAACP position on charter schools becomes even more urgent as Trump and DeVos prepare to dismantle public education. Panelists included long-time education activist Dr. Sam Anderson, Dr. Maria DeLongoria, an Associate Professor of History at Medgar Evers, and Fatima Geidi, a member of a parents’ group challenging the way the Success Academy Charter School Network treated her son and other Black and Latino children. In his introductory remarks, Dr. Anderson declared, “privatization, whether of prisons, healthcare, social security, or education has been shown to be a pro-business gimmick that is against the broader public interest.” He argued, “many Black and Latino charter school parents are well meaning but the unwitting pawns of the charter school operators.” Fatima Geidi recounted frustrations battling with the Success Charter School Network as they refused to provide needed educational services for her son and tried to drive him out of the school. “They suspended him the second week of school because he did not walk right, made too much noise.” He was suspended repeatedly for the three years he was in the school and she was constantly told to pick him up early or keep him home. She charged he was a “broken child” as a result of his experience in Success Academy. In my presentation, I argued that if charter schools were the solution to unequal education and poor academic performance in many inner-city minority schools, the United States would be irresponsible not to vastly expand the number of charter schools immediately, which incidentally is Donald Trump’s proposal. But when we look closely, while some individual charter schools perform well, charter schools overall are not a miracle solution to educational inequality and certainly not for inner-city poverty. Far too many Black and Latino children are left behind when better performing students from minority communities are skimmed out of traditional public schools and troubled or more difficult students are warehoused there. Meanwhile many of the children who end up in for-profit charters or questionable non-profit networks are just prepped for tests to make the charter management look good. They too are cheated out of their right to an education that prepares them for college, careers, and citizenship. I do not […]

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