July 25, 2007
FIRST YOU BREAK THE UNIONS:
Maverick Leads Charge for Charter Schools (SAM DILLON, 7/24/07, NY Times)
Steve Barr, a major organizer of charter schools, has been waging what often seems like a guerrilla war for control of this city’s chronically failing high schools.In just seven years, Mr. Barr’s Green Dot Public Schools organization has founded 10 charter high schools and has won approval to open 10 more. Now, in his most aggressive challenge to the public school system, he is fighting to seize control of Locke Senior High, a gang-ridden school in Watts known as one of the city’s worst. A 15-year-old girl was killed by gunfire there in 2005.
In the process, Mr. Barr has fomented a teachers revolt against the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has driven a wedge through the city’s teachers union by welcoming organized labor — in contrast to other charter operators — and signing a contract with an upstart union. And he has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools.
Educators and policy makers from Sacramento to Washington are watching closely because many believe Green Dot’s audacious tactics have the potential to strengthen and expand the charter school movement nationwide.
“He’s got a take-no-prisoners style,” said Jaime Regalado, the director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “He’s channeled the outrage of African-American and Latino parents into the public space in a way that’s new.”
If only the GOP weren't hostage to middle-class white districts, it could be channeling that anger. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 25, 2007 9:25 PM
Middle class districts don't have to be all white, but they have to be all middle class. That's the problem. Middle class parents, regardless of skin color, don't want ghetto minorities bussed into their schools and who can blame them?
Posted by: erp at July 26, 2007 8:53 AMerp,
No one can blame them for disliking bussing. I can blame them (and do, mercilessly) for their slavish and morally reprehsible support of an education bureaucracy that foists this "apartheid" upon us.
The parochial dingbat soccer mom that votes with the union against charters and choice is manufacturing the underclass that may shoot, rape, and rob her child someday.
It's time they got their pretty noses rubbed in that fact.
No rational person supports bussing. But if a poor black mom has the will to drive her son across (fake) district lines to put her son in a better (newly deregulated charter) school using a scholarship that gives her that new empowerment, then it is morally reprehensible for white parents to bar the school door.
It wouldn't be more than a year before the local school in the poor neighborhood improved anyway.
The existing school system in America today is as immoral as slavery. Kill the district, save the world
Posted by: Bruno at July 26, 2007 10:04 AMWhat do you figure the average % of black kids is in the elementary school of all Bloggers and Blog Commenters? I'll go with under 4%.
Posted by: oj at July 26, 2007 11:32 AMBruno. By all means kill the school system and if some rabid leftoids are plowed under too, that wouldn't bother me at all.
Soccer moms don't know any better having been through the propaganda mills aka public schools themselves.
Schools need to serve the neighborhood, however, it would be fine if a black ghetto mom drove her kid to the middle class neighborhood school, but you know that couldn't happen because ... what about the moms who don't have cars, can't afford the gas, don't know the way, and so on ... yellow school buses -- here they come again.
My kids were caught up the bussing of the 60's and 70's, but luckily we escaped to the exurbs and they were sparred. Not so lucky were nephews and nieces and children of friends. One of my nephews had to teach himself how to read and do simple arithmetic, so outrageous was the method of instruction in his elementary school. He's now a research scientist with an ivy league doctorate.
Barring the door against blacks? Not likely anything so overt would happen.
I don't have any idea the % of black kids in our county schools, but judging by the population at large, it's sizeable but by no means a majority.
Okay, bloggers and blog readers are a small minority of the population, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?