Orlando Sentinel: Florida charter schools are causing resegregation by race and ethnicity.

[madfloridian]

The Orlando Sentinel has a two-part series about the way in which segregation is coming to Florida in the guise of charter schools. I am glad to see this finally being discussed. It does need to be addressed.

Florida charters less diverse than other public schools


Kindergarten teacher Stefanie Miller works with Theodore Lewis, 5, at Nap Ford charter school. (George Skene/Orlando Sentinel / April 30, 2011)

Segregation is making a comeback in Florida's public schools with the new wave of charter schools springing up across the state.

One out of eight charter schools has a student body with 90 percent or more of a single race or ethnicity, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of the state's 456 taxpayer-financed charters shows. That compares with one out of 12 traditional public schools.

Those top heavy charters are adding to the list of out-of-balance public schools that have perplexed educators since integration 40 years ago. Educators have worked for decades to reduce the imbalance through rezoning, school-transfer options, magnet schools and other devices to shift students and make schools more diverse.

But the charter trend is toward segregation, and more of the charters with skewed enrollments may be on the way. Charter supporters say they have the best intentions and are following state law. Besides, they argue, students are not being forced to attend schools favoring one race or ethnicity. Parents make that choice, they say.

State lawmakers and the Florida education department appear not not to be worried about "the demographic trends in the charter-school system they created."

The backers of charter schools seem to approve of the segregation being caused. They think it might be a good idea. It in fact seems to be their goal.

From Part 2 from the Orlando Sentinel:

Grouping kids by race or ethnicity in charter schools has merit, backers say


Kids study algebra at mostly white Legacy Charter High School near Ocoee. (George Skene/Orlando Sentinel / May 1, 2011)

Segregation in Florida's charter schools is more by circumstance than design, say charter supporters. They argue that addressing the academic shortcomings of students often means devoting more attention to minorities.

They point to annual state reports showing that black and Hispanic students who attend charter schools are more likely to score higher on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests in reading, math and science than their counterparts in traditional public schools.

They highlight successful charter schools, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) national chain that targets black and Hispanic students. The KIPP charter, which opened last fall in Jacksonville and has 96 percent black enrollment, recently received accolades from Gov. Rick Scott for helping minority students achieve academically. That's justification for grouping students by race or ethnicity in charter schools, supporters say.

What needs to be mentioned is the militaristic, regimented discipline style at many schools such as KIPP. I do not understand why that needs to be. All children no matter race or ethnic group respond equally well to kindness and understanding by a teacher. I know that from many years experience.

And of course Jeb Bush's group is pushing this system of schools around the country. Levesque has been working with him since he was governor.

"I would not call it segregation," said Patricia Levesque, executive director of former Gov. Jeb Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future, a lobbying group. "Charter schools may target minority communities because they want to provide those students with options."

Pardon my French, but that is BS. There are options in public schools for all races and groups. At least there will be until they keep taking so much money from the public schools to give to charters. That is a rather racist comment by Patricia Levesque.

The Orlando Sentinel education blog has hard-hitting post.

Will new law give Florida more “white” charter schools?

A bill passed by the state House today and now awaiting Gov. Rick Scott’s signature could give Florida more little white schoolhouses catering to parents who want their kids out of more diverse schools that they complain are troubled by crowding, low academics and poor discipline.

The legislation allows “high-performing ” charter schools to be replicated elsewhere with local school boards having little or no say about the charter coming into their county.

For example, the Legacy High and Hope Elementary/Middle charters which share a campus in the Ocoee-Winter Garden area, might be able to set up shop in other school districts without going through all of the red tape that start up charters now face.

The blog ends with two very very interesting statements. It gets to the heart of so much of the reforms.

Lawmakers and charter supporters say it is not about segregation but parent choice. And some are choosing predominantly white schools.

Charter schools, which are free of many of the regulations that other schools must follow, are financed with tax dollars just like other public schools. The Hope/Legacy operation is pulling down more than $3.5 million this year.

Too many ideas of the education reformers are overtly one thing, covertly another.

I am glad the Orlando Sentinel is noticing.

[Drale]

1. Its all part of the Republican long term plan

To make sure the "master" race aka White people, don't have to interact with the lesser races. Yes I know that was the Nazi's plan but its also part of the secret Republican plan.

[Hardrada]

2. The Herrenvolk must interact with the lesser races in order

to tell them what work must get done. And by when.

[TheMadMonk]

3. One minor quibble. Traditionally schools have been miltaristically...

...regimented.

It may not be the best possible system. However, it is a system which can be successfully implemented by even mediocre teachers to give an entirely adequate eduction to the greatest number of students. It is also the system most likely to succeed with inadequate resources, and poor parental involvement.

IT WORKS!


Charter schools and the whole idea of privatising public education both scare and anger me.

But I want rote learning back in the bloody classrooms. You wouldn't send an athlete out to compete with nothing but a couple of runs through and the theory. No way, it's hour upon hour of grueling practice day after day for any competetive athlete.

So WTF do we expect kids to learn critical cognitive skills with a couple of demonstrations and "validation"?

Thirty kids all standing and chanting out the Times Tables for a few minutes every day, instills the knowledge of those tables so deeply that it remains instantly retrievable to me thirty five years later. No amount of theoretical knowledge will lead a kid to "manouevre" but writing it out correctly ten or fifty times will fix the knowledge quite firmly. And who can ever forget "seperate and separate".

[madfloridian]

6. There is order, and there is militaristic.

There are many ways in which to have order and teach rote and memory without the use of repetitious movements like KIPP and some schools use artificially.

You can have order and keep individuality.

[TheMadMonk]

9. I grew up with morning assemblies. Lining up for everything.

Collective responsibility. Formal respect. Manners and etiquite.

Or more correctly I started growing up on the tail end of all these things and by the time I left high school, we had almost none of these things, and a growing youth culture problem which has only gotten deeper and deeper into the toilet with every passing year since.

If you're talking actual military indoctrination, and the bootcamp mindset of "One of us is going to die/collapse/quit before that task goes undone." then of course it's wrong, wrong, wrong. But the simple subsumption of individuality in collective action is the whole point of the exercises. It's a crude but effective form of hypnosis.

[madfloridian]

18. "It's a crude but effective form of hypnosis."

The very thing most not needed in a school setting.

I will modify my words since we seem to be at cross purposes.

I will use the words humiliating and degrading.

Examples:

http://roomd2.blogspot.com/2005/10/charter-school-discipline-choices.html

"Holding 7th grade girls basketball tryouts yesterday, and I see maybe half-dozen KIPP students lined face-first against the wall, noses touching the concrete, not moving. Looking like they're getting lined up to be shot. A KIPP instructor comes around the corner and I half expect him to offer cigarettes and a blindfold, but instead he starts screaming at the back of their heads about something, eventually leaving them to stand there.

What I witnessed was not discipline. The KIPP policy of putting kids on "the porch" -- a systematic method of exclusion and ostracization -- is not discipline. These actions are public shaming, akin to puritanical brandings of scarlet A's."

And more:

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2009/03/22/kipp_school_withdrawals.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab

"A south Fulton County charter school following one of the most lauded education programs nationwide is embroiled in a dispute over discipline that has led at least seven parents to yank their children out midyear. The parents were so angry at what they saw as excessive punishment at KIPP South Fulton Academy that they complained to several agencies, including the Fulton school board and state Department of Education.

The parents said a group of children were mistreated by teachers who separated them from their peers in class and at lunch. The students, parents said, reported sitting on the floor and said one girl urinated on herself after not being allowed to use the restroom immediately.

..."The dispute erupted in December, after a teacher made a group of fifth-graders she said had been disrupting class sit in the back of the room. Kofi Kinney, who is also dean of operations, dubbed the group “The Little Rock Nine,” a reference to the African-American children who were blocked from, then allowed into, high school in Arkansas in 1957. The KIPP students, who are African-American like most of their classmates, later became the “KIPP Nine.”

The punishment continued in several other teachers’ classes. Kinney and the parents disagree on how long it lasted, but they say it was at least seven school days. The students — 17, eventually — ate lunch in silence and missed some school activities.

Parents said when they found out about the punishment, they demanded it end and asked for an apology.

Parent India Wood withdrew her son in February after he told her, ” ‘I can’t take them yelling at me 10 hours today.’ “

I will add emotional abuse.

[TheMadMonk]

20. Those are very different things. Tho the nose to the wall minus...

...the yelling was there for the more flagrantly deliberate discipinary infractions.

And yes I think we are somewhat at cross purposes. Crude hypnotism, not for the purpose of seizing control (as it were), but for the purpose of making certain classes of basic/core knowledge and behaviours autonomous rather than conscious skills. This includes such seemingly to modern kids ridiculous things as basic manners and etiquite.

Queueing up, even when it made no particular sense to do so, wasn't about authoritarianism. It was about making queueing such a "natural" behaviour that we don't jump queues at the bar and we don't shove in and block others in traffic. Well once upon a time.

Formal politeness, not shouting over each other, all those things that my generation took for granted and are now almost forgotten skills.

And being "in school" any time you were in uniform also has perfectly good reasons.

Rote learning was about getting the basic axioms of arithmetic, grammar, spelling etc to be auntonomic. Ditto for acceptable public behaviour, with the added effect of making misbehaviour the deliberate (and consequence burdened) act.

These things are very, very different things to the undeniable abuse you cite.

Just why is it that rote learning of necessary accademic and social basics has become anathaema to society in general, when the rote learning of merely physical skills, unto and beyond the point of somtimes crippling abuse is to be lauded?

[madfloridian]

22. Is there deliberate misunderstanding of what I said?

I think so, and to avoid this thread getting in trouble...I will back off on it.

[TheMadMonk]

24. I'm not sure that we disagree at all on the salient points.

I don't think anything of I just wrote is aimed directly AT you. Call that hypnotism "the wearing in of mental paths" if it makes you more comfortable.

Discipliarian and authoritarian are two very different things. However, they are also easily confused, and without due care disciplinarian can all to easily become authoritarian.

I think because of this, we (progressives) have come to veiw both in the same negative light. And the nett result has been to entirely abandon the reins of power to the authoritarians. Those who will when left to their own devices, naturally seek to take control for their own selfish ends.

[sulphurdunn]

14. When I was in elementary

school we learned lots of recall skills by rote, usually by making a game of it. Nothing wrong with that. However, when high school students drill endlessly in rote preparation to answer multiple choice recall questions that will come up on a test and that test determines whether or not they graduate from high school or if their school is "reorganized", something is very wrong with that. Rote memorization drills are an essential part of learning the skills necessary to eventually do critical thinking, but they are not critical thinking, and standardized tests do not measure the ability to think and solve problems very well.

[TheMadMonk]

23. Different creatures altogether. However, even in high school...

...academic drill remains necesary. The drill should however be in methodology, not rote memorisation of worthless factoids.

[sulphurdunn]

25. You can memorize the following steps

of the scientific method: Make an observation. Ask a question. Construct a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Analyze you findings and draw a conclusion. Communicate your findings and conclusion.

You can know all of that, know how to do all of that and it is useless if you never do all of that, especially the "make an observation and ask a question" part. Those are the two things we can't teach you to do by drill and repetition and they are not measurable by standardized tests.

[JCMach1]

4. Ya think? Been saying this for years +1

Private schools are separate and unequal.

:hi:

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Hey mad, did you see this:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1057940

[Mrs. Ted Nancy]

7. I think that is a goal

Here is little bit of history on "school choice".

School choice birthed in authoritarian racial animus and market fundamentalism
Deformed: authoritarian undercurrents in education, Part III


School Choice, the bedrock of modern education reform, was born as an educational strategy in 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal black and white public schools were unconstitutional. The order to desegregate public education motivated Southern racist authoritarians to search for new ways to maintain their dominance and racial apartheid. After first trying pupil-assignment schemes to maintain segregation they eventually implemented educational "freedom of choice" and public support for private whites-only schools as a way to get around the court's order, a notion immediately endorsed by free-market evangelist Milton Friedman.

"Southern states and school districts," wrote James E. Ryan in the Virginia Law Review in 2004, "relied on school choice as one tool in their strategy of massive resistance" to the school integration orders delivered by the US Supreme Court in its landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education.

"Freedom-of-choice plans, along with other resistance strategies, largely succeeded in thwarting desegregation" wrote Ryan. Following enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 that virtually outlawed school-assignment schemes Southern states rapidly created new private, white-only schools called "segregation academies" that received significant state financial and other support. "From 1964 to 1969...enrollment in private schools in the South grew ten-fold," writes Ryan.

Directly after after Brown v. Board of Education Southern states attempted to maintain their system of educational racial apartheid by the use of "pupil-assignment laws and other legal subterfuges," according to Helen Hershkoff and Adam S. Cohen, writing in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 1992. But when that system became untenable due to subsequent Supreme Court decisions and congressional action, "a network of all-white private schools was established in the large cities and small towns of the South that continues to this day< 1992>":
"The segregation academy movement was a school choice plan in that the government made its resources available to help parents to choose schools other than their child's assigned school. This governmental assistance took many forms. During this era, seven states enacted tuition-grant laws that made government money available to pay tuition at the academies.
In addition many governmental entities throughout the South provided buildings, donated educational supplies and gave other such support."....

http://thecuckingstool.blogspot.com/2011/05/deformed-authoritarian-undercurrents-in.html

[WCGreen]

8. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked....

[greymattermom]

10. so what will the whites think

when the highest performing school is the Indian charter and their kids can't get accepted. There is no guarantee that whites will be the highest performing group. They aren't any more in many schools.

[quaker bill]

11. The advocates

say it is all about choice that will create competition for high academic achievement. If that was the one and only basis for such decisions, it might work at some level. However, if the choice is based on other factors such as convenience, ideology, racial compostion of the student body, religious affiliation, or simply "it is where my kid's friends are going" their model for "improvement" falls apart. The basis for decision might be a simple as "my kid can ride his bike there" versus "the school seems better, but it is a 45 minute bus ride both ways".

The push for money for privatized schools has been a political feature in the south since desegregation. This result is a predictable outcome.

[chervilant]

12. hmm...

Parental involvement and support is an essential and often over-looked variable in this ongoing assault on public education. How many parents of charter school children are conservative or Republican? How many parents of charter school children are political activists of any ilk?

In short, why aren't more parents of school-aged children concerned about the ongoing assault on public education?

(BTW, I am still astonished at the number of teachers who have not a clue about Arne Duncan...)

[Starry Messenger]

13. recommend.

[russspeakeasy]

15. With Mr. Scott in charge, it's going to get worse.

Thanks madfloridian.

[madfloridian]

16. He's going to get his vouchers as well as more and more charters.

Then there will be no pretense at all that this is public schooling. He doesn't even pretend about what he is doing.

Most of the reformers say they want "public charters", but they really mean they want the taxpayer money to run what are in effect schools without regulation by local school boards.

We won't recognize this state when he gets through with it.

[The Backlash Cometh]

17. Very proud of the Orlando Sentinel for being at the front of this issue.

[Jakes Progress]

19. Then the neocon plan is going according to schedule.

With big help from the silent Democrats and a big push with the administrative authority of a Democratic president.

[SoCalDem]

21. Quelle surprise !

schools that (after an initial "lottery" open to all) , can "excuse/evict/de-student-ify" to maintain the mix of students they want to have. ...and as public schools get undone/closed, poorer kids have few if any options.. Minority children have always been more likely to be poor.

[bvar22]

26. I have no problem with Charter Schools, as long as...

...they do NOT receive one single dime of Public Money.




Things that should NEVER receive Public Money in a democracy:

*Armed Private "Contractors", especially in a War Zone

*Private Intelligence Gathering Agencies

*Private Prisons

*Private Vote Counting Corporations (BBV)

*Private Police/Security Agencies

*Private/Charter Schools

ALL of the above are in The Commons,
and in a democracy, it is the DUTY of the citizens to provide Funding, Public Oversight, and Accountability for all of the above.

I support Universal Public Education for anyone who wants it through post graduate levels.

If you want to send your kid to a private school in the suburbs...FINE,
as long as YOU pay for it in addition to supporting (taxes) the National Public Education System.

[defendandprotect]

28. +1000% ---

And especially for all of this . . . !!!

Things that should NEVER receive Public Money in a democracy:

*Armed Private "Contractors", especially in a War Zone

*Private Intelligence Gathering Agencies

*Private Prisons

*Private Vote Counting Corporations (BBV)

*Private Police/Security Agencies

*Private/Charter Schools]

ALL of the above are in The Commons,
and in a democracy, it is the DUTY of the citizens to provide Funding, Public Oversight, and Accountability for all of the above.

I support Universal Public Education for anyone who wants it through post graduate levels.



I'd also add -- religion -- which should be blatantly obvious, but ... !!!

[bvar22]

29. Absolutely...Don't know HOW i missed THAT one.

No Public Money for "Faith Based" ANYTHING!

[defendandprotect]

27. K/R -- any surprise that this is the usual rightwing racism ... ???

[Overseas]

30. K&R. So sad.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

31. Didn't Bush get into Yale on "Legacy" -how apropos(fitting that this is the name of the white kids)

program