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| At Fight For 15 rally in Chicago |
Funny way to get the protest news. This morning's traffic report on NBC News warns me to watch out for Fight for 15 protests tying up downtown traffic. Thanks @KyeMartin. I'll rush right over.
More breaking news from CJR. Arne Duncan and his replacement at DOE, John King discover there's actual school segregation in Pinellas County, Florida.
...the US Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into the district, the Times reported. Top department officials had first visited the district after reading the original Times series, which made clear that these aren’t just any struggling schools—they’re schools where student performance plummeted beginning in 2007, when the district abandoned an integration plan that had been in place for decades and the schools became resegregated.Remember, it was then-Ed Sec. Duncan who, in 2013, came out firmly against what he called, "forced integration". Shades of "Bull Connor" and Orville Faubus.
CJR and local media have labeled re-segregated, impoverished Florida schools as "failure factories", a term more appropriate for the Duncan/King Dept. of Ed.
Duncan's reign was marked by his misuse of federal funding to favor (even mandate through Race To The Top) the spread of privately-run charter schools.
This from Phi Delta Kappa:
The fact is we don’t have to guess about the consequences of one of the Obama Administration’s most visible policies: the national expansion of charter schools. We need only turn to a large body of relevant research showing that charter schools, on average, don’t have an academic advantage over traditional public schools (Gill et al., 2007; Gleason, Clark, Tuttle, & Dwoyer, 2010), but they do have a significant risk of leading to increased segregation (Booker, Zimmer, & Buddin, 2005; Gulosino & d’Entremont, 2011).Remember too, that it was Duncan, while CEO of Chicago schools back in '07, who lobbied to have the city's deseg consent decree thrown out, which it finally was in 2009.
So the next time you hear these guys say that "education is the civil rights issue of our time", nod and ask them, "which side are you on?"
NOW: dual marches of home care and fast food workers converge on Loyola campus! #Fightfor15 pic.twitter.com/zoU256BruM— Fight For 15 Chicago (@chifightfor15) April 14, 2016
Oh, it's so sad to see the churn about "failure factories." When I wrote my book about school reform in our district (Colorado) we were hearing about DropOut Factories, so that's what I wrote about. "Failure factories" sounds even more ominously vicious, and even more frighteningly elitist/racist.
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