Words&Dirt

“Soil is miraculous.  It is where the dead are brought back to life.  Here, in the thin earthy boundary between inanimate rock and the planet’s green carpet, lifeless minerals are weathered from stones or decomposed from organic debris.  Plants and microscopic animals eat these dead particles and recast them as living matter.  In soil, matter crosses and recrosses the boundary between living and dead.”

––Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway, loc. 1643

“The charter movement has become a vehicle for privatization of large swathes of public education, ending democratic control of the public schools and transferring them to private management.  The charters seek to compete, not to collaborate, with public schools.

The charter movement began with high hopes in the early 1990s.  Charter schools were supposed to enroll the neediest students.  But in the era of NCLB, it was dangerous to enroll the students who had a hard time sitting still, those with disabilities, and those who couldn’t speak or read English.  They might pull down the school’s test scores.  Few charters want the students for whom charters were first invented.

Charters were supposed to be laboratories for bold innovations, but the most successful charters follow a formula of ‘no excuses’: strict discipline, eyes on the teacher, walk in a straight line, no deviation from rigid rules and routines.  Some of the most successful charters seem determined to reinvent the schoolhouse of a century ago.

As the charter movement continues to grow, with the unwavering support of the U.S. Department of Education, major foundations, Wall Street, big corporations, think tanks, school choice advocates, and politicians in both parties, important questions are unasked: What is the endgame?  Will charter schools contribute to the increasing segregation of American society along lines of race and class?  Will the motivated students congregate in charter schools while the unmotivated cluster in what remains of the public schools?  Will the concentration of charter schools in urban districts sound a death knell for urban public education?  Why do the elites support the increased stratification of American society?  If charter schools are not more successful on average than the public schools they replace, what is accomplished by demolishing public education?  What is the rationale for authorizing for-profit charters or charter management organizations with high-paid executives, since their profits and high salaries are paid by taxpayers’ dollars?

The developments of the past two decades have brought about massive changes in the governance of public education, especially in urban districts.  Some children have gained; most have not.  And the public schools, an essential elements in our democracy for many generations, have suffered damage that may be irreparable.”

––Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch, loc. 3659