Ed Notes Extended

Monday, July 27, 2009

Is the Charter School Concept Inherently Anti-union and Racist?

Angel Gonzalez says yes:

Charter Schools:
  • are privately operated and exempt from govt & labor laws that provide public oversight. While taking public $$, they operate under private mode.
  • are union busters and deny pension, tenure, and other important labor/educator rights
  • have private & undemocratic governance - no parent, educator & community voice in decision-making thus helping to destroy neighborhood school concept.
  • reflect another institutional racist pattern in the education of public students. Charters are being imposed by NYC dictatorial decree predominately Black & Latino neighborhoods. See attached map. White middle & upper class communities of NYC have not sought these out. Blacks and Latino poor and working class communities have not sought these charters out. Folks want democratic quality and equality public schooling ....and these charters are what have been handed down from above by the corporate-government and those Black & Latino politicos, officials, community groups, ... that have bought into the deceit.
  • split a school with their disparate elite treatment of their charterees with smaller class size, better maintained facilities, materials, (Can do so because of greater corporate dollars pumped in as they seek to initially capture the student market.)
  • contribute to a greater multi-tiered school system ...not two tiered system. We have smaller new visions type schools in buildings that contribute to the tiered system and the regular school without outside supports, the elite-select schools like Bx Science, Stuyvesant, Bklyn Tech, and now Charters (private although they claim public)

Related:
Sean and Angel bat the issue of charter use of non-unionized labor on ICE-mail, posted at Norms Notes.
Charter Schools and Non-unionized Maintenance Workers

4 comments:

  1. The claim that "charters are public" is a falsely propagated myth designed to deceive our public.

    When charters have private boards and are exempt from public oversight, regulations & laws, union regs & laws, and can manipulate who they can accept, then they are private. If Harlem Success Academy Director can appropriate a $370K Salary without public input or a Brooklyn Charter Director appropriates a $700K salary, then we should be able to indict those charter-operators for super-grand larceny....had they not been exempt from public laws and oversight.

    Charters schools, yes, do appropriate or rob the public schools of public monies. But they run privately. Ask the Latino
    workers who are painting Eva Moskowitz Harlem PS 123 how much she is paying them. Since she is privately contracting them out and bypassing more just public construction/labor laws, she will claim that she doesn't know.

    Charters, when hiring labor
    & construction workers, are exempt from following public laws, regulations, and guidelines. It OK to do this as long as the Latino worker-laborer is not you father, mother, brother or sister.

    Charters are privateers and union-busters!
    Angel Gonzalez

    ReplyDelete
  2. Naomi Klein (no relation to Joel) wrote a book she called "Disaster
    Capitalism" and described the modus operandi of Kissinger & Co. in Chile. Foment a coup, kill the democratically elected president for not being a US stooge, establish a military dictatorship, disappear every leftist, labor activist, and every cleric who even dares flirt with the
    theology of liberation, begin implementing the ideas of Milton Friedman.

    Chile is still dealing with a partially privatized two-tiered education system and an attempt to privatize their public retirement program.

    Well "disaster capitalism" has come home. When Katrina left New Orleans devastated and defenseless, the snakes slithered into the Big Easy, and when they were finished the New Orleans Public Schools were a shell of
    their former selves, a half-dozen or so schools. The rest of the schools are charters or run out of Baton Rouge by Gov. Opie "No stimulus money for my state" Jindal.

    Now the collapse of the auto industry has opened up Detroit to the angels of death. The Wall Street Journal cheers for the imminent bankruptcy of the Detroit Public Schools for the chance to void all union contracts and for the sake of "choice" which is rhetoric they learned from Milton Friedman to hide their privatization designs and the
    invasion of the charter schools. The article is linked below.

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020351730457430627088552532\
    0.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Buy American when you can, but there are things you need to know about unions.
    http://animal-farm.us/change/communism-and-the-union-label-548

    ReplyDelete
  4. Uh, Foxwood,
    you forgot the part about
    Our Precious Bodily Fluids.

    ReplyDelete

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