GA superintendent fires entire school. 10,000 to be fired in CA, 8500 in NYC

madfloridian

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Fri Mar-26-10 11:53 PM
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GA superintendent fires entire school. 10,000 to be fired in CA, 8500 in NYC

Nothing is being solved, parents and children are not held accountable, the underlying problems of poverty are not being addressed.

This is happening very quickly, very rapidly...almost as though they hope to get it done while no one is paying attention.

There is power in this movement now with Arne Duncan at the helm of the Department of Education. Bush could not get this done because there was an opposing party. Now there is none.

Georgia superintendent fires entire school.

Savannah, GA -- A public school in one of Georgia's largest school districts is firing every teacher, administrator and janitor at the end of May.

Savannah, Georgia's Beach High School has had eight years of failing to meet state and federal "No Child Left Behind" achievement standards or benchmarks. School Superintendent Dr. Thomas Lockamy says he had to take the drastic step of removing everyone, from the school principal to the janitor, to avoid a state takeover of Beach High.

After a closed door meeting teachers and staffers told reporters they were asked to re-apply for their jobs during the summer months.

Dr. Lockamy says the school will get the fresh start that Georgia Department of Education thinks students need to be successful in the classroom.

A Huffington Post writer tells us more of how quickly this is being done.

School Closings and National Priorities

In Detroit, because of population shifts -- "white flight" -- the school population has precipitously declined in the past decade. Forty-four city schools will be closed and a recent cut in per pupil allocation will be offset from public employee pensions. In California 10,000 educators will be fired and in NYC 8500 will be laid off in addition to 19 schools scheduled for closing due to low test scores. In Kansas City -- with a similar situation as Detroit -- 29 schools will be closed and 1000 educators are being laid off in Chicago. These measures will certainly have an effect on reducing the quality of the education of young learners in these cities and states but there is no doubt that schools in more privileged areas and private schools will suffer little negative impact.

I am afraid that this trend will become more commonplace just as homelessness, which would have been regarded as a national disgrace and unacceptable condition in such a rich country as the United States forty years ago, is now considered by most Americans as not much more than a public nuisance. The more "tolerant' we as a nation become to signs of economic, social and ethical decay, the closer we will be to becoming a country in which democratic values will be regarded as too much of a "luxury" to be sustained or even fought for. School closings and budget cuts are, in my opinion, not only a sign of a shrinking economy whose impact is disproportionately felt by the majority, but of a decline in our standing as a nation.

I am convinced that there is more than enough wealth in America to address many of these problems far more adequately than they are now, but that would require a serious redistribution of wealth, through a fairer tax system, so that at least revenues for the public good would be more available.

The loss of public education will indeed signal a decline in our standing as a nation. The goals of the new schools being built out of this "venture capitalism" will be determined by corporations which will control the management of the schools.

There was an excellent discussion on Democracy Now yesterday about the special list kept by Arne Duncan in Chicago to help certain families get their kids in top schools.

This is an especially good part in the interview of Pauline Lipman, who teaches education and policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

A Look at Arne Duncan’s VIP List of Requests at Chicago Schools and the Effects of his Expansion of Charter Schools in Chicago

llinois-Chicago. Arne Duncan said Katrina, you know, the hurricane, may have been the best thing to happen to New Orleans when it comes to education. How do you see what’s going on right now in Chicago playing out on the national scape with Arne Duncan, head of education in Chicago, now become the Education Secretary?

PAULINE LIPMAN: Well, I think that that’s a really good question, because I think probably the best phrase to describe what is happening nationally is what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” So we have a situation in which there’s a fiscal crisis in the cities and in the states. We have a situation in which we have a long history disinvested public schools in communities of color. And in that context, there is now a move to privatize public education, just as happened in New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and then that was seen as an opportunity to actually move in and privatize public schools.

So the federal stimulus money that’s being offered now to the states is being offered on the condition that they raise charter school caps, that they tie teacher evaluations to students’ test scores, that they close what they call failing schools, that they turn them over to private turnaround operators. So we have a neoliberal project nationally, which was tested out in Chicago and then is now being pushed out nationally.

And one of the ways that this was dramatized so clearly to me was that almost immediately after Arne Duncan was selected to be Secretary of Education, he flew to Detroit, which is one of the most disinvested, economically devastated cities in the country. And it was—their school system has been decimated because of the economic crisis in Detroit. And he offered millions of dollars, but on the condition that they would do the Chicago plan.

Arne has so much money to get states in crisis to do his bidding. That means that the lid on charter schools will be lifted, teachers will be tested on how students score...with not an inkling of holding the student responsible. And there are going to be more and more whole schools in which all the teachers are fired.

More about the smash and grab of public schools under this "disaster capitalism

Capitalizing on Disaster in Education

Despite the range of obvious failures of multiple public school privatization initiatives, the privatization advocates have hardly given up. In fact, the privatizers have become far more strategic. The new educational privatization might be termed "back door privatization" or maybe "smash and grab" privatization. A number of privatization schemes are being initiated through a process involving the dismantling of public schools followed by the opening of for-profit, charter, and deregulated public schools. These enterprises typically despise teachers unions, are hostile to local democratic governance and oversight, and have an unquenchable thirst for "experiments," especially with the private sector. (10) These initiatives are informed by right wing think tanks and business organizations. Four examples that typify back door privatization are: (1) No Child Left Behind, (2) Chicago's Renaissance 2010 project, (3) educational rebuilding in Iraq, and (4) educational rebuilding in New Orleans.

No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind sets schools up for failure by making impossible demands for continual improvement. When schools have not met Adequate Yearly Progress, they are subject to punitive action by the federal government, including the potential loss of formerly guaranteed federal funding and requirements for tutoring from a vast array of for-profit Special Educational Service providers. A number of authors have described how NCLB is a boon for the testing and tutoring companies while it doesn't provide financial resources for the test score increases it demands. (11) (This is aside from the cultural politics of whose knowledge these tests affirm and discredit). (12) Sending billions of dollars of support the way of the charter school movement, NCLB pushes schools that do not meet AYP to restructure in ways that encourage privatization, discourage unions, and avoid local regulations on crucial matters. One study has found that by 2013 nearly all of the public schools in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. will be declared failed public schools and subject to such reforms. (13) Clearly, NCLB is designed to accomplish the implementation of privatization and deregulation in ways that open action could not.

Schooling in Disaster Capitalism

Parents, students, teachers, administrators are all responsible for providing a climate for effective learning.

Only the teachers are being fired or held accountable.

And not a single Democratic leader is speaking out against this hostile takeover of public education by the corporate world.