KIPP wants public bond issues for their Texas prison schools

[Hannah Bell]

As the Texas Legislature heads into its next session, I want to offer some advice to our state policymakers:

Provide high quality charter schools with facilities assistance.

Right now, KIPP and YES Prep educate a combined 10,000 students. By 2020, we're hoping to grow that number to 30,000. But to reach this goal, we need buildings where our students can learn. And unfortunately, charters, unlike traditional public schools, don't start off with a school facility in which to work — they have to find and secure their own, without government help.

The government needs to level the playing field, and seed expansion of high-performing charter schools, by giving districts incentives to open up unused spaces for charters to use. For example, districts might receive the kind of increased freedoms their public charter counterparts now enjoy, in exchange for giving local charter schools access to much-needed facilities.

The government should also back bond offerings for public charter schools, as it does for their traditional counterparts, so that the competition for buildings is fair.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7324488.html


Not only is he audaciously reckless in calling for public funding of property and buildings for all corporate charter schools in Texas, even as KIPP sits atop a pile of several hundred million dollars from the philanthrocapitalists, but he also demands that all of Texas' "parental choice" charters, the ones with black and brown and poor kids anyway, be converted to the psychologically — sterilizing, apartheid KIPPs or KIPP knock-offs such as the YES College Preps.

The other segregated charters, the lily-white-flight ones with family incomes to match their soaring test scores, will be left untouched, except of course, their building will be paid for by the state and their principals CEOs will be given unconditional authority (like the rest of the charters in Feinberg's fantasy) to hire, fire, and promote without the burden of any consultation with teachers.

In Feinberg's dreamworld, charters can't do it all--there will always be the need for the marginally-funded public schools that mimic the lockdown methods of KIPP to accept the discards that could, otherwise, damage the KIPP brand with low scores or a disruptive and stubborn refusal to become miniature corporate automatons. And if these children can't cut it there in the residual public schools? Well, there is the other penal system, the one that provides free room and board, an orange jumpsuit, and good jobs for the smiling, postivized guards that Feinberg's human-crushing crucible will crank out.

The fact that our society, even in Texas, could be contemplating Feinberg and Levin's eugenics-inspired brand of containment, segregation, and behavioral sterilization, provides evidence that we have learned nothing from the previous century's dangerous flirtations with fascism. Our present Gilded Age is as blind now as that one a century ago, with "progressives" like Feinberg and conservatives like Rick Perry both embracing the same "educational" strategies and tactics in an emerging version of a "war against the weak" that has the same goals as the one that swept through America a hundred years ago, the one that inspired a middle-brow madman in another country suffering the bludgeoning effects of economic meltdown and war.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1812§ion=Article

[WinkyDink]

1. Notice how KIPP is trying to change the terminology: Using "traditional", a marginalizing word,

for public education.

I.e., public schools, the historic backbone of American inventiveness and success, are nothing more than, say, the turkey on Thanksgiving.

[w8liftinglady]

2. my partner and one of our best friends teach 5th grade at one of those filthy public schools.

they work miracles with some of the poorest kids in Dallas.KIPP would do away with them in a heartbeat.They don't come from "Generic" backgrounds,and don't do well in "Generic" classes.

Like I said yesterday,Texas would be happy if the poor were on street corners,the children begging for crumbs and pennies as the rich drive by.

Not all texas,but you get the picture.

[Reader Rabbit]

3. Reveals the mercenary nature of the charter movement

Their main goal is to drain public coffers to increase their own bank accounts and portfolios. It's obscene.

[Starry Messenger]

4. recommend.