New York mayor moves to shut public schools while promoting charters

[Hannah Bell]

Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has escalated an assault on public education in New York City by proceeding with plans to close at least 26 public schools this year while adding more than 100 private charter schools. The Department of Education (DOE) has hastened the co-location—in the same buildings as larger schools—of selective, smaller public schools and charter schools that starve traditional schools of space and resources...

Former schools chancellor Joel Klein, now an executive in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, closed over 90 city schools based on test scores and graduation rates. It is widely believed that Klein resigned his post last year because researchers had exposed a systematic and deliberate dumbing-down of tests in order to produce an appearance of success for Bloomberg’s educational polices.

The 26 schools slated for closure serve the poorest sections of the population, with the lowest rates of four-year graduation and low scores on standardized tests. The closings will now go forward under the tenure of Cathleen Black, the new schools chancellor...At a recent appearance in front of parents and teachers, she responded to a parent’s remarks about an overcrowding crisis in the public schools by asking, “Could we just have some birth control? It would really help us all out.” Shortly after this, she referred to the problems of schools citywide as “many Sophie’s choices..."

She is pursuing a political program of open assault on public education which takes for granted that there is no alternative for overcrowding in the classrooms, except though a reduction in the number of children, and she will make choices that will result in the survival of education for some, and its destruction for others...

[patricia92243]

1. I never have understood about charter schools. Do you have to pay to go to one. What happens to

kids who can't pay - it is mandatory that they go to school.

[Celebration]

4. no, the kids don't pay

but charters are allowed to skim the best students from the system. They are not required to take the kids with various behavioral difficulties. That means that their test scores, by definition, practically, show them to be more "successful".

[Reader Rabbit]

2. K&R

Hopefully this is the start of a groundswell!

[Starry Messenger]

3. k&r