A few days ago the Corporate Appeal has a story by Jane Roberts on the front page above the fold that typifies their coverage of the charter school issue. A clip:
. . . .Nearly a year after former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton launched his charter school business, he draws a salary of $200,000 a year as chief executive officer although enrollment is a fraction of projections, and he has raised no outside money.
As of March 10, W.E.B. Du Bois Charter Consortium had 655 students, down from the 1,800 Herenton projected a year ago. His nine-school consortium has dwindled to five schools. There are no new schools in the hopper for next year, although his five-year budget is based on enrollment reaching 4,000 in 2014.. . . .My comment posted at the Corporate Appeal website:
Front page, above the
fold, for this story?
Herenton has served
as a convenient target any time criticism arises about the charter industry
that is draining the public coffers in Memphis. The Roberts story allows all
the suburbanites to vent their outrage over morning coffee at someone who has
no connection to the Gates Foundation, other than the fact that he was given
his little charter fiefdom by Gates and Hyde to buy his support for the
demolition of Memphis Public Schools four years ago.
Now he stands in the
way of the corporate bottom feeders and profiteers who want to carve up
Herenton's old territory for more chain gang schools like KIPP or the remote
control test factories like Rocketship, where children are tethered to a
computer screen for hours each day doing digital worksheets.
As Nashville_Native points
out in an earlier comment, the Commercial Appeal dares not look inside the corporate charter black
box that remains out of sight of the state taxpayers who are pouring into it
over $80 million each year for the 10,000 segregated charter students in
Memphis to be culturally sterilized.