The following is a speech that I never got to finish last Fall, as the Shelby County Schools were contemplating the latest plans to turn over public schools to the skinheads of the Achievement School District.
Since 2009 when Bill Gates
bought his way into Memphis with $90 million, the business plan for Memphis
schools has been based on public school closures and corporate charter
start-ups and takeovers to replace them. A dozen schools
are on the hit list for the coming year, and the charter operators are lined up
waiting for the buildings to become empty. Parents and teachers, however, are
not nearly as uninformed as county officials who are doing the Gates dirty work
believe.
In fact, they know how the
charter school takeover cycle works. They know that first you need public
schools isolated by years of neglect, segregation, and poverty--schools that
everyone outside the affected communities would rather forget about. Memphis
has an ample supply of these schools in the poorest neighborhoods, and
politicians are eager to make them someone else’s responsibility.
These neighborhood schools make
easy targets for profiteers and politicians convinced (or pretending to
believe) that these public schools have low test scores because of lazy
teachers, public bureaucracy, unconcerned parents, unions, or other reasons
having nothing do with the reality
of poverty, racism, or a sordid history of inequality.
Since 2002, NCLB’s impossible
demand for schools to reach 100 percent proficiency manufactured a state of crisis
for public education, beginning with the poorest schools where students’ scores
were the lowest.
Parents who could afford to moved
or sent their children to schools not in the dreaded “Needs Improvement” zones,
thus leaving the poorest schools with smaller and academically weaker student
populations and with even less capacity to make test score targets. Further deprived, then, these schools are
eventually labeled “underperforming” and “priority,” thus clearing the way for
school closure.
Waiting in the wings are the
corporate operators and their manager, the ASD, ready to open total compliance
charter schools staffed with temporary corporate missionaries from Teach for
America, or one of the other organizations that emulate the TFA practice of
placing white privileged young women with 20 days of classroom practice and no
teacher prep into schools that require the most professional and mature
teachers.
With empty buildings from the lowest
scoring public schools scheduled to sit idle, the charter operators step up to
claim them by offering a token payment to the County.
Further weakening of the
surviving schools comes from further austerity measures by the County to pay
the $9,500 for every student lost to a charter school. If another 2,000
students are lost to new charters next year in Memphis, that amounts to $11,400,000
leaving the public schools and going to corporate welfare charter operators getting
rich on public money. Meanwhile, the SCS deficit is used to justify more cuts
and further weakening of the surviving public school’s capacity to meet testing
expectations.
None of this planned austerity
is a surprise. In 2012, the Transition
Planning Commission Report predicted a $212 million hole in Shelby County's
school budget from charter expansion in 2016.
That $212 million will be headed into the pockets of out-of-state
corporate charter operators:
However, with the projected share of students in non-district
operated schools [will be] expanding rapidly in the
next few years—from approximately 4% in FY2012 to 19% by FY2016 (equivalent to
approximately $212M of revenues shifted to charter schools and the ASD in
FY2016). . .
With a State and federal commitment
to close the bottom five percent of schools each year based on invalid,
unreliable, and unfair test scores, it is easy to see that there will be a
continuing supply of bottom five percent-ers until all public schools labeled for corporate reform takeover are
“turned around,” or turned over.
I am reading this now because
some of you are new to the Board, and some of you continue to pretend to be
ignorant about what is going on, and some of you are supporters of it all, even
though I doubt that you have any inkling of the social fallout from turning
public schools into corporate run penal-style testing camps that you would
never consider offering to middle class parents for their children.
Parents and teachers at South
Side, American Way, Raleigh-Egypt, and Wooddale deserve better. I am glad they are among those who have been
awakened to the threat to their neighborhood schools by corporate takeover, as
they have decided to SKIP the KIPP and offer a loud NO to YES Prep and put a
big red light in front of the Green Dot.
Frederick Douglas knew that power
concedes nothing without a demand. It is
time for Shelby County to concede what these teachers and parents demand, and
that is nothing more than quality public
schools for all children.
