New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to close at least 26 public schools this year while adding more than 100 private charter schools, a move which some say amounts to a corporate gift of public assets, namely real estate, tax funds, and the state’s right to govern substantively how students are educated.
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, reports WSWS.
Last year, the DOE targeted 19 schools for closure. In a suit brought by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), courts temporarily blocked the closings, based the DOE’s violation of procedures for community and school involvement in the decision. The DOE is moving ahead with plans to close most of these 19 schools as well as others.
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 move to charter school-based education is peculiar, given that such schools offer even less oversight by parents, the state or the DOE than traditional public schools. Stranger still is that for-profit education, such as Kaplan College, is under attack for fleecing students out of a quality education merely to gain income from student loans, which unemployed students will undoubtedly default on.
For profit school were recently the subject of new government laws curbing their recruitment tactics raising standards for qualifying for federal aid programs. Regulations scheduled to take effect July 1 specifies minimum steps a state must take to authorize postsecondary programs that participate in federal student aid programs, strengthens federal authority to take action against schools that engage in deceptive marketing, and reinforces a federal law that prohibits schools from paying recruiters based solely on how many students enroll.
Read about one teacher’s experience as a charter school teacher and decide for yourself whether the new system is more of the same, just privatized.