According to an analysis by the Network for Public Education (NPE), published in the
Washington Post, a five-year grant of $26.6 million from the federal government’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) was awarded to North Carolina in 2018 and is being used to finance “white-flight academies,” including existing and new charter schools in the majority-white communities that tried to break away from CMS.
Referring to her organization’s analysis, NPE executive director Carol Burris explains that North Carolina used funds from its federal government grant to finance charter schools that have “significant overrepresentation of white students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located.”
, with one bill, in West Virginia, going so far as to call for teachers to be “dismissed or not reemployed for teaching… divisive concepts.”
Proposed laws against “divisiveness” in schools prompt Ford to question, “Divisive for who?” and he notes that the people behind all these bills are overwhelmingly white, wealthier folks who have generally benefited most from the nation’s education system. Ford suggests they may be provoking white resentment against public schools because schools are now more populated with Black and Brown children who may express doubts about a prevailing narrative about the country that may not include people who look like them.
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“What I’m working on like making sure students have access to food, clean clothing, and streetlights may not look like what I’m working on,” Catherine Gilmore told me over a phone call. Gilmore has worked as an educator in Hillsborough County, Florida, for 13 years, and has spent the last six years at Gibsonton Elementary School where […]
Yves here. Funny how Betty DeVos was, according to the liberal and leftist press, one of the worst in the pantheon of Trump Administration monsters, yet remarkably little has been said on how much of her education-as-rentierism is merrily moving forward across the US.
By Jeff Bryant, a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools and a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm. Produced by Our Schools
Supporters of public education and school teachers were relieved to see Betsy DeVos leave her job as head of the Department of Education, knowing full well the education policies she and former President Trump supported would go nowhere in a President Biden administration. But they should remain incensed over how her efforts to privatize public schools are being rolled out in state legislatures across