Raynard Sanders - Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education

Karen Lewis

R aynard Sanders, David Stovall, and Terrenda White have organized excellent, cogent arguments against the corporatization of the charter school movement, which started as a way to have community- and teacher-led schools that served the needs of poor black and brown children.

The writers have demonstrated that the original intent has been usurped by a greedy, oligarchical class intent on tapping into the $600 billion in taxpayer money meant for public schools that has been out of reach for years. The neoliberal education reform agenda has been well documented by dozens of scholars, but the charter school industry is finally coming under intense scrutiny as the for-profit sector has gained momentum.

Donald Trumps secretary of education, heiress Betsy DeVos, will likely advocate for the complete eradication of publicly funded, public education while promoting charter chains and vouchers that will exclude the children who are most difficult to educatethe English language learners, the disabled, the children who need special services, and the disengaged learners. Sanders et al. have provided an explanation of why market-based choice isnt choice at all, but rather an opportunity for the wealthy, the charlatans, the religious warriors, etc., to take advantage of, and reap the spoils from, a devastating economic war of communities that were left behind due to the Recession of 2008.

Along the way, Sanders turns his gaze to New Orleans, Stovall takes a hard look at Chicago, and White gives us her perspective on New York. What is particularly interesting is that all three authors tend to recognize the promise of charter schools original intentproviding a high quality education for students whose needs werent being met in district-run schools with burdensome mandates and inflexible work rules. What the charter operators did was utilize the lack of district oversight and promise better results that would cost substantially less because they could have a nonunion workforce.

Unfortunately, it was the beginning of an elaborate hoax. The mom-and pop charters in New York and Chicago were successful at providing nurturing, teacher-led and communityresponsive education. Unfortunately, the for-profit chainsoperated by former district teachers, Teach for America alumni, and market-driven entrepreneursresembled prisons more than the promised innovative new schools. Many of these schools are intent on destroying community culture, calling it dysfunctional and replacing it with grit. According to these schools, students need to learn compliance and strict adherence to rules, or they face return to their miserable failing schools. The elusive results for the profit sector are test scores. But for-profit schools refuse to acknowledge that scores tell us much more about family income than what students actually know.

To achieve those scores, several drastic measures had to be taken. It was necessary to develop application criteria that would discourage mostif not allparents who needed help to navigate the admission process; create marketing plans that used misleading data and false promises (such as a 100 percent graduation rate); establish a mechanism to cream the best test scores from neighborhood schools; impose zero-tolerance disciplinary practices for minor offenses, and monetary fines for said offenses; counsel out undesirables (low-scoring students, those with behavior problems); and complain to state and local funding agencies that the charters werent getting the monies they needed.

These are just a few ways in which the charters cheat the system and the students. In addition, White et al. carefully point out the purposeful starvation of district schools. The reality of charter schools is that some are good and do provide parents with a facsimile of choice, but it is mainly illusory. Stovall says, Corporate charter schools are positioned as the viable alternative of choice for black and Latinx families that have been failed by the system. He goes on: Missing from prevailing perceptions of charter schools... are the realities of white supremacy, neoliberalism, disinvestment, mass displacement, hypersegregation, and the politics of disposability.

Stovall tells us that the corporate charters provide false narratives of success... while continuing to exclude a significant portion of black and Latinx families that choose to engage charters.

One of the most pervasive myths (though finally debunked, forcing marketing departments to change their literature) was the 100 percent graduation rate. It didnt seem to matter that only 35 to 65 percent of students who began at the charter school made it to their senior year. This was particularly true for the highly praised Urban Prep Academies, where young black males wear jackets and ties and exude a palpable sense of pride. It took a while for the real story to emergethat the schools lost about 60 percent of the freshman class. When the reality was exposed, the narrative changed to 100 percent college acceptance rates. Still magnificent, but most people still believe the 100 percent graduation rate because the lie went unchallenged for years. Who would want to burst the bubble of success for young black men in a city so violence prone?

Fear of backlash kept many critics silenced for years. It wasnt until victims of intimidation and harassment came forward that the ugly truth emerged. Another corporate charter chain, which had parlayed its position with the donor classnaming schools after its benefactorswas discovered to have forced students to pay fines of approximately $200,000 per year for minor infractions, such as not wearing belts, and forcing students to repeat entire years for failing a single class, unless they transferred back to their neighborhood schoolsthis included changing students transcripts (As miraculously turning into Fs) unless a student agreed to transfer. These are some examples of the unscrupulous depths to which many for-profit corporate charters sink to preserve their claims of success. Stovall likens these practices to the nineteenth-century bait-and-switch promise to freed slaves, of forty acres and a mule, which turned into debt peonage or the sharecropping system. You are promised a high-quality education, and you get a low-quality, test-and-punish education.

What all authors in this book attempt is to provide the reader with the landscape and history of charter school movements in their respective cities. What is important for us to remember, to contemplate, and to provide a continual analysis of is the fact that the idea of the charter school started innocuously enough, as a way for parents to provide children who needed extra help a way to get it. What we got was something completely different. We must be ever vigilant about the false promises, the marketing tricks, and the bait-and-switch practices of the corporate charter schools that play on the fears and genuine concerns of parents who have the best intentions for their children.

Think about what it takes to label a school, or a child, a failure. It speaks volumes about what and who is valued in our society. It says, We cant fix poverty, so stop using it as an excuse. These are harsh indictments of a system that was designed by the industrialists of the nineteenth century, and an interesting commentary on the robber barons of the twenty-first century, who see profit in an area that should support the broadening of our democratic ideals.

And it is notable that in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York there are no elected boards of education for charter schools. Local control of these systems has been hijacked by business elites in order to create a school system that serves their needs for compliant, noncritical employees. These same elites decry the lack of critical-thinking skills exhibited by todays youth as they simultaneously promote for-profit charters that envision a world in which minority children know their place. That place is often at the back of the line for higher education and the concomitant well-paying jobs that hopefully ensue. Those same elites want to hire foreign STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers through the H1-B visa process.