Projo
Recycles Teacher Trash Talk With Classic Dump on Public Schools
By Robert Yarnall
On Tuesday, June 16, 2015, at precisely
2:01 AM, an unidentified editorial writer representing the flailing Providence
Journal crapped the keyboard and hit the Post button. Did it ever occur to him or her that the
headline “Assault
on Charters” was an exceedingly poor choice of descriptor for a school-based
opinion piece?
Did he or she realize that the
word “assault” in conjunction with any discussion of schools forevermore evokes
the stark imagery of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre?
An image is worth a thousand
words. And added to the four hundred fifty-nine word, boilerplate anti-union
screed Projo’s designated keyboard commander unleashed in his predawn barrage,
it makes for a kilometer’s worth of column inches, meeting
the expectations of the corporate watchdogs who sign the editors’ paychecks.
Rhode Island’s only major
newspaper, now wholly
owned by out-of-state interests, seems doggedly determined to exploit the ongoing
charter school discussion for the purpose of deconstructing public education in
favor of privatized,
investor-based marketing schemes.
The corporate roots of the school
privatization movement can be traced to The
Edison Project, the 1992 collaborative effort of educational media
entrepreneur Chris
Whittle and former Yale University President Benno
Schmidt Jr. These links provide an essential starting point for any
discussion of the school privatization industry, but they are secondary to the
most intrinsic, gut-level concerns families have: the health, safety and
welfare of their children.
The school privatization industry
- its conceptualization, commercialization, and corruption – is a massive topic
that commands major resources within America’s most prestigious think tanks,
the progressive Brookings Institute and its conservative counterpart, the
Heritage Foundation. Go ahead, Google yourself to the brink of insanity. Been
there, done that.
There is wide ranging
disagreement concerning both the reliability and validity of measuring academic
achievement levels in comparative studies of charter schools and traditional
public schools. Regardless of the perennial debate, it is no mystery to
teachers why charter schools are universally embraced by their clientele: 100%
of the families who choose a given charter school are there because they want
to be.
In the vernacular of cyberage
social networking, the stakeholders are “all-in.”
Traditional public schools should
be so lucky. Their playing field is perilously rocky and meanders uphill all
the way from start to finish. For public school teachers entangled in the
bureaucratic typhoon of Race to
the Top - U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s mythical epic
voyage their daily regimen is rife with the Scylla and Charybdis of Public Education
– Disruption
and Distraction.
Students in virtually every
classroom in every public school in America bear daily witness to the turmoil
washing over their teachers courtesy of the twin terrors Disruption and
Distraction. The narratives that trickle down to students’ homes scare the
bejezus out of every parent and guardian, and rightly so. Hello, Charter
Schools.
Over the next couple of months, this
series of articles will explore the state of public education from the point of
view of classroom teachers at both the elementary and secondary levels. Unless
you are a public school teacher, you probably cannot grasp the nature of the
current state of affairs. It’s hard enough for teachers to sometimes believe
what is happening to their profession. Ask one sometime.
Welcome to the club, people.
Next Up : The Rock