I welcome beneficent billionaires wanting to help poor school children, but only so long as their charters do not enjoy unfair advantages, limit diversity and crush public-school students. As it stands today, charters, compete on an uneven playing field with devastating consequences for the remaining 90+% of public-school students.
We now have a two-tiered system of education in which, oddly enough, the charter-school elite expropriate the mantle of "civil rights" to ensure their unchallenged dominance over the rest of us. They advertise their distorted view of reality through a multi-million-dollar propaganda campaign aimed against underfunded and oversized public schools.
Public schools are starved for space. For too long now, too many public schools (like Susan S. McKinney Secondary School for the Arts) have been crushed by colocation with charter schools (like a Success Academy, K-2).
Public schools and the children in them are compacted as trash. Kids are smart enough to see and feel this for themselves. Two sets of children co-exist in the same school, separate, but not equal.
Charter-school students often sit in sparkling new, spanking clean classrooms while public-school students are separated into a second-class world of sometimes hanging wires (Susan S. McKinney, for example) and PCB bulbs (Brooklyn School for Global Studies, the School for International Studies and P368, for example). It breaks the heart. Public-school students are on the outside looking in at the privileged world of the charter, noses pressed up against the glass, always on the wrong side of the educational tracks.
Even in the schools that are not co-located, the effects are strongly felt. Buildings are overcrowded, stuffed to the gills. Students are packed in like sardines; others are banished to trailers, once again reaffirming their inferior status in the system.
Sadly, the USDOE's favoritism of charters has led to increased segregation in the United States by race, class, religion, culture and language. According to a study recently published by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, the worst segregation exists in NYC. In a city known for its diversity, schools have become frighteningly homogenous. There are the highest concentrations of African-American and Latino students in schools with under 10% Caucasians in NYC. In Hoboken, NJ, and other parts of the country, charter schools cater to a "white flight" syndrome.
The playing field needs to be leveled. Before charter schools can cry "civil rights," let them cater to similarly diverse populations, otherwise Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) becomes meaningless. All charters should be required to provide services for children with I.E.P.s and ESL needs as well as children who cut across many diverse backgrounds.
Given that charters enjoy generous private funding, it seems unconscionable that they should receive extra per pupil cash, colocation rights and government-funded rent at the expense of the public school system.
Charters must not weed out students, only to dump them as unwanted trash back into the public-school system. Despite high attrition rates, some charters brag of data superiority and pro-charter politicians take it as fodder to close more public schools and destroy more communities.
Charters must welcome all children if they want public money and public space. They should offer a rich curriculum rather than become essentially test prep centers in the best tradition of South Korean Hagwons.
They should play fair instead of opening their war chests to the politically powerful in Albany. They shouldn't use their kids as political pawns and move them around the state when they should be in the classroom learning. With their unfair advantage of millions in spare change, they hire PR firms, sell their schools as a product and generously open their pocketbooks to finance campaigns that win them favor. Yet, when the state auditors come knocking, their doors quickly close.
I am tired of this unfair playing field. Public-school students should not be made to feel second-class citizens in their own buildings. How much longer can this game continue before a referee blows his whistle, the penalty cards appear and public-school students begin to receive the respect they deserve in a democratic nation founded on the principles of equality for all?
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