Charter Schools and the Capitalist Way

For some strange reason, that American Indian Public Charter School article that I bitched about in my last post is still really bothering me. I can't explain why, but I suspect that it is because of my irritation with charter schools within my work context that I have been experiencing lately. I decided to look up the charter school today and it DOES say this on their website: "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism to join our family at AIPCS." "Multi-cultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots, and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply."

Puke to the highest degree. Liberatory pedagogues should be present in all inner-city schools, jackasses. It figures that rich and privileged white men would know just how to education poor black and brown kids.

This type of ignorant shit has been pissing me off all week and has set me in a mood from hell. I'm totally serious. All week long I have been dealing with fucked up charter schools who are taking advantage of our kids, basically. These business people (as in the case of the American Indian Charter School--he was in real estate I believe) come into our schools, make money off of our kids, and then the public education system typically has to pick up all the pieces when the kids are either kicked out of the charter school because they aren't performing to their expectations or the charter school crumbles. It's all a sham to dismantle the public education system, make money off of innocent kids and shove traditional teaching methods down the throats of children who live in poverty.

I was just reading in the LA Times opinion piece that many people are just as disgusted with the school as I am. In fact, the opinion piece is titled "Capitalism for the Kids". Many of the opinion pieces just reminded me of one of my favorite books on the topic written by Bowles and Ginitis "Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life" which details that schools are nothing more than institutions designed to reproduce the existing class structure in society. It's an older book, but it's a classic and a must read.

It figures that everything reminds me of a damn book. I'm beginning to think that I need to get a life outside of the bookstore.

What's on My Reading List Today??

Here are some things that I've been reading in the LA Times today and are on my mind:

1) Two Sides to Sonia Sotomayor: Um, is there a problem with standing up for minority rights? I bet the racists are shaking in their boots imagining that if Sotomayor is on the Supreme Court that "those people" will take over the country by actually having the nerve to have equal protection under the law! Imagine that.

2) Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education: I just can't fucking believe this article. What part is pissing me off the most? Is it that the charter school openly recruits capitalists who subscribe to free market theory and openly supports union busting? (It's supposed to be public education, jackasses.) Or is it the part when the CEO of the charter school asked if the Jews and Chinese were stupid enough to ask the public school to teach about their culture? I suggest that he take a stroll over to San Francisco Unified School District, where the district continues to be under Lau v Nichols regulations as a result of the lawsuit regarding bilingual education that Chinese parents brought over 40 years ago.

What pisses me off about it all is that the fucking school is called "American Indian Public Charter School". What, are we going back to the "Indian boarding schools" days when they would hijack American Indian youth, cut of their hair, not let them visit their homes, stamp out their language, teach them that the people in their culture were a bunch of savages? This type of school remind me of the Indian boarding schools documented in the book: "Education for Extinction: American Schools and the Boarding School Experience 1875 to 1928".

The sad thing is that although the article is titled "Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education", this is pretty much as close to mainstream education as you can get. What's the difference really between this school and other schools in California? Minority children are denied a quality education in most schools, students are treated as if they are in the military, teachers have narrowed the curriculum and pretty much only teach to the test, and the curriculum is basically from a white, middle class perspective, despite the claim from right-wingers that schools are a bunch of liberal melting pots.

The main difference between this fucked up charter school and others is that the school practices corporal punishment in the form of public humiliation such as shaving heads and forcing kids to wear humiliating signs--you know, the types of punishment that are actually outlawed in public schools??