Censored 2011: Obama's Charter School Policies Spread Segregation and Undermine Unions

1. 5-7 essential "facts" re: your Project Censored 2011 story, based on your reading of the PC2011 text;

I. Charter schools tend to work against healthy diversity, by race and class, whereas public schools maintain a more equal “playing field” for students of different backgrounds. This is especially true of Charter schools in western states (102-103).

II. Obama’s education plans encourages the growth of charter schools “to undermine public education,” (103) and teacher’s unions. He would like a teacher’s pay to be based upon student performance (test scores).

III. Obama believes that these schools are innovative and will raise a public education. Many teachers and community members think charter schools actually demean public schooling. These schools are also accused of selectively choosing high scoring students to increase their funding and disregarding low-income or “difficult-to-teach students” (103).

IV. Obama, and his secretary of education chair Arne Duncan, lay out the policy of open more charter schools = more money for education, as well as merit-based pay and changing/disregarding teacher’s union policy = more money for education.

V. Arne Duncan has overseen and assisted in the closing of many public schools, and his most famous act was in 2004 when he oversaw the attempted closure of twenty public schools in Chicago. These schools were attended by low-income students “of color,” (105) and did this “with little or no community input,” (105).

VI. There is an immense movement toward privatizing the education system, where entrepreneurs and the Department of Education are “anxious to get their greedy hands on the 5.6 percent of the national economy that education represents,” (106). In their “Race to the Top” the privatization of the education system is causing schools to change their policies and adapt to Duncan’s “four assurances” in order to receive any of his $4.3 billion in funding. These four assurances were not created by teachers. “This is the Wal-Mart model of education,” (108).