http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1767§ion=ArticleWBEZ and Catalyst expose hypocrisy of Chicago charter schools -- Raising test scores and making their numbers by kicking out 'bad' students
George N. Schmidt - November 10, 2010
As the propaganda for the national expansion of charter schools reaches its peak, thanks to a combination of an endorsement by the President of the United States, the U.S. Department of Education, and Hollywood, two Chicago news organizations have gone behind the scenes to reveal the truth about how most of Chicago's charter schools "make their numbers", corporate style:
They dump their "bad" students out. Sometimes those students wind up back in the public schools. At other times?
In the first part of a hard-hitting series that ran on WBEZ radio and on line in Catalyst magazine on November 9, 2010, reporters exposed the fact that the majority of Chicago charter schools were forcing out or kicking out their problem students.
But the discovery in 2010 by Catalyst and Chicago Public Radio of scandals in Chicago's charter schools programs was really nothing new. Parents and children had been reporting the push outs by sanctimonious charter school operators in Chicago since the founding of Noble Street Charter School more than ten years ago, and the fact that Noble Street, where Michael Milkie's family now is paid more than $300,000 per year, kicks its kids out and sends them back to Wells High School (which Milkie regularly slanders in his narratives) was being reported from the first months of the administration of George W. Bush. Chicago's charter school miracle stories, which have now been adopted and woven into the Obama administration's version of corporate "school reform," have more to do with intensely skillful marketing and propaganda than with the actual ability of Chicago's charter schools to radically improve the education of America's most at risk students. Despite regular doses of corporate propaganda touting the Chicago charter school model, charters schools, even the most "successful", routinely cheat the public and their own supporters by neglecting the most seriously needy children, thereby dumping those children into the public schools while simultaneously deriding the public schools for supposed "failure."
THE WBEZ REPORT FROM NOVEMBER 9 FOLLOWS HERE:
...much more at link.
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