Cloaking Inequity

One of the most challenging aspects of charters and choice that our society is struggling with are the potential incompatibilities with democratic and community control of schools. Last year NEPC recently released a report entitled  Democracy Left Behind: How Recent Education Reforms Undermine Local School Governance and Democratic Education.  I previously discussed the brief in context […]

An infinity of good and bad things get unevenly distributed across populations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of discrimination that are banned in our laws and Constitution. Chester Finn Congratulations, us Americans can officially pat ourselves on the back. From my estimation, from where I sit, women have now […]

Today on the Cloaking Inequity series, The Teat, I examine where parent trigger proponents get their $. I had pondered parent trigger— because from the outside looking in it appeared to be a community-based approach led by parents and civil rights activists to address the inequalities that have plagued our schools for generations. Recently we even […]

Today The Teat returns to discuss neoliberal education “reformers.” Reformers argue that their approach is about “students first”… parent trigger, online courses, universal charters, Teach For America, vouchers, anti-organizing, school closings etc… if you are to believe the “reformers,” all of these efforts are about the students… not about the adults… Who is paying the bills for […]

Today I was invited by Senator Royce West to give testimony on charter schools at the Texas Senate Committee on Education for the proposed SB2. You can see the full hearing here. My testimony begins at about 2:29. See Cloaking Inequity’s full thread on charters here. Here is original text of my testimony: First I […]

With nearly 1,000 hits and counting, my post “Why do hedge fund ADORE charters?” was surprisingly popular. One of the issues raised by commenters on the post was the New Markets Tax Credit. It has been discussed elsewhere (here and here). We thought we would add more hard numbers to the discussion. This post was […]

During Thanksgiving week, Cloaking Inequity’s visitors voted on the 1st Annual Educational Policy Turkey of the Year. One of the contestants was Great Hearts Academies charter management organization. I wrote: Recently granted a new charter in Texas. Discussed on CI here and here and here. (An interesting book about Great Hearts entitled It’s All About the Information: What Great Hearts Academies Doesn’t Want You to Know) Innocuous […]

An “oldie, but a goodie” article from the New York Times about charter schools and at-risk students. An excerpt: … Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor at the University of Texas College of Education who studies how incentive systems affect student achievement, said his research had found a higher dropout rate for all charters — not just those that […]

I noted neither a critical or opposing view in the first MYSA article, but David Safier, an Arizona blogger, has plenty of information on Great Hearts, a charter seeking to open schools in San Antonio. Is Great Hearts banking on segregation in their charters? Thanks to Karen from Houston for sending along the info for […]

I gave another interview on the cheating scandal in El Paso (1,2,3) yesterday. The question that often arises is this only a case of bad apples? The research literature has long shown serial dishonesty in Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) publicly reported dropout and graduation numbers (See for example IDRA; Losen, Orfield, & Balfanz, 2006; Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond) suggesting […]

Vasquez Heilig, J., Williams, A., McNeil, L & Lee, C. (2011). Is choice a panacea? An analysis of black secondary student attrition from KIPP, other private charters and urban districts. Berkeley Review of Education, 2(2), 153-178. Public concern about pervasive inequalities in traditional public schools, combined with growing political, parental, and corporate support, has created the expectation that […]