Cloaking Inequity

I had a coffee conversation with Mike Feinberg yesterday. About two weeks ago Mike Feinberg contacted me via email about one of my posts on Cloaking Inequity. He related that he wanted to clarify the conversation about KIPP’s funding. I agreed to meet with him at the Blanton Museum Café at UT-Austin for a coffee […]

Apologize for the CI hiatus. I have six PhD students that want to graduate, which translates to about 1,000 pages dissertation reading these past few days. I recently had a conversation with a conservative Harvard-trained attorney last Saturday in Houston. We were discussing Finland (I blogged about Finland a few weeks ago) and her point […]

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 […]

Politicians and others often frame a narrative that charters are on par or better than traditional public schools. I have discussed how charters stack up traditional public schools extensively in posts here on CI on charters. Are there charters that are islands of excellence? Of course, there are some and I discussed this in my […]

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 […]

Jay Mathews is an education talking head, columnist, blogger and huge cheerleader for KIPP schools. KIPP is under fire for their attrition again— this time due to discipline in D.C. Mathews’ explanation and justification for KIPP actions were punitive and unsympathetic. Jay Mathews is clearly not an expert on this issue, so I asked someone […]

Cloaking Inequity seeks to illuminate popular and dominant ideologies that purport to foment equality and close the achievement gap. Often well-intentioned citizens support educational policy that claim to create a more inclusive and better quality education system— unbeknownst to them— instead these policies magnify and hide inequality by utilizing an elegant, yet false, bureaucracy of […]

Thanks to Karen from Houston for sending along the info for this thread. What John Banks needs to explain about charter schools What does NZ have to learn from an overseas schooling model that discards 30% of the most disadvantaged children and 40% of African American boys? If KIPP is about ‘no excuses’, what’s your […]

In April of 2012, KIPP responded to a press release for Is choice a panacea? An analysis of black secondary student attrition from KIPP, other private charters and urban districts, a peer-reviewed paper published in the Berkeley Review of Education (BRE) about African American secondary student attrition from charter schools across the state of Texas. KIPP began their response by […]

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 […]