SAVE DR. KING'S VISION FOR AMERICA IN BERKELEY
* Defend the Right to Free Public Education
* Keep Berkeley Schools Public and Integrated: No Charter Schools
* Make Integration Work: Eliminate Tracking, Reduce Class Size, Teach Critical Thinking, Reduce Teaching to the Test, and Structure Frank Discussions on Campus Climate about How Race Affects Students%u2019 Experiences at School
[Article at: http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-10-08/article/33903?headline=Activists-Protest-City-s-Proposed-Charter-School ]
[Op-Ed at: http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-10-15/article/33939 ]
The right of every child living in America to receive a public education is a right most Americans take for granted and could not imagine losing. The national campaign being spearheaded by Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, to create a new, parallel, privately controlled, profit-driven system of 5000 charter schools, which will be publicly subsidized but minimally regulated, will eviscerate this right.
The right to universal public education, like the universal right to vote, was won out of the great civil rights struggles of the 1950's and 1960's. Together, they represent the cornerstones of American democracy and freedom, concrete expressions of our shared national commitment to equality and diversity. Creating a new education system dominated by privately controlled, publicly and privately funded charter schools, supplemented by a safety net of under-resourced public schools, will make the right to a public education more like the new proposed "right" of all to health care. Public education will become another government entitlement, subject to the laws of the market economy, completely unequal in its outcomes, highly stratified by socio-economic, race and immigration status. All due process, civil rights, first amendment, and labor protections for teachers, students and parents incorporated into current public school rubric, will be eliminated.
The most vulnerable students: black, Latina/o, immigrant, and poor students of all races who are cynically being presented by charter advocates as the "driving" concern of their movement, will face intensified segregation, isolation, and inequality if the charter scheme is adopted. The families of these students will lose any democratic or regulatory control over the schools their daughters and sons are being pressed to attend. Special needs students, who the charters do not even feign concern for, will be permanently assigned to second class status. Instead of solving the "achievement gap," charters will exacerbate it.
Currently in Berkeley, a group is trying to establish this city's first charter school. The school would be predominantly black and Latina/o and have access to far fewer extracurricular activities and programs than are available in Berkeley's public schools.
Berkeley must not sign onto this national attack on public education. We must continue to be a model for the nation. We must be what we have been, a community distinguished by our stubborn refusal to abandon our egalitarian principles. A community striving to create equal, integrated, diverse public schools, even if it takes constant struggle, constant friction and constant change to succeed. We have stood on the principles of Brown v. Board of Education for more than 40 years -- now is not the time to give up and bow down to assumptions or inequalities of the new Jim Crow, no matter how superficially it is dressed up.
