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Sunday, July 5, 2015

CURMUDGUCATION: Detroit News Is Clueless

CURMUDGUCATION: Detroit News Is Clueless:

Detroit News Is Clueless






Detroit News writer Ingrid Jacques reports breathlessly about the arrival of education experts into the motor city. Actually, the headline writer says the experts "descend" on Detroit, which tells you plenty about how the editor views the relative position of these experts and the city, even if the editor stopped short of writing "Experts descend from on high to enlighten lowly locals."

Jacques and her editors have an odd view of what constitutes an educational expert, because the experts in question are Mike Petrilli (Fordham Foundation) and Eric Chan (Charter School Growth Fund). So, not so much "educational experts" as "charter school marketing experts." They were invited by Excellent Schools Detroit. ESD deserves its own piece, but the short form is that ESD was formed in 2010 as one of those "community philanthropic boards" that allows all sorts of privatizersto get a seat at the school management table without having to be, you know, elected or anything. These boards are carefully crafted to make sure that The Right People are in charge of making all the decisions about how to manage schools (and those sweet, sweet piles of public tax money).

Chan and Petrilli were working the next phase charter talking points, which is generally to call for tighter quality controls on charter schools, because while the theory is that charters need to be opened because the charters do a better job than public schools, it turns out that many don't do a better job than public schools and so the charter system has to be fixed. This is the newest odd paradox in the privatizing narrative-- when public school systems fail, they must be replaced, but when charter school systems fail, they must be nurtured, supported, managed and improved. Go figure.

Jacques says that Detroit should look at "models that are working," citing New Orleans and Memphis, so I guess by "working" she doesn't so much mean "providing quality community school systems" as she means "creating good revenue streams for privatizers." She does note that Detroit is "complicated" and poses some "unique challenges." Which leads us to this improbable sentence:

That's partly why the education debate in Detroit is attracting such high-profile expertise.

Will this be the place where she introduce people who are actually experts in education? (Spoiler alert: no). Her next example is Paul Pastorek, the former NOLA superintendent who turned post-Katrina public school crisis in to charter school gold (well, gold for charter operators-- for students 
CURMUDGUCATION: Detroit News Is Clueless: