This concise yet powerful volume examines the rise of charters in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, exploring the specific conditions that spurred their proliferation. Raynard Sanders (New Orleans), David Stovall (Chicago), and Terrenda White (New York City) show how these schools—private institutions, usually established in poor or working-class African American and Latinx communities—promote competition instead of collaboration and are chiefly driven by financial interests. Sanders, Stovall, and White also reveal how charters position themselves as “public” to secure tax money but use their private status to hide data about enrollment and salaries. Furthermore, the authors document the lasting consequences of charter school expansion, including the displacement of experienced African American teachers; the rise of a rigid, militarized pedagogy; and community disruption.
FOREWORD by Karen Lewis
NEW ORLEANS—RAYNARD SANDERSThe New Orleans Public Education Experiment: Children Lose—Education Reformers Win
CHICAGO—DAVID STOVALLCharter Schools and the Event of Educational Sharecropping: An Alternate Take on the Chicago Phenomenon
NEW YORK CITY—TERRENDA WHITEFrom Community Schools to Charter Chains: New York’s Unequal Educational Landscape
APPENDIX
RELATED READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
“Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools is both a social autopsy of catastrophic and fraudulent charter school initiatives in three American cities and a helpful guidebook for those of us engaged in the gathering struggle to save our public schools. It’s a torch against the darkness, an antidote to cynicism and despair, and a map to move the movement forward. With this little book the forces determined to destroy public education—with mobilized campaigns to disinvest and destabilize, displace and disenfranchise—have met a formidable opponent. As participatory democracy is repeatedly assailed, as the public space is systematically eroded and eclipsed, and as the very concept of something we might call a ‘public’ is flogged by the powerful in favor of ruthless meritocracy and fanatical individualism, we who believe in freedom must rise up, reimagine, and revitalize the public square. Raynard Sanders, David Stovall, and Terrenda White have given us an essential tool in the fight ahead.” —William Ayers, coauthor of “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!”: And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education
“Excellent, cogent arguments against the corporatization of the charter school movement, which started as a way to have community- and teacher-led schools that served the needs of poor black and brown children . . . demonstrat[ing] how the original intent has been usurped by a greedy, oligarchical class intent on tapping into the $600 billion in taxpayer funds that should be used for spending on public schools.” —Karen Lewis
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