Utopia, you are standing in it!

The unthinking opposition to charter schools has reached new depths with SaveOurSchoolsNZ sharing The Racist History of the Charter School Movement.

This article relates the founding of charter schools and school choice to the opposition of the Democratic party to the desegregation of schools in the late 1950s in the southern States of America.

In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Democratic Party government threatened to close the public school system and transfer the assets to private hands to avoid school desegregation.

Naturally, the article, which was supposed to be recounting history was some accuracy and new insight, fails to mention that this racism was in the Democratic Party. That’s one dirty little secret to many. These Democratic party stalwarts were instead labelled segregationist whites.

The threat to close the public school system and transfer it to was never carried. From recollection, closure of the public school system to avoid desegregation may have been carried out in other southern states.

The current racism of the charter school movement is explained in this most bizarre way:

A 2010 report by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards,” uncovers some troublesome facts in this regard. “While segregation for blacks among all public schools has been increasing for nearly two decades, black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enrol 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools.”

In the first decade of the 2000s, charter school enrolment nearly tripled; today around 2.5 percent of public school students are enrolled in charters.

Blacks are overrepresented in charter schools (32 percent vs. 16 percent in the entire public-school population), whites are underrepresented (39 percent versus 56 percent), and Latinos, Asians and American Indians are enrolled in roughly equal proportions in charters and traditional public schools. These snapshots mask considerable variation. In the West and some areas of the South, it appears that charter schools “serve as havens for white flight from public schools,” according to the Civil Rights Project.

Black Americans are fleeing the public school system in record numbers for charter schools because the public school system as failed them. The entire New Orleans school district is now chartered schools because the public school system was too slow to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

The three largest charter school movements are in New Orleans, Detroit and Washington DC. All three cities had public school systems that failed their predominantly black communities. The governments of New Orleans, Detroit and Washington DC are dominated by the black vote with black leadership in many  leadership positions.

Charter schools must attract their students from the existing Schools. They must compete and compete successfully to survive and avoid closure.

Not one of these black students in a charter school is required to attend them. They enter by choice, often having to compete in lotteries because so many wish to go to chartered school. It is highbrow condescension to suggest that they and their parents don’t know what they’re doing when they attempt  two enrol in a chartered school.

Many charter schools tend to target students with educational disadvantages. Not surprisingly, some get into different difficulty while many others succeed.

Chartered schools in New Zealand, known as partnership schools, were initiated by the ACT party but the bill in Parliament required the support of the Maori party to pass.

The Maori Party supported chartered schools in New Zealand because they wanted a better deal from Maori in the education system. Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples said

“We have to try new things – and if they don’t work, ditch them,” he told reporters yesterday.

“This is about giving charter schools a chance, we have to see how it can work here.”

New Zealand Charter schools will be state funded but run by community, church or business organisations. They will be able to set their own curriculum and term times, and don’t have to hire registered teachers.

Maori Party president Pem Bird appeared before Parliament’s Education and Science select committee when the chartered school bill was in its committee stage as the spokesman for Nga Kura-a-Iwi, a group of 23 Maori immersion-schools.

Mr Bird told MPs the  chartered schools  bill will free schools from rules and regulations that prevent them from doing a better job for Maori children.

Maori and Pasifika groups are desperate to improve their children’s educational performance and many will want to set up partnership schools, he said.

Maori organisations will come in in big numbers, as will Pasifika. And the reason is simple: they want to be architects of their own futures and destinies … We’ve got to get with the fact that this is desperation for us.

Mr Bird said several Maori-immersion schools wanted to become partnership schools.

Sadly,  I must say, the self appointed left-wing representatives of Maori and Pasifika want to keep them in a public school system that fails them for ideological reasons while they educate their own children in nice suburban schools.

The Labour Party in New Zealand  had its second worst Party vote ever in the most recent 2014 general election.

The Green Party vote did not increase its vote in the 2014 election, despite the failings of the Labour Party and a hard left campaign by the Greens emphasising education and child poverty.

The Green Party vote was abysmal in working-class electorates and among Maori and Pasifika. Most of the Green’s party vote is from the educated middle-class in rich electorates.