The ProJo Hates Teachers

I have had a very tumultuous relationship develop via e-mail correspondence with the Editorial Page fuehrer and Vice President of the ProJo, Edward Achorn.  There's something fundamentally wrong with the guy who is in charge of operations also being the gatekeeper of all the dissent that is fit for print.

Today was the Charter School Blitzkrieg, with a Staff Editorial at the top of the page lamenting the bill in the General Assembly that dares to refocus funding to our barely-standing public schools and away from the barely functional neoliberal nightmares.  Then, in the Letters section, there was the ingenious epistle from a reader about the glorious advances her son made at a charter school.

Mr. Achorn may live on a different planet than we great unwashed masses, but on planet earth, the results are in and the corporate charter school model is an abysmal failure.  The original notion of the charter school was an ingenious idea, a grassroots-developed educational experience for populations that had been disenfranchised by the public school system.  It borrowed its basic logic from parochial schools but shed the white privilege and religious studies.  But, as with all good things, corporate America got its hands on the idea and transformed it into a perverted doppelgänger.  

The corporate charter school is a graveyard where a child's potential goes to die.  The staffers are not licensed educators.  Discipline is often akin to a gulag.  Students in the vital range of fifth to eighth grade, the period when they decide whether to drop out or not, have their self esteem destroyed by the non-existent pedagogical model and are flushed down the school-to-prison pipeline.  But don't take my word for it, just check out the free documentary film THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH BEHIND WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, produced by a coalition of New York City students, parents, and teachers who were disgusted by the insanity.

Ultimately this latest putsch will fail, despite Mr. Achorn's efforts the teachers union is deep in the pocket of the Democratic majority and they know who butters what side of the bread.  But be warned, this is not the last battle cry of the assault on the public education system and the unionized teachers movement.