Leid Stories - 05/15/14

Class Warfare: New Charter Schools Target Poor with ‘Blended’ Education

Haitians, Dominicans Fight Racist Law That Has Made 500,000 Stateless

A new type of charter school is getting ready to make a grab for children’s minds in communities of color all over America. The new model, pushed by the corporate-backed Rocketship chain of charter schools, already has taken root in Milwaukee, Wis., having sold state legislators on its low-budget, untested “blended education” formula for sharply cutting costs while delivering supposedly quality educational services to children in poor communities.

The formula?  Hire young, inexperienced teachers; reduce the curriculum to focus mostly on reading and math; and substitute digital learning for in-person pedagogy.

Dr. Gordon Lafer, a political economist, associate professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, and research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., details his extensive study of charter schools and of “blended education,” the aggressive push by charter-school profiteers for virtual schools.

Bowing to pressure from racist nationalists in the Dominican Republic, the Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest court, reversed 80-plus years of previous law and ruled last Sept. 23 that “the children of undocumented migrants, who have been in the Dominican Republic and registered as Dominicans as far back as 1929, cannot have Dominican nationality as their parents are considered to be ‘in transit.’”

Activists from the Dominican and Haitian communities update Leid Stories on their battles against the new law, which is wreaking havoc in Haiti, the D.R. and internationally.