Today, in reaction to school transfers from unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens School Districts into other accredited school districts (Francis Howell, Mehlville, Kirkwood, and others), anti-teachers' unions advocate Dana Loesch downplays racial concerns about the transfers and misleadingly blames unions for allowing it to happen.
A disgusting, race-baiting article from a clueless out -of-towner. Schools LOST ACCREDITATION ... http://t.co/ZRqtczQAWo
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 1, 2013
... in a historically Democrat-run city where teachers's unions reign supreme, edu has been ruined ... http://t.co/ZRqtczQAWo
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 1, 2013
I hate to break this to you, Dana, but the teachers' unions DID NOT cause the demise of Normandy, Riverview Gardens, and other school districts.
And the same people who ruined these unaccredited districts are anti-voucher for these students. http://t.co/ZRqtczQAWo
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 1, 2013
Myself and friends live near and in these districts. I don’t live in West County. Some1 making up racial strife to blame for operation? LOL
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 1, 2013
These hacks who excuse DECADES of operation and union control enable the very thing which tanked these schools originally. Shameful.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 1, 2013
Loesch's fraudulent piece on her own site on this topic bashes unions and downplaying the racial impacts of the school transfers:
Right off the bat the article excuses decades of mismanagement by educrats as a racial issue. Race has nothing to do with why these schools in a historically Democrat-controlled area ran by administrators who pay more lip service to teachers’s unions than parents.
[...]
I live in the city. I don’t live in West County suburbia. Some of my friends and I live near or in the very districts this article discusses. Part of my family has lived in North County since WWII when the country women like my great-grandmother went to the factories. The problem with these districts are numerous and also include the breakdown of the family unit with no direction provided at home. Sending a kid to school for a few hours a day isn’t going to correct the established learning given to her or him through their home life. Unfortunately, the political leadership of this area cheerleads policies which obliterate the American family, economic opportunity, and after controlling this area for longer than even my parents have been alive, there is absolutely nothing to show for it aside from failing schools and failed kids. That’s what is shameful, that is the story, had it been written by someone with more devotion to truth than identity politics.
John Eligon at The New York Times rightfully says race plays at least some role in the school transfers:
ST. CHARLES, Mo. — When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law in June allowing students from failing school districts to transfer to good ones, Harriett Gladney saw a path to a better education for her 9-year-old daughter.
But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter’s mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip.
“When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,’ ” said Ms. Gladney, 45. “ ‘They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.’ ”
Public schools here in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide achievement gap between school districts — a divide that often runs along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer students out of failing school districts, the State Supreme Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and move their children into better schools.
But the ensuing contention has shown that the process remains a tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social perceptions.
“Most folks are for having equal opportunity, having good schools for everyone,” said Patrick J. Flavin, an assistant professor of political science at Baylor University who recently wrote a report on the black-white achievement gap in schools. “We’re all about that in the abstract. You start to see support levels drop when it turns into a real-life thing.”
[...].
More than half of the 28 public school districts — excluding charter and specialty districts — in the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County combined are at least 75 percent black or white. Of the nine districts that are at least three-quarters white, all but one scored a perfect 14 on the state’s performance rating scale. The six mostly black districts scored an average of 7.
Racial segregation has lingered in this region, the result of generations of discriminatory zoning and real estate practices. Efforts to reverse it have included a court-ordered program that has been busing thousands of black St. Louis students to mostly white suburban schools since the early 1980s.
[...]
Normandy and Riverview Gardens, also in St. Louis County, have each received transfer requests from about 1,000 students. Riverview Gardens administrators chose a second district, Kirkwood, to bus their students to, because their first choice, Mehlville, said it could not accommodate all of the transfers.
Some parents have criticized the law for not giving taxpayers a say in what happens in their own districts and accused the state of abandoning the unaccredited districts instead of working to improve them.
No comments :
Post a Comment