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School board contribution limits fail
Written by Todd Engdahl on Mar 23rd, 2010. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Without spending limitations, candidates such as Mary Seawell, sponsored by the Charter School Industrial Complex, will continue to buy elections, thwarting the will of the people. In North Denver, where I live, charter schools are opposed in favor of magnet schools. Yet, Seawell and her cronies on the board of education, using the tyranny of the majority, have stymied the common good. Charter schools, such as Denver Arts & Technology Academy (DATA), now defunct, have been allowed to fail for nine years (DATA) while magnet schools such as Lake MIddle School IB World Academy are allowed only four years to prove their value. With spending limitations, a candidate such as Seawell might not win and cast the winning vote for a charter school and be able to stand in the way of real reform.
I’ve not mentioned campaign finance reform in previous postings. Thus, the previous comment is a different topic.
Mr. Augden,
Your rants would have more credibility if just once, instead of going off on ideological riffs about charters, you could articulate a specific strategy or set of strategies for “real reform.” Like many Republican senators and congressmen and women on health care, you are eloquent in your opposition to the ideas and efforts of others. But your silence is deafening when it comes to proposing specific solutions. Do you have some specific ideas you would like to share, or do you prefer spewing negatives? Yours is the easier and less productive course. And it’s pretty obvious that your ignorance about Mary Seawell would fill volumes.
I most certainly do and have mentioned one such previously – magnet schools such as Center for International Studies(CIS), Lake Middle School’s IB World program, George Washington High School’s IB program, and others. Speaking of Republican ideas, Mr. Gottleib, you’ve been a spokesperson for one, charter schools. Just how are charter schools representative of reform? Most are administered in a similar, authoritarian fashion as regular schools. How is that reform? How do they contribute to the common good? And, how am I ignorant about Mary Seawell? She’s an advocate for charter schools that, according to various studies (that you continue to ignore), are contributing to the racial and economic re-segregation of public schools. So, please provide me with the “volumes” about Ms. Seawell that I need to be fully informed about her and others who represent her viewpoint that charter schools that serve the few instead of the many in the regular schools represents equity. Finally, as I’ve mentioned many times, your “silence is deafening” on the question of whether or not charter schools are contributing to the racial and economic resegregation of Denver Public Schools. And, to the question of whether or not such segregation is harmful to children.
Mr. Augden,
I will elaborate further in my newsletter this coming Tuesday. But as far as magnet schools in Denver go, you are as careless with the facts as you are with the spelling of my name. GW’s IB (full disclosure, my daughter attended that excellent program) and other magnets have, since the end of busing, tended to exacerbate segregation. As far as charters and segregation, we may actually agree in part here. To the extent that suburban charters make segregation worse, and are used by parents to flee increasingly diverse traditional public schools, I have no use for them. In urban settings, it is a very different story.
By the way, when I worked at Piton, I commissioned and published the Civil Rights Project study of the resegregation of DPS post-busing. This study found that, without factoring in charters, DPS had become more segregated in the post-busing era than it was pre-busing. White and affluent families were decreasing in numbers, but were increasingly concentrated in schools like Bromwell, Steck, Slavens and Cory.