I'm for school choice. I think every community has the wisdom and agency to shape public schooling for all students.

"School Choice" as in the forced choice model promoted by white libertarian bros is an oppressive model where something much worse is substituted for equity.

If you want to see how half-assed on actual education this "movement" was, they co-planned, wrote and funded pro-charter legislation across 50 states, but did nothing to protect students from "cultural transfusion" models like "zero tolerance".

They acted so surprised that so many schools strategized to exclude emerging multilingual students and disabled students.

And that so many schools turned into front corps for New Market Tax Credit grifts.

I'm for infinite agency for our communities with supports to universally design our schools for all students.

Not sure why we needed a bunch of white folks Columbusing eds of color's life work, a teaching corp whitification program and all this graft as part of "school choice".

When I say you can't half-ass equity, I mean:

I really believe Arne, President Obama and state level legislators thought School Choice was good for students.

But, especially in Chicago, they sided with reactionary thinktanks over neighborhood based school equity movements.

That's why whenever the national media rolls Arne out to talk about improving education everyone actually in Chicago has to breath in to keep our eyeballs rolling out of our heads.

These folks undermined movements in communities of color to push racist white guys' ideology.

And now we are losing so many people in our communities and they are dancing on the corpses saying, "COVID is not so bad, Unions BAD, Go School CHOICE"

Unions are one thing keeping a lot of people alive. Some are racist, many are poorly organized. But there isn't a single union worse than a right-wing or neo-liberal thinktank run by white dude ideology. And many of us are working directly with and taking cue from the community.

So when I see White Guy School Choice Asshole #239 say, "What about the Black and Brown kids?", I put them in the bucket with the other white folks actively trying to destroy my community and pushing the country toward ethnofascism and support folks organizing for real ed agency.

Oh, and you probably already know this, but the ALEC template legislation pushed in so many states was based on creating a separate, unequal parallel school system w/a whole new section of school code that didn't include the same protections for students AND

Partnerships with fast-track certifications programs that catered toward white college grads in fields other than education with the goal of them getting points for law school, leaving the students behind and then pushing School Choice at the legislative level. And it worked.

Oh, and they pushed "teacher evaluation reform" and paid to staff cash-strapped State Boards of Education who re-wrote state certification to be "more rigorous" which meant higher scores on racist standardized tests & more fees disproportionately DQing would-be teachers of color.

They also pushed through "Charter School Commissions" so that their cronies could push charter schools on communities OVERRULING the school boards elected by the community and charging them for it.

When I say cronies, I mean they were not only appointed, but in many states, a loyalty to charters was required in the actual legislation forming the commission.

So you had to have literal faith in some nebulous right-wing school ideal to be able to evaluate whether someone else's community had to have that kind of school, whatever that kind of school was supposed to be.

And that's the thing, we are supposed to LOVE charters, but what is a charter? Most aren't run by the community. Nearly all have an unelected board. Many are governed by a separate school code with less accountability to disabled students.

They can't even decide what they are.

God Forbid you call them "non-public schools" in charter fan circles. They'll give you the same splaination of how they are part of the district and are funded publically.

But in court, or when stimulus money goes out, they argue in court they are privately administered

So the public school system funds them, but random connected folks run them, have the ultimate say in their authorization, and collective educator voices are quite unwelcome (props to the brave educators who organized their charters).

And a last thing, whenever I've politely (not like this thread) brought up some of the problems I've seen with charters, Mr/s. Pressed Suit never been in a classroom (or worse, flamed out of the classroom in months) patronizingly says,