Seven-OH-Six-Niner.3

We are on CONTENT, why HB 7069 is the educational equivalent of the Titanic pulling out of Southhampton, England on her maiden voyage.

3. People will argue that the bill did provide a fund for struggling schools to tap to implement the changes needed to get them out of failing status.

Yes, the bill allocated $2,000 per student for 25 struggling traditional public schools. But the list of schools that must close under this bill is over 100. Winners and losers, dog eat dog world, competition is the end all and be all of human existence, the Darwinian struggle for survival, that is how our legislative leaders, with the complicity of the governor, view the world and structure our civilization.

Thus, 100 or more schools need extra resources, we'll toss out scraps for no more than 25, let the dogs fight.

Hmm, if this analogy was real, these legislators would be put in jail because dog fighting is illegal.

But we're only talking about human children.

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(the above blank space is to let that last thought sink in.)

There is more to talk about, always more, but we need to be brief; let's move on to EFFECT.

Charter schools are resegregating our schools and by implication, our society.

Don't tell me charter schools are giving African-American children a chance to escape failing schools in poor neighborhoods when they arrive in charter schools that are almost all black. White children are leaving public schools for schools that are almost all white. 'Choice,' when aggregated in its totality, is resulting in a bad choice.

Separate but equal is inherently unequal. Read it here: http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/5-decision/courts-decision.html

While you have tired of the baby boom generation and wish us to pass into retirement and silence, here is where we must speak up.

We are the generation of desegregation.

We are the generation of federal troops ordered to protect the access of non-white children to the desegregated schools to which they were assigned.

We are the generation of forced busing to move children around cities and school districts to achieve the goal of desegregation and equality of education for all.

Here is our testimony: IT WORKED.

We learned how to relate to people not like us. We learned to form friendships, to play together, to learn together, and, as time moved on, to work together. We learned to live together. Some of us learned how to love one another.

But the legacy charter schools are forming is that they are a vehicle to overturn that. We can go back to the pre-1954 society under the illusion of school choice.

The fact that charter school advocates are being used as proxies in the real undoing of integration through the promotion of school vouchers and the privatization of all schools ought to give everyone pause.