Gov. Deal’s Opportunity School District is Now About Poverty and Crime!
That’s right. In a paid TV advertisement, the Governor is pleading with folks in Georgia to Vote Yes on Question 1 on the November 8th ballot. His message is that if you vote Yes, then poverty and crime will be affected.
Where did this language come from? Why is Deal using it to promote his pet education project?
In particular, Gov. Deal is claiming that,
If you vote Yes on Question 1 on the November 8th Ballot, then the Opportunity School District will somehow
- End the cycle of poverty and crime
- Carry out a rescue operation from 127 failing schools
These two new outcomes will result from changing 127 public schools to 127 private charter schools. Now, mind you, in all the documents that were filed in the Georgia Legislature related to Senate Bill 133 during the 2016 legislative session, poverty and crime were not discussed as part of this bill.
In fact, I ran a search of Georgia Senate Bill 133, and neither the word crime or poverty appear in the document.
So it looks like there has been a shift in the rationale for the OSD. Instead of just improving kids’ test scores on the OSD will reduce crime and end the cycle of poverty.
The 127 schools will do this.
Are you kidding? The Governor has it backwards.
Georgia citizens will have an opportunity on November 8th to tell the Governor and his cronies that the OSD is a fraud.
According to Nathan Deal’s comments on a 30 second video, the OSD is going to break the cycle of poverty and crime, rescue children trapped in 127 failing schools.
And if you watch another video from Georgia Leads on Education, Gov. Deal’s political action group, you will have to have brown bag handy.
The language and the imagery of the Georgia Leads video tape propaganda serves only the Governor, his daughter-in-law (Denise Deal) whose company (Southern Magnolia Capital) will earn 5% its raising for Deal’s opportunity pac, as well those people who will come into the state and set up private charter schools in local Georgia districts, use the local communities’ money, and have little to no tie to the school community.
This equation was never part off the legislation (Senate Bill 133) that went through the the Georgia Legislature
Words like fix, crime, criminal justice system, crisis, less fortunate propagate the Georgia Leads video. Combined with the Deal 30 second video, we have a newly reconfigured OSD based on poverty and crime.
The one who gets an F is the Governor and his staff who have pushed the OSD, not the 127 schools in the chronically failing list.
But the fundamental problem here, is ancient thinking suggesting that the schools can have the major impact on poverty and crime, when we know that these are more complex issues, and simply holding professional teachers as the one’s responsible for solving a massive problem is unfathomable and unconscionable.
Deal’s view of education, poverty and crime is without any base of research and knowledge. It is based on undemocratic politics and questionable ethics. The Opportunity School District is rooted in Deal’s ethical and financial problems, and has nothing to do with improving education in Georgia.
Improving School Achievement
The solution to school achievement, as presented by David C. Berliner in his research article, Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform, in Learning From the Federal Market-Based Reforms (Library Copy), edited by William J. Mathis and Trina M. Trujillo is embedded in the problem of poverty.
In 2005, Berliner analyzed the relationships among educational achievement and poverty. His 2005 article was republished in the Mathis & Trujillo research book, and as Dr. Berliner says, the relationships he describes and arguments he made are exactly the same as today.
In Berliner’s original study, his work is summarized in this sentence.
The data presented in this study suggest that the most powerful policy for improving our nations’ school achievement is a reduction in family and youth poverty (Berliner, p.439)
The fiasco that Deal has run through the state legislature and now put before the voters of Georgia to plunder Georgia school districts by taking possession of more than 120 schools over the next year and beyond is a fraud.
It must be stopped. It must be voted down.
Vote NO on question 1 on the November 8 Georgia ballot.
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