The Baltimore Sun and other news organizations recently noted the designation of a handful of schools as “Opportunity Schools,” including Hamilton Elementary Middle School in Baltimore City. The designation is the work of an organization named MarylandCAN, the local branch of 50CAN, both of which promote the privatization of public schools in America.
We didn’t cover it because the designation was based mainly on test scores and the poverty level of students, although the story failed to focus on that angle.
Now three parents from Hamilton write in the Sun that they don’t appreciate an organization that was founded by a pro-privatization hedge fund manager playing on their pride to promote a hidden agenda.
Josh Botel, the director of MarylandCAN, “in a matter of days,” they write, “has gone from talking about ‘Opportunity Schools’ in Baltimore to claiming that ‘there are organizations in other parts of the country that are operating schools that are succeeding in leading children from low-income families—especially children of color—to reach much higher levels of academic success than the norm for their communities.'”
The agenda of the pro-privatization movement in the US is to divert attention away from the growth-stunting effect of poverty. Advocates of charter schools, run by for-profit corporations, would, as a general rule, tear down public schools in neighborhoods where lots of poor people live. They would replace them with charter schools, managed primarily outside of state oversight but still made wealthy by state tax dollars.
Maryland’s charter school laws are among the worst in the nation, mainly because the public schools are very good and there has not been a great outcry from the public for relaxing charter school laws in Annapolis. People and corporations want to make money by tearing down public schools so several kids who live in impoverished neighborhoods have no choice but to attend for-profit charter schools. In Maryland, that would require a change in the law. Any such law would be a movement against the public schools, which is why we haven’t given this movement any airtime, until now.
The letter was written by Ben Dalby, Ty Pearson, and Cathleen Becker of Baltimore and appears on page 15 of today’s edition.
