"Private: intended for or restricted to the use of a particular person, group, or class."

President Obama's Race to the Top education plan has not been in the headlines very much because most of it has yet to be implemented, but from recent trends in education reform one can see where it is heading. At the heart of this movement is the effort to privatize the nation's public schools in the form of charter schools.

Let me start by acknowledging that many charter schools do in fact do great work, and many have an orientation towards social justice (which is pertinent to communities where the school is one of many failed public institutions). At the same time it is important to understand that charter schools are essentially publicly funded private schools, indepedent of the local school district. In fact many charter schools receive their funding from private sources altogether. So what does this mean for our schools?

Research studies have been mixed to say the least. Some have demonstrated higher test scores (which themselves have many potential sources of bias), while others have indicated that charter schools achieve at the same rate or sometimes even lower than public schools. Even more disturbing, charter schools tend to be much more segregated, with many having an application process and preferring "model students." All of these facts indicate that charter schools themselves are no better than public schools, but rather it is the community and family support level that can predict the success of a student.

The question then becomes what happens to the students who do not have family support or who live in impoverished communities, oftentimes with epidemiological levels of violence. Where do these children and teenagers end up, since many don't end up in charter schools? Considering the dropout rate in the United States's public schools, which Time Magazine reported as being 30% several years ago, and taking into account the explosion of the American prison population, one can get see where most of these children left behind are in fact going. Other factors such as the real unemployment rate indicating one-sixth of Americans do not have a stable job, the foreclosure crisis, and the rising number of people going hungry in the United States all indicate a "second America" mostly invisible to the mainstream media and many college students bound for the work-force.

So how does this relate to schools? Well, states with severe deficits have no choice but to apply to the Race to the Top program for lack of resources just to get out of the red. States are also dipping into the pockets of city governments, who are responsible for public school systems. In California, many city governments now have little means of revenue outside of the sales tax. The economic crisis for the mainstream has been a disaster for communities that lacked resources even before the Great Recession.

As long as the national government continues to favor private charter schools over public schools, give financial incentives to cities and states to favor those charter schools, and force public schools to compete with charters that are independent of unions and offer better salaries to teachers, there is little evidence that education will improve in the United States apart from the anecdotal. Perhaps a good indicator of the future of impoverished school districts is the city of New Orleans, which was in crisis years before the foreclosures 0f 2007-present. If you want to read a little about New Orleans's new school system, go here:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_04/narr214.shtml