This is the choice the FOR-PROFIT corporate reformers of public education are offering our children. Send your child to a corporate charter school and expect that child to give up his or her social life (that includes being a member of your family) starting in kindergarten at age FIVE to end up long hours like a university medical student does.
Eric Mears, a teacher in a public high school in the South Bronx, complains that his high school seniors were required to read a pro-charter essay in a Houghton Mifflin textbook.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/24/my-public-school-students-read-pro-charter-propaganda/
The essay, by Malcolm Gladwell, celebrated the work ethic in East Asian schools and at KIPP, while putting down the students’ neighborhood and school.
Mears wonders why Gladwell chooses East Asian schools as models for success instead of the schools of Finland.
He objects to the blatant pro-charter propaganda in the textbook.
He writes:
“I am a South Bronx public school teacher who is expected to teach my students that they must enroll in charter schools and leave “desultory” public schools, such as ours, if they wish to succeed.
“I, along with scores of other New York high school teachers, teach from a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) Collections textbook whose introductory text is a pro-charter chapter from Malcolm…
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