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Saturday, May 4, 2013

Superintendent Vitti says: charter schools are not public schools.

Did anybody catch what Vitti said about charter schools in the article about bullying?  It’s kind of a bombshell if you think about it. The superintendent said, “Public education is for everyone. It is easy to lose site of this simple fact in the cloud of charter schools and private school vouchers. These selective schools can accept or kick out students whenever they like.”

Right there he admits what people who have been fighting against the privatization of our schools have been talking about.

Right there he says charter schools aren’t public schools.

Right there he says charter schools can pick who they want.

Right there he says charter schools can get rid of whom they want too. These are not the words of some rando from Murray Hill or some union chief only interested in protecting bad teachers. No they come form a man who was hand picked by Gary Chartrand to be the superintendent here and who shared the same stage as Jeb Bush at the Champions for Education meeting just the other day. Chartrand and Bush are leaders in the privatization movement though they have yet to be as honest as Vitti was. 

Charter school supporters like to say they are public schools too. They think saying so gives them cover and some legitimacy. They ask us not to look behind the curtain and at all the management fees siphoned out of the classroom and to ignore their lack of certified teachers and a quality curriculum.

The truth however is just like Vitti said, they are not public schools and nobody should confuse them as such.

Chris Guerrieri
School teacher

4 comments:

  1. I also wonder if Vitti isn't setting us up for a fall by lowering the standards for high school graduation and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that public schools in the US don't make the grade.

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  2. If you go back and read the folio article you will notice that the quote you are refering to is an opinion of the author of the article, and is not a quote from Vitti. Also, I think we can both agree that Vitti upholds state law, and as you may already know, by state law, Charter schools are defined as public schools.

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  3. I think you should read it again, that entire section was a quote. Now did he mean it? I don't know sometimes people in authority say one thing and mean another.

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  4. Also you can call them public schools and the state can call them public schools but that doesn't make them public schools.

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