Who owns the media, even the “public” media? A Teacher in Bed-Stuy Posts to Beth Fertig's Blog

A teacher posted this today on Beth Fertig's News Blog on WNYC's website:

When will the press expose the “distraction”, to use Obama’s term, that charter schools provide for a system that is truly unwilling to reform itself? I am a teacher with 30 years in the DOE. My elementary school in Bedford-Stuyvesant experienced reform in the early 1990s, sponsored by the Office of School Reform and the UFT. It worked and transformed us in meaningful ways.

Twenty years later we are reaping the benefits of that initiative and are expanding our enrollment while all neighboring schools are losing theirs and subsequently having to share their building with a second or third school, sometimes a charter school. We benefited from funding opportunities then that no longer exist for us now, because funders are putting their money into charter schools.

We have devastating midyear budget cuts that they don’t have. Who will expose the fact that while they may have a lottery for their students, ultimately they get to pick and choose them and their parents? They cap their numbers by the late October head count and begin to weed out the troublesome and academically low-performing students from then on in time for the state exams.

Of course, they are going to look like they are doing a great job. We have to take those students back and work with the students they don’t want. In the end this exclusive private system within the public system is being supported by cuts to our budgets. The majority of public school children, who will never attend a charted school, will lose out in overcrowded classrooms in schools that have had to drop arts-in-education partnerships and after school programs, the services that made us great and helped to bolster their achievement and love of learning.

Who in the media is going to question a system that won’t spread reform to every school in order to benefit every child? Who wants to understands what is really happening in our midst, in the name of “school reform”? There is a travesty going on and they get away with it, because no one will report it.

Begs the question: Who owns the media, even the “public” media?