Last September, the Senate Committee on Education met in an informational meeting to discus Equity in Education Policy Proposals and have a panel discussion that included Kali Thorne Ladd, Executive Director of KairosPDX which describes itself as "a non-profit organization focused on delivering excellent, equitable education to underserved children, their families and their communities." It's a public charter school located in inner Northeast Portland.

During the discussion, Senator Dallas Heard (R-Roseburg) asks the panel a broad and simple question, "Are you supportive -- and the groups you're associated with -- of more school choice for parents to be able to dictate where they want their child to be educated?"

After a pause, Thorne Ladd takes up the answer.

"...Choice definitely disproportionately favors privileged children -- mostly white -- and definitely middle class. And as such, becasue the public education system is to educate all children and all children don't exercise choice, I don't think the answer is having lots of choice."

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Thorne Ladd continues, clearly recognizing her own hypocrisy, and calls herself out.

"Now, I say that, recognizing that I do run a public charter. I think we found that the black children were failing at such high rates that we wanted to find an option that could yield different results."

In other words, the local public schools were failing at such high rates, so we created an alternative charter school -- school choice -- but we don't think this is the answer.

It causes one to wonder, why the negative cast on the value of choice, which most people think is generally a good thing, and specifically could be a great tool to help resolve the problem of failing inner-city schools, coupled with the defense of dollars being poured into failing inner-city schools? Could it be that the political operations of the educational-industrial complex are more important than actually helping kids? Watch this three minute video to see




--Staff Reports

Post Date: 2021-03-06 12:16:59

Last Update: 2021-03-06 14:06:42