IPS Privatizes Two More Schools For The Benefit Of The Charter School Industry

I've been telling you folks that the mission of the education profiteers who seized control of the Indianapolis Public Schools is to dismantle the public school system in its entirety by privatizing all of the schools and turning their management over to private operators they have a financial interest in rewarding. To that end, the IPS board approved the privatization of two more public schools yesterday.

Control of Riverside School 44 will be turned over to Global Preparatory Academy. This is a mayoral-sponsored charter school run by Mariama Carson, the wife of U.S. Rep. Andre Carson. You may recall that former Mayor Bart Peterson's Mind Trust created a fellowship opportunity for her at Global Preparatory Academy to lure her away from her job as a principal at Pike Township Schools to run this charter school. It's a dual language school catering to Hispanics.

Joyce Kilmer School 69 is being turned over to Kindezi Academy, another mayoral charter school that's set up to operate as a segregated, black-only school. Its goal is to have less student-teacher interaction and more computer-led independent instruction. Students spend their day playing merry-go-round as they move in small groups from one work station to another throughout the school day.

The profiteering opportunities are mind-boggling. IPS gives these private charter schools free use of our public school buildings, but the taxpayers get stuck footing the bill to maintain the schools and the transportation of the students. Naturally, this arrangement meets with the one hundred percent approval of our Gannett-owned newspaper, which believes a charter school performs better than public schools even though the statistics show they fare no better on average and often perform even worse than traditional public schools.