LOL @ libtards

LOL AT NAIVE WHITE LIBTARD "PROGRESSIVES"

http://www.oregonlive*com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/09/hip-hop_schools_failure_sealed.html

Hip-hop school's failure sealed before its debut
Published: Wednesday, September 14, 2011, 7:48 PM
The Oregonian Editorial Board By The Oregonian Editorial Board

Nearly 50 Portland students scrambled for placement in high schools this week following the failure of their hip-hop charter school to open -- an unnecessary setback that complicates their academic and social lives while diminishing their dreams of building a life in the recording arts.

But the larger tragedy associated with the doomed REAL Prep Charter Academy is the rampant failure of its leaders to honor the public's trust and the state's inability to ensure it. Roughly $500,000 in federal dollars were spent to get us nowhere: a Pearl District building whose renovations are incomplete, classrooms with no desks, teachers without curriculum materials.

This is a wholesale embarrassment for which everyone involved is palms to the sky.

And that won't do.

Portland Public Schools approved REAL Prep as an alternative for students keen on learning from recording industry professionals while submitting to academics that could take root in hip-hop and other forms of music and performance. REAL Prep was to be modeled in some measure on the High School for the Recording Arts in St. Paul, Minn., which serves an overwhelmingly minority constituency and touts a high graduation rate.

But promise, facing Monday's deadline, fell apart.

Charter schools are launched by the people who envision them, in this case those who ran a tax-exempt corporation called Freedom Thru Freestyle Inc. For the most part, FTF leaders answered to nobody but themselves, spending startup funds on staff remuneration, student and faculty recruitment, and a curriculum consultancy with a hip-hop band's brand manager. Little to nothing was spent on textbooks, desks and computers -- the belief among sponsors only weeks ago that some phantom donor, inspired by the idea of REAL Prep, would step forward and outfit the place.

It never happened. The Oregonian's Betsy Hammond reports only a smattering of recording equipment was ever obtained.

PPS did track the management of the group's small seed grant early on by aligning paperwork with expenses. But when it came time for big federal implementation grants to land -- two valued at about $225,000 each -- the school's planners requested they work only with the Oregon Department of Education, which selected FTF for the grants.

And there was very little oversight. Federal regulations, Hammond found, require the state to give charter schools "a high degree of autonomy" over finances. But autonomy killed this dream.

It is not enough that Erica Jayasuriya, a longtime Waldorf School teacher leading the launch, stepped down over the summer and yielded to financial manager Tom Klein and curriculum specialist Keisha Edwards. And it's not enough that these folks, along with their new chairman, the vocalist and photographer Juan McGruder, found themselves short of money and unready on Monday.

They simply did not or could not do what they said or allowed others to believe they would do. They worked in a vacuum. And now we're all paying for it, the students with something more valuable than money: their dreams.

The Oregon Department of Education is busy tracking the money and will turn any worrisome findings over to the attorney general for review. But that's not good enough, either.

The federal government, with a loud shout out from state and PPS officials, needs to revise its rules to insist on basic accountability for the citizen dollars it doles out for charter school development. Citizens deserve it as do the students whose futures are in play.