And the next step will involve blaming the students at bottom-feeding charters for being too lazy to learn and suggesting that the feds changed the rules as a sop for those filthy undeserving students, rather than the operators; who will need to be bailed out in order to save the education system.
Also, any suggestions that sophisticated con artists might be able to exploit an information asymmetry against poor people with limited options are just condescending liberal paternalism and probably an actively racist desire to keep the poor dependent on welfare.
Did I miss any coming highlights?
Just one. The charter system takes dollars directly from the public schools. They deny it, but it’s still true. If the charter system implodes, it could do serious damage to public schools as well.
Pop quiz: Is “pratnership” a clever play on words, or merely a typo?
Clearly both systems are a mess, just talk to any parent navigating either. Charter in Arizona was the lesser of the two evils for my Son, it was a gamble, but it paid off for us and him.
My son has always had access to affluent public schools, but still I want to ask, why don’t we demand the same quality for all children?
Depends on the state. Here in PA a charter school gets a percentage of what a student’s home district gets from the state.
But the district within which the charter resides gets to determine whether or not the charter is renewed.
This is something I never thought of but charter schools have always made me uneasy. It seems like it attempts to fix the problem of failing public schools by taking money away from them and giving it to private concerns.
Don’t you get it? That’s the Republican solution to everything.
- Cut funding.
- Watch services erode.
- Blame civil servants.
- Demand privatization.
In Arizona at the time 90’s - early 2000’s you went with Charter if you wanted maintain your sanity. But you make an excellent point, in the USA every child should get access to superior education free of charge regardless of the location. We are supposed to be living in the greatest nation on the planet afterall.
I have SO much to say about this subject.
My brother was hired as principal for a Charter High School in Texas and was the principal of a Charter Middle School in Arizona. He also had a brief run at another Charter school in Chicago which used video games as a teaching strategy. For them he was hired a Curriculum Developer with the promise of becoming principal of his own high school in the near future.
He is currently the principal of a public high school in Ohio that uses audio-visual production projects as the basis of its teaching.
He is an excellent administrator and educator who has had a long career in alternative education techniques, starting with a 10 year stint at a private school based on the principles of the 7 Intelligences.
His family has had to move 4 times during his daughter’s early childhood because of the unscrupulous investors in the Charter schools and the lack of support he had from them.
The school in Texas hired him without checking that he had the proper credentials for their state. When the school never opened, he ended up high and dry because he had no ability to work as a principal anywhere in the state.
The school in Arizona was squeezing teacher pay while the investors were looting the funds.
The school in Chicago had all kinds of in-fighting, most everyone left, and he was never advanced as promised.
Many of these schools expect very quick results from kids with troubled backgrounds; they think the corporate model can be applied to children and when it doesn’t succeed the investors run.
See? Government can’t work. It should just get out of the way and give taxpayer money directly to private corporations, with few rules and no oversight.
That’s really the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long time. Charter schools are generally ranked better than public schools. They compete in the same geographic area for the same students.
That a charter school is accredited doesn’t mean anyone has to send their children there. If people are unhappy with a charter school, they can move their children back to public schools.
Moreover, who is accrediting the public schools? Are they subject to independent examination, or are they judged by the same entrenched bureaucracy the let them fail in the first place? The exact same argument can be made about public schools in general.
None of which leads us to a meltdown of the financial system.
That all sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?
Citation required.
Yeah right. Let’s take a look at corrupt charter school funding in, hmm, how about Ohio?
The two central figures in Ohio’s corporate charter movement, David Brennan and Bill Lager, have donated a combined $6.4 million to state legislators and committees, more than 90 percent of which went to Republicans, who have dominated the state House and Senate. Their donations have paid off. Since 1998, the state has given $1.76 billion to schools run by Brennan’s White Hat Management and Lager’s Electronic Classrooms of Tomorrow, accounting for one-quarter of all state charter funds.
Look, you don’t get the government you want, you get the government you can afford. These people obviously want better government more than you. If you ask me, every God damned last one of them are Patriots, celebrating America and Freedom and America!
Because racism?
And classism?
