Rule of thumb: If you are starting off asking if you are being called a liar, it means the answer is “Yes”. 
Several posters here already chimed in about how not public these charter schools are.
As I said, the entire concept of Charter Schools is flawed regardless of what people call their PRIVATE operating board. It is all about ignoring student exclusion and diversion of funds from the public school system drive the results claimed by them.
A “non-profit” charter school is run by a private entity outside of public control. As noted by other posters the “non-profit” entity may simply be a spin-off of a for profit corporation created for tax reasons.Either way it is outsourcing control of the school and in most cases the teaching as well.
A magnet school is a public school in all senses of the words in terms of funding and control.
It’s simple math:
Looks for math…
Charter schools aren’t public schools in the same way libraries aren’t public institutions by this logic. They receive public funds, are held accountable to standards by a charter, and yet are run by groups of non-governmental employees.
This trope that charter schools aren’t public schools is non-sense. Yes, for-profit charter schools are wrong and I’d advocate for them being shut down. But, the argument that charter schools are purely profit-driven entities is, in itself, a racist argument meant to deprive families of color from having education choices in the same way that wealthier families have those options (see parochial schools, private schools, and magnet schools).
Thanks, @DukeTrout. I appreciate the break-down of the argument of charter schools’ racist origins. Let’s set aside for a moment the tenuous connection between racist economists in Virginia and the civil rights leaders that “hijacked” (in your words) the charter school movement in Minnesota three decades later.
For arguments sake, let’s say that the idea for charters, via an argument for school vouchers, is racist. My issue is that Cory’s presentation of charter schools today, serving roughly 3 million students today, as racist denigrates those families’ rights to make sure their children have the best education possible. It becomes a case of a white progressive telling families of color what is best for their children, for their family, for their communities. To me, that’s racist.
Again, let’s say that the idea of charter schools emerged from a plan to keep schools segregated. What does that matter to a black family in Newark whose neighborhood school is failing, but the local KIPP charter school is supporting students to academic success? Are you arguing that because the voucher idea was racist then that family should be made to send their child to a failing school? That sounds like privileged bullshit to me.
The notion of public schools likely emerged from Horace Mann’s visit to Prussia. Does that origin have any bearing on the concept of public schools today? Would you be surprised if Cory, in describing public education, said something like “public schools, which emerged from the Kingdom of Prussia’s scheme to successfully prepare the peasant class for menial jobs”? To me, that’s how Cory’s description of charter schools sound–completely detached from the daily reality of millions of families of color in the US.
@DukeTrout, The Ed Post article you link on the NAACP’s charter moratorium is a good one. You should read the opinion piece from Citizen Stewart linked within: https://www.the74million.org/article/stewart-black-parents-deserve-an-naacp-that-fights-for-schools-they-choose-not-against-them/
You do realize that the reason Charter Schools were a thing is because of racist wypipo not wanting their kids to attend integrated schools, right? Because “why should urban slackabouts get handouts when I have to work hard to pay for them?” (Even though, you know, people of colour had to work three times as hard to be as successful as a white counterpart).
Charter schools subsequently became a way for the rich and Petit Bourgouisie to enrich themselves further at the expense of the public school system. Even as public schools continued to have funding slashed, wages frozen, services shuttered, the wholesale transformation of public education to private profit marched on.
“Education choices”, my ass
EDIT:
The answer to resentful white people defunding public institutions is not to give rich private actors more money. It is to restore public education funding and smash racist institutions and systems of segregation.
How is a blind lottery exclusionary? There is a technical public high school in our city that does the exact same thing. Are they exclusionary as well?
That makes no sense. Libraries are funded and controlled by public entities in their entirety.
Meaning they are not public institutions, but privately run ones which happen to be glomming off public funding. Unlike your example of libraries.
No, its basic facts. If they are not run by a government entity, they are not public. Simple honest logical definitions there.
Not an argument anyone made. Nice strawman you are burning. But “choice” is a fiction here because the charter schools are funded by taking money away from public schools. No option is really being presented here since one is being destroyed to bolster the other. Moreover charter schools owe their existence to private efforts at school segregation using public funding.
Unlike public schools, charter schools use public taxpayer money with zero obligation of serving the entire community contributing it. It is the public paying for its own exclusion and discrimination.
Word problems are hard!
Unless the school is part of a system with a mandate to teach an entire community, as public schools have, they bolster their stats by excluding students, especially poor performing ones.
No doubt that technical public high school can’t get rid of students based on their performance, unlike a charter school.
Not one single child has been expelled from our school for academic performance. The only expulsion in 8 years (that my family has attended or worked at the school) brought a weapon on campus. If anything the district has been encouraging children with varying degrees of behavioral issues to “try out the charter because they have a great program.”
The schools you’re speaking of should absolutely be shut down but you continue to speak about “all charters” like they’re all the same and I’m telling you that you’re wrong. You just don’t seem to want to listen.
I’m going to stop replying now because this is going nowhere.
If you say so, but in reality all charter schools owe their existence and stats to their lack of a mandate to teach an entire community or keep underperforming students. I am sure you can cite to rules within the school’s charter which prohibit such activity. Or not.
In addition, there is never any “school choice” being that the public system is being drained of funding to go to the charter system. True choice is between public schools and private ones.
I had the same during elementary school, but no such thing for junior high/high school, so I was rather miserable until college.
It appears you have the unicorn of charter schools! That’s great for you, but doesn’t represent charters everywhere. In Michigan, which is the topic at hand and where I live, charters perform worse than most public schools while siphoning funds from public schools, and most charters here are for-profit. The entire student population is suffering due to the dilution of public funds.
Would be happy to make a guess about the school district you send your own children…
It’s not the educational experts in Minnesota who hijacked the system, but they also didn’t implement the ideas they proposed. It’s the KKK-adjacent private interests that took the idea that Shanker advocated and put it into practice as a way to achieve resegregation while also making a publicly-funded profit.
I have experienced first-hand that some charter schools are absolutely great for kids. I also don’t blame parents or communities for reaching for any solution for their kids when they’ve been abandoned by the federal government. Any given charter school isn’t racist. It’s the structure of the charter school system that is racist, because it takes funds from the already stretched public school system and re-directs it to charter schools while the public school still has all its existing expenses.
As a progressive, you should know better than to use those right-wing catch-phrases. Those two phrases have been dogwhistles since I was in school, decades ago.
Except they are publicly-run and publicly-accountable. The word charter refers to the charter they must abide by. Just because you disagree with the way that some of them operate doesn’t make them any less a public institution that can and have been held accountable by the public.
Neither part of that statement is true. They are privately run and accountability tends to run to non-existent. As is the case in Detroit and many other charter schools.
If they were publicly run, they would not be charter schools in the first place. They would be public schools. You also got confused about how magnet schools work.
You don’t seem particularly well versed in the subject beyond canned points and ignoring everyone’s responses.
Thanks for your response, but I respectfully disagree with your take. And I will continue to advocate for the families that aren’t as lucky as me to have great options for their students. And I will look to examples of traditional public schools working together with charter schools (see Newark, DC, Denver) to serve students as a way forward to improve education opportunities for historically-marginalized communities.
At the same time, I will continue to advocate for increased school funding, increased teacher pay, increased professionalism in teacher training, culturally-responsive teaching, increased diversity in the teaching force, and the reduction of policies that prioritize adults over students’ interests in schools.
If you are interested, you can Google “charter revoked” to see examples of charter schools being decommissioned due to failing to meet accountability standards.
I’ll take your insult in stride because I don’t know you. On the other hand, I’ve spent more than a decade working in public education, have visited hundreds of public schools, and work every day with school leaders, teachers, district admins, parents, and students in traditional and charter schools.
At this point, I have to say @Joe_Ventura this seems like a total threadjack. I get that you’re defending your school and others like it, but the OP is about students at a for-profit charter school that apparently did some pretty appalling stuff, sacrificing good teachers and the education of students in favor of profit.
