For one reason or another the U.S. public school system has been under constant attack since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the American people have been well primed to believe that public schools are cesspools of ignorance and depravity. Except for the schools their own kids go to, of course. It’s all those other schools that are rotten.
The first taxpayer-supported charter schools were set up after Brown so that taxpayer dollars could follow white children into what amounted to private all-white academies. But what started out as a reaction to desegregation soon turned into Opportunity! in the form of the charter school scam.
As conservatives continued to gripe about those awful public schools, charter schools were marketed as a way to empower parents to make better public schools. And on paper, it sounds like a grand idea. However, it’s also turned into a way to siphon taxpayer dollars into a for-profit education industry. Even officially non-profit charter schools turn to for-profit companies to manage them sometimes. See “Education for Profit: The Darker Side of Charter Schools.”
And what’s happening out in Real World Land is that many of these charters have become less accountable to parents and the communities than traditional public schools used to be. The charter school activists saw Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to force New Orleans to accept a mostly charter school system. And today residents complain the New Orleans system is more like colonialism than reform. With no elected school board, schools are answerable only to the state chartering bureaucracy, not to communities and parents.
Having an elected school board created ways for the public to participate. When Katrina hit, I was serving on the search committee for a new superintendent. For years I served on the disciplinary review committee. It was much different from the dictatorial charter school environment.
The charters purport to give parents and teachers greater power, right? But you have little real voice. In the charter school world they say, “We don’t even want a PTA in our school, but we’ll survey our parents about satisfaction.†Well, goddamn it, we’re not consumers!
Now the grifters have hit a glitch. Last week, the Washington state Supreme Court decided that privately operated charter schools do not qualify as public institutions and do not qualify to receive tax support.
In the lead opinion, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen said the case wasn’t about the merits of charter schools, simply whether they were eligible for public funds. Citing state Supreme Court precedent from 1909, she said they are not eligible because they are not under the control of local voters. Washington charters are run by private nonprofit organizations that appoint their own boards. Most, including Tacoma’s charters, are also under the oversight of the appointed Washington State Charter School Commission.
(On Diane Ravitch’s invaluable blog, Peter Greene has a simple solution for the charter-school panjandrums – submit to the authority of an elected local school board. Yeah, that’ll happen.)
Because it happened on Friday of a holiday weekend in which Donald Trump is still running for president, this was a huge story that got buried in the news cycle, but it remains a signifying decision in the fight against the school “reformers.” This latest attempt was the result of the fourth statewide referendum on charter schools. This latest one squeaked through in 2012 because the pro-charter side brought in all the pros from Dover – Gates, the inexcusable Jeff Bezos, Ms. Rhee and her consort, Kevin Johnson. There is now great scrambling among the masters of the universe because public accountability and democratic institutions can be so damned…inconvenient. (Not that they’re done. There are higher courts.) Public education should be conducted in public schools. Period. Good on the Washington Supremes for reinforcing this simple truth.
Regarding quality of education, if you google for information you can find articles extolling the virtues of charter schools, and others complaining they’re teaching kids that cave men rode dinosaurs. (Forbes magazine loves them, which ought to make us suspicious right there.) The rules and regulations governing charters as well as how performances are measured vary from state to state, so it’s hard to make any general claims. But there are news stories telling us that in some states and school systems — Ohio, Chicago, and Arizona, for example — the charter schools are lagging behind public schools. See also Separating fact from fiction in 21 claims about charter schools.
Weirdly, both supporters and detractors of charter schools pull data from the same study to support their positions, so here is the study. It takes a while to load, and I haven’t had time to look at it in detail, but it appears to say that charter school performance can be better than public schools in some ways but are worse in others.
Conservatives POV:
“Private = GREAT!”
‘Public = Horrible.’
Conservatives cause confusion in the minds of the citizenry. And in the confusion they create, they are very deft at cheating and stealing, to get what they want.
And in the case of these private schools, they’re cheating student of their educations, and stealing their futures.
I really with there was a Hell for people like these greedy sociopaths and psychopaths to go to for all of eternity!
Sadly, there ain’t.
And if there IS a Hell, it’s here on Earth – thanks in large part to conservative sociopaths and psychopaths…
“the American people have been well primed to believe that public schools are cesspools of ignorance and depravity. Except for the schools their own kids go to, of course. It’s all those other schools that are rotten.”
Funny you could just replace “public schools” with “Goverment” and the sentence still applies perfectly in right wing world! The GOP has been chipping away at the words “public” and “Goverment” for so long they effect a visceral reaction from many. If the grifters that run these “charter” schools actually lose taxpayer funds the scam will end faster than you can say Swindler!
Charters, like “trickle-down economics” and other Republican scams, are a serious threat to our Future as a nation. That said, the Charter Lobby has a ton of people hoodwinked, including: our President; many minority parents seeking to close the achievement gap (like the GOP would allow that to happen!); yuppie parents seeking to avoid mixing with darker people (yes, you can drive your SUV’s to lily-white suburban charters, but don’t count on them being measurably better academically than the public school you were fleeing).
You see, the curriculum is unregulated, the “teachers” (at least in our state, NC) don’t need so much as a bachelor’s degree, and salaries and “money flow” is hidden from public review. Our state recently “OK-ed” two online-only charters which had Been subject to investigation in previous victim-states. Oh– and our state is now offering “vouchers”, that is money, to local Madrassas—oops!— wrong misogynistic sect– I meant Catholic schools. All the while, our public school teachers start at 30– not enough to cover a modest apartment and still get health insurance, pay taxes, and eat.
I don’t know, Uncledad. Have American voters been voting against politicians who do deals that lose and send taxpayer money to private developers/consultations/etc? Deals for setting up factories that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions and return tens of millions? Stadium deals? Replacing special forces deployment with contractors from private security companies?
I haven’t seen it. And there are plenty of other examples of that sort of money-losing.
This old broad is glad she went to school in the 1940s and 1950s when I just got taught how to read and write and add, etc. From there on, pretty much had to think for myself. There’s a lot to be said for simplicity. It wasn’t a war between the adults then.
As with most moronic aspects of American life, this too was satirized by The Simpsons. In one episode, the late, lamented Mrs. Krabappel was teaching her fourth-grade students from a table of elements provided by Oscar Meyer, which included an element called “Bolonium.” Then there was the time a toy company took over Springfield Elementary, and used the kids to design a creepy robot-doll called “Funzo.”
Training our kids to be pickers & packers for Amazon, that’s the end game I foresee.
It’s sad to read that ALEC has its fingers in the education pie also. What disturbs me most is the idea that these Repug politicians can just grab an off the shelf legislative package to solve any problem that they are just to lazy or disinterested to deal with. Just add water!
They have no concern about the realities that occur down the line with their one size fits all mentality. Especially when it comes to education.
I think it was Marco Rubio who announced we should get rid of the U.S.Dept.of Education. Federal oversight. I find that troubling because education is the most valuable resource we have as a nation. And if there is nobody there to oversee and direct the big picture then we become fragmented with education goals.
Did a Masters thesis on charter schools in SE WI. Big pic idea; if a charter isn’t associated with a school board, chances are it sucks. Very, very few independent charter schools are little more than ways to grub money from the public school trough. In Milwaukee, hardly the bastion of education, charters and voucher schools perform WORSE than the regular public schools. Many/most of the vouchers are religious schools getting money from the state to teach religion on the taxpayer’s dime. With all due respect to my colleagues in Milwaukee, but if you can’t outperform Milwaukee Public Schools, then you should just hang it up. Charters in the South are used as a way to continue segregation. The black/white ratio is seriously skewed toward whites in charters. Through various laws and other tactics they’ve figured out how to have the public pay for things that should have been ended with Brown.
The republican mindset, and this goes for anything IMO but especially education policy, is that if I passed a law, then the problem is solved. Never mind what happens afterward. In WI they’ve skewed the law so horribly toward vouchers and charters that very wealthy people are having the state pay to have their kid sent to private Catholic schools. The vouchers and charters also don’t have to participate in state wide testing (read, accountability). So while public schools get dinged for not having each and every kid with a cognitive disability take the ACT (and I am not shitting you on this, kids with CD must take the ACT as part of state wide accountability) vouchers and charters can pretty much do whatever the hell they want, and teach whatever the hell they want, with absolutely no accountability to the state. Zero. Nada. Nil. Zilcho. Vouchers don’t even need to teach every kid, they can select who they want to have. I have sat in meetings where the discussion was; what strategies can we use with the CD kids to raise their ACT score from a 10 to a 13, because that’s what’s expected. Besides the absolute misery that these kids go through when they have to sit endlessly taking these pointless tests, it is a huge waste of resources, and makes no difference in the kids life in the end.
Oyvay, sorry. Don’t get me started…….
Swami…It isn’t just ALEC, but other hidden “think tanks” that are supported by the Koch boyz…this has been a long term item for these guys…and it has been fairly successful in parts of the country…Denver is one prime example of their influence and corruption…and they are creeping this way…