It is no secret that charter schools coast to coast are rife with fraud, waste, corruption, and racketeering. This is closely related to the fact that charter schools annually siphon billions of public dollars from public schools that serve 90% of the nation’s youth, thereby undermining the ability of public schools to educate millions of poor and low-income minority students.
Thousands of investigative reports, news articles, blogs, and scholarly books and articles have over-documented this relentless assault on public education, the economy, society, and the national interest by charter schools. No other sector or institution comes close to the financial malfeasance plaguing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools.
Charter schools are also riddled with many other well-documented problems, including very high teacher, student, and principal turnover rates; poor academic performance on a broad scale; union-busting; limited transparency; a tendency to increase segregation; and a long-running propensity to cherry-pick students, to name just a few other problems.
Oftentimes, however, it is argued that “bad charter schools” are essentially the result of “bad policy.” And since “bad policy” is what allows so many charter schools to be so rotten, the implication is that if policy were just better, more intelligent, more thoughtful, more humane, more technically sound, more enlightened, more rational, better crafted, and less bad, then charter schools would be great and all would be well. Such a view also uncritically presumes that the existence of charter schools is legitimate to begin with and that there is nothing inherently problematic about charter schools: we just need “good charter schools” that are the result of “good policy” made by “good people.”
The core problem with this ahistorical view that renders “good” as a meaningless universal abstraction, is that it does not recognize that “bad policy” is conscious and deliberate class policy—class war, to be precise.
Policy is never neutral or apolitical. Policy-making never takes place outside class relations. Policy is seldom produced by people without political and economic interests.
“Bad policies” represent, embody, and promote the narrow political and economic interests of major owners of capital. The rich are constantly crafting and imposing policies that serve them well but violate the public interest. The rich are not going to establish policies that undermine their narrow interests. Policy today is not human-centered and pro-social because the working class and people remain politically marginalized and disempowered in society; they do not decide the affairs of society or control the economy.
Charter schools, also known as contract schools, were conceived by the rich and their representatives before 1980 and were brought into being by the rich in the early 1990s. There has never been anything grass-roots or progressive about charter schools. Charter schools did not start out as humble, benign, accountable, transparent, empowering, teacher-centered, ethical “laboratories of innovation” that somehow unpredictably went bad years later—as many writers on the left, right, and center would have us believe. Charter schools had a problematic start from the very beginning. From the public’s perspective, charter schools were “bad policy” from the get-go.
The main undiscussed idea behind charter schools was to seize as much public funds and property from public schools in order to avert the inescapable law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism. In the context of a continually failing economy and discredited political system, charter schools would become pay-the-rich schemes by legally and politically depriving existing public schools of the “exclusive” right and authority to operate schools, specifically by making it possible to outsource education to private operators. This is how public education became deregulated, privatized, and marketized in the neoliberal period—and all under the banner of high ideals (e.g., “serving the kids,” “valuing choice,” “closing the achievement gap,” “empowering parents”).
For the rich, charter schools have always been “good policy” because they have successfully funneled tens of billions of public dollars to wealthy private interests determined to counter the inevitable law of the falling rate of profit.
But since policies that preserve and strengthen the dominance of wealthy private interests and their outdated system will never solve any problems or benefit the public, the working class and people have to collectively find creative ways to negate capital-centered thinking and assert their interests, demands, and needs. A good expression of this has been numerous teacher strikes that target charter schools and defend public education. It is not an accident that the last 12 months have seen an unprecedented number of public school teachers and charter school teachers go on strike to defend the right to education. People are fed up with the wrecking activity of charter schools and do not want a wild west scenario in an institution meant to consciously and thoughtfully plan for the education of the youth.
The fight to defend public education and oppose school privatization led by the rich is more than a matter of policy: it is a major front of class war.
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