Charter Schools

Joe Biden is one of about two dozen 2020 democratic candidates running for President of the United States. This is not his first presidential campaign.

The narrow aim of maximizing profit as fast as possible compels owners of capital to say and do whatever they have to to get richer, no matter how irrational and contradictory, and no matter the cost to society and the environment. Such an aim is irresponsible and outdated, and needs to be replaced by a human-centered aim that recognizes the need for a modern economy controlled by the working class and people themselves.

Deregulated, deunionized, segregated, test-obsessed, privately-operated charter schools that lose employees regularly, manipulate student enrollment frequently, and funnel huge sums of public funds to the rich and their allies under the banner of high ideals cannot be prettified.

“Performance-based accountability” is a hackneyed, Skinnerian, neoliberal buzz-phrase often repeated dogmatically by charter school promoters in order to falsely claim that privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are more accountable and higher-performing than public schools.
But it is becoming clearer to everyone with each passing day that charter school promoters have long vastly over-promised and under-delivered, while rapidly enriching themselves at the expense of students, parents, the public, the economy, and the national interest.

Charter school promoters want the public, especially poor, low-income, and vulnerable minority families who have long been exploited by the rich and their state, to believe that when it comes to nonprofit and for-profit charter schools the issue is really “high-quality” charter schools versus “low-quality” charter schools. We are told that we need more of the former and fewer of the latter.

After wavering and making confusing statements about charter schools three years ago when he was running for President, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who is running for President again, finally came out and issued a broad education plan on May 18, 2019 which, among other things, opposes charter schools.
Part two of Sanders’ ten-part “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education” is titled, “End the Unaccountable Profit-Motive of Charter Schools.’

Lara Trump isn't supposed to be the brightest of the Trump menagerie and she's certainly always welcome at Fox.

A May 2019 report of a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 Presidential voters conducted late spring of last year shows that broad public opposition to charter schools persists.1 About half of all those polled are Democratic primary voters.

I can only imagine how low the turnout has been so far. It's the runoff between progressive former teacher Jackie Goldberg and the slick downtown establishment candidate, Heather Repenning.

Under the veil of high ideals, nonprofit and for-profit charter schools across the nation have long been violating the public interest in a variety of ways.
One of the most destructive ways is the non-stop siphoning of unthinkable sums of public funds from public schools—schools that are often chronically-underfunded, over-tested, constantly-shamed, and increasingly militarized and surveilled.