The role of education in a society is to consciously pass on the accumulated knowledge of humanity to the next generation so that society keeps moving forward.
This is especially true in a modern society based on mass industrial production where all sectors of the economy are interdependent and large-scale in character.
Major problems in the charter school sector have been detailed by many researchers and writers over the years. In the last year or two, however, persistent charter school problems have been exposed with much greater depth, breadth, and regularity by more individuals and organizations.
It has become abundantly clear to more people that the charter school sector is riddled with too many serious difficulties to hide. The consequences of these problems are just too severe to deny.
Irrationalism and disinformation manifest themselves in endless ways. While both have intensified greatly in the neoliberal period which began in the late 1970s, the public should brace for even more of both. The obsolete forces who have long benefitted from an outdated economic system that cannot provide for the needs of the people will surely sustain a massive onslaught of irrationalism and disinformation in an attempt to preserve their class power and privilege while keeping people disempowered and disoriented.
Prominent charter school advocates are understandably shaken and worried about the growing tide of opposition to privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools that have been wreaking havoc across the country for nearly 30 years. Charter school supporters are speaking out more in hopes of saving these deregulated and segregated schools that often perform poorly and foster corruption.
Advocates of privately-operated charter schools that siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools have been a little more defensive and restive than usual in recent months.
This is to be expected given the growing number of mainstream and academic reports exposing their long-standing problems, as well as the fact that more people are seeing charter schools for what they really are.
A high-level court case is currently underway in Mississippi to decide if privately-operated charter schools can keep siphoning local property taxes from public schools.
Presently, Mississippi’s charter school law unconstitutionally diverts millions of dollars in local property tax money (ad valorem taxes) away from local public school districts to privately-operated charter schools.
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
—Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909
In November 2018 I wrote a short piece titled Opposing Charter Schools Without Really Opposing Them.
In that article I highlighted some of the forms of confusion promoted by neoliberals, privatizers, and corporate school reformers to block people from concluding that nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are harmful and must be opposed.
While billionaires Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos can take some of the “blame” for an uptick in broad opposition to the nation’s 7,000 non-profit and for-profit charter schools, resistance to privately-operated charter schools has been building for nearly three decades.
Opposition to segregated, test-obsessed, and unaccountable charter schools that fleece the public treasury is not new. Many defenders of public education and the public interest have been consistently exposing and criticizing charter schools for a long time.
In another recent study on charter schools, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, “finds little to no progress in charter school impact in Pennsylvania.”1
