Charter Schools

Cyber Charter Schools: Neoliberals Determined to Commodify More Students

The parasitic seizure of social wealth by the rich has intensified in recent years and promises to increase in 2021. While the stock market soars to artificial new heights, the productive sector of the economy continues to steadily disintegrate, leaving the financial oligarchy with fewer options to maximize profit over time. This in turn is […]

Charter School Accountability Will Remain Weak in 2021

Segregated charter schools have a high failure rate and are notorious for lacking accountability and oversight. Charter schools are also well-known for being non-transparent even though they are ostensibly “public” schools. This has been the case for nearly 30 years when charter schools first came into being. Over the years, endless reports, articles, and books […]

Charter Schools Have Fewer Nurses and More Inexperienced Teachers than Public Schools

According to two recent U.S. government reports, private businesses like segregated charter schools have far fewer nurses and more inexperienced teachers than public schools: School Nurses in U.S. Public Schools (April 2020) and Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary and Secondary School Teachers in the United States (April 2020).  Both reports cover many years of […]

Charter School Promoters Comfortable with Cardona

President-elect Joe Biden recently nominated Miguel Cardona to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Hardly anyone in education circles has heard of or spoken about Cardona, let alone in an open and serious way. For weeks there was endless speculation and confusion surrounding the “top potential pick” for this position. All kinds of […]
The post Charter School Promoters Comfortable with Cardona first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Charter Schools Spend Millions On Advertising and Marketing

Unlike public schools, private businesses like charter schools spend millions of public dollars a year on advertising and marketing. Putting aside widespread fraud and corruption in the segregated charter school sector, this is an enormous waste and abuse of public funds, especially at a time when public schools are being starved of much-needed public funds […]

Charter Schools Bully Teachers

It is no accident that fewer than three percent of the nation’s roughly 7,300 charter schools are operated by teachers and that 90% of charter schools do not have a teachers union. So much for the narrative that charter schools started nearly 30 years ago to empower teachers. Some states even allow charter schools to […]
The post Charter Schools Bully Teachers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Why Are Embezzlement, Fraud, and Indictments So Rampant in the Charter School Sector?

The simple answer is that there are lax standards, poor oversight, and little accountability in the segregated charter school sector. This decades-old set-up is consciously built into many charter school laws, which exist in 44 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. It is no accident that charter schools are deregulated schools.1   Charter schools […]

Charter School Promoters Complain About Inability to Pilfer More Public Funds

While they have constantly been at it, every now and then charter school advocates self-servingly complain more vociferously than usual about how they are unable to funnel even more public funds from public schools into the hands of narrow private interests. A quick review of charter school news in recent days shows no fewer than […]

Obsession With “Academic Performance” is Charter School Disinformation

Promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools are obsessed with students’ scores on punitive and curriculum-narrowing high-stakes tests produced by big corporations. They think that test scores on these unsound tests are the end-all and be-all. They have even convinced themselves that the more technical and professional their “academic performance” reports look and feel […]

Next U.S. Secretary of Education Will Continue to Promote Charter Schools

There is a 100% chance that the next U.S. Secretary of Education will, like many previous secretaries of education, continue to promote privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools and keep undermining the right to education.1  Both Democrats and Republicans have long supported segregated charter schools—in Congress and at the state and local levels. The rich […]