Perhaps no other word is more central to charter school discourse than the word “choice.” “Choice” is not only a central concept in charter school discourse but a persistent source of disinformation. Disinformation refers to the deliberate hiding of the real context and relations of things so as to disorient people and cause them to […]
The post Charter School Disinformation About "Choice" first appeared on Dissident Voice.
From the very beginning, more than 35 years ago, the idea and practice of charter schools was conceived and gradually executed by those with abundant cultural, social, political, and economic capital. Charter schools are not the product of grass-roots forces, as the public has often been led to believe. They never have been. Charter schools did not arise as a result of ordinary everyday people coming together and saying: “hey, we need charter schools, let’s make it happen.” Charter schools did not emerge from the ground-up.
Recent news reports suggest that more parents and students are flocking to privately-owned-operated online charter schools, presumably due to concerns about the “COVID Pandemic.”1
Parents, students, teachers, and the public at large should be aware that:
In 2015 the Washington Post shared this observation of privately-operated charter schools by a veteran public school official:
The United Teachers Los Angeles claims that that the re-opening of schools cannot occur without substantial policy provisions in place, including a "moratorium" on charter schools, defunding of police, federal Medicare-for-All, state taxes on wealthy people, and a "federal bailout" of the school district.
Now is not the time to divert even more public funds to private businesses like charter schools. Disaster capitalism has harmed the public interest and public schools in many ways. The nation’s public schools have been suffering budget cuts for years and now with the “COVID Pandemic” they will experience deeper funding cuts.
It is no surprise that many are exploiting the “COVID Pandemic” to advance their narrow self-serving agendas. Charter school advocates are no exception.
Crises often generate instability, chaos, and confusion that can make it easier for such forces to get away with antisocial policies and arrangements that would be far more difficult to implement under normal conditions.
While private businesses like non-profit and for-profit charter schools have been seizing enormous sums of public money for decades,1 they continue to seize hundreds of millions of public dollars during the “COVID Pandemic”—a move that further undermines the nation’s public education system and economy.
Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have never stopped working to funnel as much public money as possible from public schools into their own private pockets, even if this means undermining the education and future of students attending those public schools. This massive transfer of public funds from public schools to charter schools also undermines teachers’ working conditions and has a negative impact on society, the economy, and the national interest.
Despite the sustained exposure of endless problems in the segregated charter school sector, charter school promoters are permanently stuck in “blindly repeat disinformation” mode and cannot seem to understand what is happening to them. Their social being and social consciousness objectively prevent them from grasping why the public increasingly opposes charter schools.
