There is no shortage of convoluted and bizarre “arguments” for creating and multiplying privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools.
The rich and their conscious and anti-conscious allies in politics, the media, think tanks, higher education, and many other spheres have spent an astonishing amount of time, energy, and money promoting and imposing privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools on society.
Transparency and accountability have never been the strong suits of non-profit and for-profit charter schools.
Unlike the nation’s public schools, all charter schools (about 7,100) are run by unelected individuals, and many, if not most, charter schools regularly violate open-meeting laws, are not subject to public records laws, and avoid audits.
We wrote a post on Saturday-- published Sunday-- Are Democrats Going To Finally Get Behind Public Education For Real-- And Leave Charter Schools To The Republicans? that needs some updating. The education forum in Pittsburgh that the Democratic presidential candidates took part in has led to a valuable evaluation published by ElectraBlog.
Charter school promoters are skilled at promoting disinformation about charter schools and public schools; they have decades of experience.
This week I left my house for something that isn't part of my normal routine. While I braved rush-hour freeway traffic-- something I have avoided for at least a decade-- my friend drove straight from work to meet me at the Broad in downtown Los Angeles (DTLA), where it costs $8 to park-- every 15 minutes. My friend had to drive from Compton where he teaches elementary school.
David Osborne is a well-funded neoliberal demagogue who has authored several books advocating the elimination of the public sphere and public interest. He has long championed the narrow private interests of major owners of capital.
Osborne has spent much of his life openly attacking the public sector and pushing for its privatization (“reinvention” and “innovation”) as fast as possible. This includes aggressively promoting school privatization through the creation of poor-performing pay-the-rich schemes like charter schools.
Despite the vehement objections of thousands of teachers, parents, college professors, public school advocates, state officials, and teachers’ unions, in late 2017 the State University of New York (SUNY) Board of Trustee’s charter school committee voted 4 to 1 to unilaterally and illegally lower training and preparation standards for teachers employed at privately-operated charter schools approved by SUNY (about 165 across the state). State officials called SUNY’s irresponsible decision to put more unqualified teachers in classrooms “an insult to the teaching profession.”
After nearly 30 years of hype surrounding charter schools, a large number of charter schools across the country continue to perform poorly. This is especially disturbing given the fact that non-profit and for-profit charter schools routinely cherry-pick their students, have high teacher turnover rates, are run by unelected individuals, oppose unions, over-pay administrators, and siphon enormous sums of money from public schools. Further, while academic failure is one of the main reasons charter schools close regularly, financial malfeasance is the number one reason charter schools close.
Workers produce all the wealth of society. Unions have been around for generations and exist to protect the rights of workers.
Currently, 90%—93% of privately operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools across the country have no teacher unions, whereas about 90% of public school teachers are unionized.
Currently, about 3.2 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,000 privately-operated charter schools across the country. This represents less than 7% of all students and 7% of all schools in the country.
