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
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.
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
— Borges, “The Immortal”, IV, in The Aleph (1949)
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges
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.
With a straight face, many millionaires, some media outlets, and Governor Andrew Cuomo are once again righteously demanding an increase in the number of privately-run but publicly-funded charter schools permitted in the State, specifically in New York City where these deregulated schools have run amuck.
Chaos, anarchy, and violence are inherent features of the free market.1 Instability, uncertainty, disequilibrium, unevenness, imbalance, volatility, turmoil, impulsiveness, alienation, greed, anxiety, jealousy, risk, irrational behavior, and “animal spirits” are fellow-travelers of advanced commodity production and exchange, especially in the final and highest stage of capitalism.
It is no secret that charter schools coast to coast are rife with fraud, waste, corruption, and racketeering. This is closely related to the fact that charter schools annually siphon billions of public dollars from public schools that serve 90% of the nation’s youth, thereby undermining the ability of public schools to educate millions of poor and low-income minority students.
The shape of learning comes in all sizes, all forms. We know what not learning is — texting, emailing, You Tube videos, a world of Teletubbies, from birth to death.
