A charter school in Sacramento abruptly closed its doors, locked out the students, and called it quits.
The charter operator said the space could only handle 75 students, but he had enrolled 400.
The parents were not happy. They said the school had collected $2 million or so.
They were puzzled.
So am I.
Hey, that’s the free market. Stores come and go.
Stuff happens.
Go shop somewhere else, consumers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Michelle Rhee and Kevin Johnson issued this statement: “Apres’ moi, le deluge.”
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Can you imagine public schools doing this? In my small school my class size has varied in size from 11 from to 20-something. 18 children fit well in my classroom. After that we begin to shoehorn them in, but we can’t just turn them away.
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Someone needs to produce a charter documtentary, maybe called “Will Close Down” Living with Lex Luthor, or Education Cessation “. Does anyone know Michael Moore?
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How about, “Lex Luthor(the charters) killed Superman.” Your titles are great!
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Michael could make a movie titled “Rheefer Madness.”
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Please do not confuse the rheefer with the real substance. It’s an insult to an innocent plant.
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The free market at work. It’s all about the kids, right?
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This a bad situation, but I’m confused as to why the teacher’s union would retweet it when it’s really a show of no confidence in traditional schools: 400 students enrolled in a charter designed for 75 students. Why would the union want to draw attention to that?
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It’s not a union school
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After our Act 10 passed in Wisconsin, a few of my colleagues and I looked into what it would take to take our game to the private sector and start a voucher school in our town. What we learned was that it would be perfectly legal for us to rent an abandoned storefront in our town and lure students in with the promise of free technology that they could keep, even after they left the school. We could collect our voucher money from the state after the third Friday in September, when the state establishes your enrollment. To keep costs low and profits high, we could use Khan Academy as our curriculum and hire uncertified aides to monitor the students (we had a few recent HS graduates in mind who we thought would make good bouncers). The hastily sketched out business plan had us earning far more than we would as public school teachers, based on our best estimates.
But the real beauty of the plan kicked in after the third Friday in September. Immediately after that, we would start “counseling” kids out and sending them back to the public school. We figure that by Thanksgiving or at the latest Christmas, we would have our enrollment down to zero, then we could fire the bouncers, break the lease, take the voucher money and run. All totally legitimate, as far as we could tell by reading the law.
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CAVEAT EMPTOR.
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