Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly traces a clear pattern: The Republican party has embraced charter schools as their cause.

Republicans have always favored school choice, assuming that competition makes all schools better.

But they have never been able to persuade any electorate to endorse vouchers for private and religious schools.

So, charters are now the darlings of Republican donors and candidates.

The fact that charters have failed to demonstrate consistently superior academic performance doesn’t bother the Republicans, nor does the number of failed charters, nor are they dissuaded by the charters that have been caught up in financial scandals.

Nor do they care that the expansion of charters drains money from the public schools.

Nor are they troubled that many charters cherrypick their students and exclude students with disabilities and English learners.

Follow the money.

Cohen writes:

In politics, you have to follow the money. The editorial board of the San Antonio Express-News found it almost laughable to imagine that what it counted as more than $800,000 in campaign contributions from “charter school interests” between 2006 and 2013 didn’t play a role in convincing the Texas legislature to lift the state’s cap on charter schools. The Express-News is referring to the findings of a report from Texans for Public Justice that indicated people affiliated with the state’s top six charter school chains doubled their political contributions in recent years, comparing 2006 and 2008 to 2010 and 2012.
The bulk of the charter school contributions were linked to KIPP, particularly in the Houston area, where Doug Foshee, the former CEO of the El Paso Corporation natural gas producer, sits on the KIPP board and is treasurer for the conservative-leaning Texans for Education Reform. The biggest recipients were gubernatorial candidates Bill White, a Democrat, and the eventual winner, Rick Perry, a Republican, in 2010. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo may have scored a $10,000 campaign donation from the state’s largest teachers’ union in the past few months, but charter school advocates have given the governor much more, including $40,000 from Bruce Kovner, a billionaire among the 100 richest people in the U.S. who is a well known financial backer of Brighter Choice Charter Schools in Albany; $25,000 from StudentsFirst NY, the New York State affiliate of Michelle Rhee’s pro-charter political arm; and $14,000 from the pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform. Cuomo says he can’t be bought by campaign contributions, but like the editorial editors at the San Antonio News Express, most people would find the notion that campaign money doesn’t affect political positions as ludicrous.
Republican politicians like Rick Perry might get some money from charter school supporters, but given the large Republican soft money edge across the nation, donations from supporters of KIPP or IDEA are kind of inconsequential. In fact, strong charter school and privatization supporters like Eli and Edith Broad and John and Laura Arnold are major donors to Democratic politicians, although it is possible that those campaign contributions make the Democrats a little more charter-friendly. But around charter schools, campaign financing follows a bipartisan mold. The Arnolds’ foundation, for example, has put substantial funding into promoting charter schools in Houston and Louisiana. (The latter is where conservative Republican governor Bobby Jindal is closely allied with the expansion of charter schools and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.) Republican supporters of charter schools have also been somewhat bipartisan; the American Federation for Children, funded by Republican donor Betsy DeVos, for example, made more than one-third of its political donations to Democrats. Similarly, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst Tennessee poured dollars into both to Republican and Democratic campaign coffers trying to win favor for charter schools and school choice.
The fact that President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan support charters allow Republicans to appear bipartisan even as they embrace a strategy that undermines and weakens public schools:
This new charter school strategy by multiple Republican gubernatorial candidates isn’t just serendipitous. It is a conscious strategy—kinder, gentler, and kid-focused— for a Republican Party that generally has not supported the strengthening of public schools. Perhaps charter schools in Texas and elsewhere feel that they are not in a position to deny politicians like Abbott the opportunity to shoot TV ads in their facilities, especially if today’s denied politician turns out to be tomorrow’s governor. It might be a little bit awkward for charter schools, many of them managed by nonprofits like KIPP, to find themselves positioned by Abbott, Walker, and others as avatars for reduced public sector support of public school systems. Maybe some, however, are not all that discomfited by their use as props in Republican campaigns.
In a National School Choice Week editorial, Georgia Governor Deal lauded both private schools and charter schools as the means for parents “to ensure their child is getting an excellent education to compete in today’s world.” He made his position on charter schools clear. “These schools are given greater flexibility in return for strong accountability for student academic success,” Deal wrote. “By observing high-performing charter schools throughout Georgia, it’s clear these institutions promote competition, innovation and creativity while encouraging strong parental involvement.” He offered not a scintilla of analysis about how to make the public schools of Georgia, beyond the 310 charters already operating, also attractive choices for parents.
Deal didn’t acknowledge how the $1.51 million given to the Georgia Charter Schools Association in the past few years by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus’s foundation and the $3.99 million given to the Association by the Walton Family Foundation, much of it devoted to building charter school capacity, boosts the attractiveness of that choice over traditional public schools, whose staff are often scrounging for basic supplies and services. He didn’t mention the past several years of grants to KIPP in Georgia, including at least $21.825 million in foundation grants to the KIPP Metro Atlanta Collaborative ($2.653 million from the Marcus Foundation, $9.456 million from the Community Foundation in Atlanta, and several large seven-figure grants and PRIs from various foundations for the construction of the KIPP Strive primary school), over $2 million for the KIPP West Atlanta Young Scholars Academy, and funds specifically targeted for KIPP Strive Academy and KIPP South Fulton Academy. These and other grants hint at the private capital that Deal’s Democratic opponent Thurbert Baker pointed to in his explanation that charter schools’ complaints about facilities funding, not to mention operations, might be a little unwarranted.
The Foundation Directory Online lists over 960 grants in the past several years in support of specific charter schools or charter school networks in Texas, more than half of them between 2008 and 2011. KIPP Academy pulled in 208 of those grants, eight of them in the seven-figure range, with major support from a couple of community foundations as well as the Houston Endowment, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Brown Foundation—plus over $40,000,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. YES Prep Southeast received 106 foundation grants or loans, including seven larger than $1 million. KIPP Aspire Academy got 40 grants, KIPP Truth Academy 35. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation made only a handful of grants, but one was for over $6 million in 2011 to the YES Prep Public Schools. Traditional public schools, which serve the bulk of students in Texas and elsewhere, can only dream about and salivate at these sources of private contributions.
Why do Republicans detest public schools? That is hard to say. It used to be that Republican businessmen served proudly on local and state school boards. Now they flock to privately managed charters, without any concern for the community public schools that serve their town or city.
Some think it is because charters are overwhelmingly non-union. But Republicans support charters just as enthusiastically in states where unions are prohibited.
Bottom line is that Republicans as well as leading Democrats are unconcerned about creating a dual school system: one sector that can pick its students and kick out the ones it doesn’t want, and the other sector that must take all students.
Some people thought that the Brown decision of 1954 foretold the end of dual publicly-funded school systems in the United States. Not so. Now we will have one sector for the strivers, another for the undesirables rejected by the charters.
Why do Democrats support the school choice movement, which was once seen as a signature policy of the far-right? That’s even more puzzling than why Republicans are ready to abandon our nation’s public schools.