Steven Singer explains succinctly why charter schools are by definition a waste of money. No one has yet explained why it makes sense to have two publicly funded school systems, one public, the other under private management.
He writes:
You can’t save money buying more of what you already have.
Constructing two fire departments serving the same community will never be as cheap as having one.
Empowering two police departments to patrol the same neighborhoods will never be as economical as one.
Building two roads parallel to each other that go to exactly the same places will never be as cost effective as one.
This isn’t exactly rocket science. In fact, it’s an axiom of efficiency and sound financial planning. It’s more practical and productive to create one robust service instead of two redundant ones.
However, when it comes to education, a lot of so-called fiscal conservatives will try to convince us that we should erect two separate school systems – a public one and a privatized one.
The duplicate may be a voucher system where we use public tax dollars to fund private and parochial schools. It may be charter schools where public money is used to finance systems run by private organizations. Or it may be some combination of the two.
But no matter what they’re suggesting, it’s a duplication of services.
And it’s a huge waste of money.
Read the rest.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many states including the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have clauses in their state constitutions establishing a set of “common schools that are thorough and efficient.” Privatization has imposed inefficiency on public schools making them less thorough and efficient. Taking money away from the common schools to pay for private schools seems to me to be violation of many state constitutions. It makes no legitimate sense why any state would want to undermine the schools that serve the most students. In the case of Pennsylvania charters serve only 6% of the students, but they are getting about 25% of the revenue. The math and benefit do not add up to anything “thorough and efficient.” These separate and unequal schools are not “common” either. The only commonality is they get to extract public money from public schools. The only reason privatization lumbers on is because it is backed by wealthy individuals that want to transfer public money into private pockets.https://edlawcenter.org/assets/files/pdfs/State%20Constitution%20Education%20Clause%20Language.pdf
Four years ago, the Alliance for Catholic Education, part of the University of Notre Dame, invited the Walton Family Foundation to speak at its inaugural lecture on education policy. The “audience was large” to hear the Walton representative say, ” “WE (my caps) need to grow quality seats ambitiously and WE need to eliminate underperforming seats judiciously”…. We believe that Catholic schools …are integral….”
Interesting to note there’s a religious group, Catholics, eager to hear children reduced from personhood to “seats” by heirs to a discount retailing fortune. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the Catholic Alliance finds the Gates/Zuck schools-in-a-box, are sold at Walmart. .And, for them to wake up the fact that the vouchers in the students’ hands barely cover the cost of the boxes and, public schools have been eliminated.
frighteningly not happening: “wake up..”
The “libertarian” Koch Bros. gave $3.5 mil. to the University of Notre Dame International Security Center
Let me give you the pro-charter view:
But if we give a private fire department a huge contract to service only the buildings built to very high fire prevention specifics that all have their own massive sprinkler systems and early warning systems and leave all the buildings that haven’t been built to a strict fire code to the public fire department, that private fire department will have buildings suffering less fire damage overall, so that’s a wonderful savings!
And don’t forget, that private fire department must have the right to call the public fire department if one of their buildings actually catches on fire and it can’t be put out with a garden hose and as soon as that happens, that building that is on fire immediately becomes the sole responsibility of the public fire department. Because we pro-charter folks know that if one of their buildings has a fire that can’t be put on with a garden hose, it is entirely the fault of the building not having the “high standards” that is expected from the private fire department and it is the building’s fault that the private fire company’s inexperienced fire fighters can’t put out the fire with he garden hose like they have been trained to do.
That building should have been a better building and it slipped through the cracks to temporarily be the responsibility of the private fire company but now that it is on fire, no one should expect the private fire department to cut into its profits to have to take care of the fire.
It makes perfect sense in the irrational world that the charter folks live in which explains their love of Betsy DeVos and their admiration for the case she and Trump make for privatizing public education.
More and more communities in the USA are turning to privatizing their fire departments see
https://www.wildfirex.com/private-firefighting/
The private fire protection industry is about to “catch fire”! More and more communities are going to be turning to private fire protection in the USA. It is cost-effective, and areas with private fire protection, have equivalent fire insurance rates with areas with government-operated fire protection.
Canada has privatized virtually all of their air-traffic-control operations. Canada is vast, arctic nation, which by necessity, must rely on air travel. The government “saw the light”, and contracted out their air traffic control.
The USA is quietly moving to phase out government-operated air traffic control. The airline industry, the FAA, and the Air traffic controllers union (PATCO) all support privatization.
In the coming years, more and more services, traditionally provided by government, will be privatized.
It is time for education to get on this train, or else be left at the station.
Charles, you have lived off government funding your entire life. Try life in the private sector for a change, with no government funding.
I have 5 years of military service, and 7 years of federal service. (I am very proud of the work I did for Uncle Sam, it was a privilege). I have spent most of my career in private industry (some federal contracts, and other private sector contracts).
I have worked in Cable TV, Broadcast TV, and other private sector work.
What is your point?
BTW- I have never “lived off” government funding. I am a telecom engineer, not a welfare case.
I have done many years of honest labor, for both private industry, and in the public sector. You make me look like some kind of parasite.
You are a libertarian and I am tired of your wolf in sheep’s clothing blather about how you love and support public schools but want to defund them.
Just go haunt someone else’s blog.
I am libertarian on some issues. No denial. I support freedom, I support LGBT rights, I have marched in gay rights parades. I support reproductive freedom. I am from a family of public school teachers, and I respect the teaching profession. I support the concept of public education, and schools operated by professional educators. The public schools in Fairfax county, and the rest of Northern Virginia are uniformly excellent. I also believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
If half of that were true, you would not be a zealot for vouchers, which will defund public schools and promote segregation.
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
Let us logically follow this point: districts create their own curricula instead of using a single best one. Publishers compete with different programs instead of offering a single best one. Clearly, a single national curriculum produced by the federal Ministry of Education is more efficient.
The most efficient system in terms of usage of resources is a Soviet-style system, where there is only one of everything: only one subway system instead of three or four competing systems like in New York hundred years ago. Only one airline carrier with fixed prices. Only one model of a car for each size, that is one subcompact model, one compact model, one large model for party bosses and one minibus for ridesharing, although all are too expensive to own, so most people ride by bus. Just one model of shoes per season. One standard for beer bottles for the whole country, which encourages reuse instead of trashing them. One main party newspaper. One government-owned TV channel.
All this is very resource-efficient. Sadly, most people want to be able to choose from at least three kinds of cheese…
BA
Expand on your argument with illustrations of the tech monopolies e.g. Microsoft, Netflix, Google, Facebook.
You’d be better informed if you read the posts at the Open Markets Institute site. Barry Lynn’s group was formerly at New America (funded by Google’s Eric Schmidt). The reason Open Markets is no longer at N.A. is they lost their jobs after writing a report about the danger of too much power concentrated in the tech industry.
Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt (the CEO of N.A. is a school privatizer- a Broadie) and Zuck have spent big for your pretend choice.
And, the next time you sidle up beside the Koch’s “well-being” institutes, the bait and switch of their “freedom and liberty” and, their Stalin schtick (how much did their Dad make in Russia while Stalin was in power?) tell the predators that Justice Democrats fight for democracy and remind them about American concentration of wealth.
BA
The Koch’s must think you’re a sucker to buy their PR.
Linda, if you are disagreeing with “pretend choice”, then do you approve of a single unified education system with a single national curriculum guided by a single authority, that is, national Ministry of Education? Do you approve a single of everything else for the sake of efficiency? Or maybe only the education system must be unified, but for everything else there must be a choice? If the latter then why? Who is the arbiter? You don’t need to bring up Zuck or Kochs to answer this question.
BA, public schools are not a single anything. You are truly incoherent on this issue.
There are more than 14,000 school districts. The only standardizing Force is the federal government’s ham-handed testing mandate and Bill Gates’ Common Core.