The New York Times recently wrote an article claiming that many black and Hispanic families were disappointed that Democratic presidential candidates were abandoning the charter school crusade beloved by the leaders of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and currently by Betsy DeVos.
Steven Singer disagrees. He responds bluntly that charter schools exploit children of color.
He writes:
Go to most impoverished black neighborhoods and you’re bound to find three things in abundance.
Liquor stores, payday lenders and charter schools.
It is no accident.
In the inner city, the underemployed compete for a shortage of minimum wage jobs, healthcare is minimal, public transportation inadequate and the schools are underfunded and short staffed.
But that doesn’t mean money isn’t being made.
In capitalist America, we make sure to turn a profit off of everything – including our peculiar institutions of racial inequality.
Businesses are on every corner, but they aren’t set up for the convenience of those living there.
Ethnic isolation – whether caused by poverty, legal coercion, safety in numbers or white flight – often puts the segregated at a disadvantage. It creates a quarantined economy set up for profiteers and carpetbaggers to get rich off the misery of the poor.
The system is set up to wring as much blood as it can from people forced to live as stones.
Families struggle to survive in a community where they are exploited by grasping landlords and greedy grocers. And the system is kept in check by law enforcement officers who are either disposed to turn the other way or so overzealous as to shoot first and ask questions later.
As W.E.B. DuBois described it nearly a century ago, “Murder sat on our doorstep, police were our government, and philanthropy dropped in with periodic advice.”
The economy is glutted with enterprises offering cheap promises of relief but which actually reinforce the status quo.
Predominantly black, low-income neighborhoods are eight times more likely to have carry-out liquor stores than white or racially integrated neighborhoods, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Yet in higher income black neighborhoods in the same cities, you don’t find these same liquor stores.
They are established in the poorest neighborhoods to offer cheap, temporary respite from the trauma of living in poverty. Yet they increase the likelihood of alcoholism, addiction and violence.
The same goes for payday lenders.
These are basically legal loan sharks who offer ready cash at exorbitant interest rates. Typically these payday loans are meant to last the length between paychecks – approximately two weeks. However, they come with extremely high interest rates. For instance, the average $375 loan ends up costing $520 (139%) in interest.
These businesses aren’t located in the suburbs or wealthy parts of town. You find them typically in the inner cities and poor black neighborhoods. They promise temporary help with one-time purchases and unexpected expenses, but in truth most are used to pay for necessities like rent or food.
They end up trapping users in a debt spiral where they have to take out payday loans to pay off previous payday loans. This is mostly because these loans are made based on the lender’s ability to collect, not the borrower’s ability to repay while meeting other financial obligations.
And these are just two of the most common features of this predatory economy – capitalist enterprises designed to enrich businesses for exploiting consumers beyond their ability to cope.
Others include high priced but limited stock grocery markets, fast food restaurants, gun stores, inner city rental properties and charter schools.
That last one may seem out of place.
Most descriptions of urban neighborhoods neglect to mention charter schools, but in the last few decades they have become an increasingly common part of the landscape. And this is no wonder. They fit the same pattern of exploitation as the other establishments mentioned above.
Think about it: (1) charter schools disproportionately locate in poor black communities, (2) offer the promise of relief from inequality but end up recreating or worsening the same unjust circumstances and (3) they are often owned by rich white folks from outside the neighborhood who profit off the venture.
Diane,
You are terrific. Thank you, again and again.
Love this article by Steve Singer re: Charter EXPLOITATIONS.
Singer’s offers great insights into the exploitation of the poor in our country. Charter schools are part of the problem, not the solution. As noted before, public schools are public assets. They enhance communities and add value to real estate in the area. Charter schools are carpetbaggers that invade a community and send the profit to corporations outside the community. What is worse, they offer a separate and unequal education to mostly students of color. Charters increase segregation.
Charter schools are a symptom of disinvestment. White students are educated by a legitimate certified teacher while many charters are staffed by TFA teaching temps. Students in public schools are protected by federal and state laws that regulate the health, safety as well as the rights of students. Charters offer no such protections. Due to market forces, charters are notoriously unstable.
Public schools are often the center of community life that offer predictable care and service. Public schools aspire to provide equity while charters select the stronger students and unload the challenging and expensive students back onto the public schools. They offer opportunity for a chosen few while they undermine the education of many.
Correction: Singer offers
Governance is a key point of comparison. Charter schools are managed by corporations often outside the community. They use public funds to pay for an assembly of overpriced administrators while teachers are not well compensated. Public schools are an example of democracy in action. They are generally governed by a board of education elected by members of the community, and they are answerable to the community they serve.
“These are basically legal loan sharks who offer ready cash at exorbitant interest rates. Typically these payday loans are meant to last the length between paychecks – approximately two weeks. However, they come with extremely high interest rates.”
Potterville, they called it in a Christmas movie. Its a Wonderful Life has many images that bring to mind the modern state of things. Only now payday lenders are national instead of common only to small towns.
Companies can afford to assess risks using actuarial science, an expensive analysis considering the salary of an actuary. Poor folks are put in position to exaggerate their risk or take it when buying insurance or warranty. Forced to bet against the house, they lose.
I’m reading the ed reform “analysis” of candidates on public education and it is simply remarkable how little time they spend on anything other than charters and vouchers.
This is a typical piece:
https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-the-charter-school-debate-is-more-complex-than-either-side-admits/
90% charter promotion with a brief mention of the other 90% of students in the last paragraph.
They simply don’t see public school students at all. Our kids don’t exist in the echo chamber.
We could have two completely different debates- ed reformers would be debating charters and vouchers and people outside their echo chamber would be debating “public education”.
They’re irrelevant to public school families. They contribute absolutely nothing to anything we actually talk about. I mean, if you talk to public school parents they (understandably) DO NOT talk about charters and vouchers! Their kids don’t go there!
The tossed off mention of public school students is standard in the genre. It’s always the last paragraph. It’s like there has to be an obligatory mention of 90% of students or they aren’t allowed to submit the article.
Amazing. Utter and complete capture. They are “public education experts” who exclude 90% of students. Is that even possible?
In this nasty and inappropriate comparison, where is the local district school? If parents are choosing this charter school, it must provide an experience that parents want for their kids over the local school.
Parents in these areas would choose a conventional lender over a payday lender if it was available to them. Same for a supermarket over a convenience store, etc. IMO, what’s part of the predatory economy is a neighborhood school that parents are required to send their children to that offers no hope for bettering their situation or their community. It’s probably gotten horrendous results for people of color for decades and has led to those who can moving out and the overall decline of the area. The charters in these communities are a choice and a hope of higher expectations and better outcomes; more like what those of us who live outside these areas expect for our children.
Most charters are not-for-profit. They are located in poor areas because those are the children they predominantly want to serve. Charters get less money per student than traditional public schools. The CREDO urban charter schools study shows that they get better results that traditional public school peers. Charters typically have much higher high school graduation rates and the best charter network alumni are getting 4-year degrees college at 4x the rate predicted.
You are either a glutton for punishment or else you are very well paid to keep posting this stuff. You’ve been refuted so many times, I’d think you’d slink away by now with your tail between your legs.
I have asked John many times where he works but he refuses to answer. He is Eva’s perennial champion.
Does “IMO” mean “in my opinion,” by any chance? I hope so, because very little of what you’ve written here has any basis in fact. You might try retailing this nonsense on one of the may right-wing echo chambers available to you on the internet. On this site, we deal in facts and evidence, not opinions.
Have a lovely, and I hope, reality-based day.
Shorter John,
Once my funders have destroyed public schools by slow starvation, my funders will open a private charter that will take even more money from those schools to teach only the low income African-American students we smug white people people decide are worthy of getting our education. The rest can rot.
And by “worthy”, John clearly means that the worth of a child is the value they bring to charter school CEOs. If a child’s academic performance or special needs or other struggles don’t bring bragging rights and donations to the charter, they have no value to the charter folks whose views John is tasked with justifying.
The charter industry has come a long way from “we’ll show you how to improve failing public schools”. Now their mantra is “we’ll show you how to teach the kids we think are worth teaching”.
It takes a lot of chutzpah — and the support of right wing billionaires who own politicians — to expect praise for doing what public schools already did well. On the other hand, that may or may not be an improvement over what John’s favorite charters used to do all the time, which is simply lying and claiming you have solved the problem with public education and any kid who isn’t thriving in your charter is a worthless and nasty child who should be locked up in a place where all severely disturbed children are left to rot.
John’s concern for children is exactly like Betsy DeVos’ concern for children. I’m sure John considers that a compliment but it is not.