A reader writes from Wisconsin:
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diagusting and immoral. Making money off of kids misfortune can’t be right!
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Sounds like that charter school in Sacramento that was recently abruptly closed. People are used to the relative predictability of public schools and outraged by their “free market” charter. Along with choice comes a responsibility to research what you are buying. We all have certain expectations of what will be provided by a school. It is naive to assume that those expectations will be met by private enterprise especially when they can take the money and run with no legal consequences.
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And KJ and Michelle were not outraged? Shocking!
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Legal maybe, but not moral. That you could conceive of doing it is not, however, a defense of NCLB and RTTT. New accountability laws need to be enacted to enable someone to prosecute you if you did not engage in a good faith effort to actually do the education. NCLB and RTTT are NOT that accountability mechanism.
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I don’t think the problem is that teachers WOULD think of this, as those above seem to think. I think the problem is that if some teachers, with (I’m assuming) no business experience, can figure out how to game the system so easily, how much havoc can be wreaked by people that DON’T care about kids?
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“I think the problem is that if some teachers, with (I’m assuming) no business experience, can figure out how to game the system so easily, how much havoc can be wreaked by people that DON’T care about kids?”
Exactly my point in bringing up Sacramento, which is only the most recently reported charter school fiasco.
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And, of course, that is EXACTLY what is happening, brought to us courtesy of “enterpreneurs,” NOT educators! This is why Louisiana is brought up time and again. Charter schools open that are nothing more than buildings and people who don’t know much about anything, teaching creationism, and whatever other nonsense suits them. The kids and parents are nothing more than dollar signs in the eyes of those who would exploit them.
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Where are the reliable Chinese investors – there are so many Green Cards needed.
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This is ridiculous. Your WI reader is selectively reading the law and basing their plot on assumptions. This “hastily” made plot is implausible.
Of course people can cheat the system (and have) but publishing this fiction makes it clear where the dialogue has come — regardless of the facts. That’s too bad.
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The problem with this model is that it is not sustainable. One quick shot
won’t give you the highest yield. It would be much better to “counsel” out
every student that won’t score well above the mean on standardized tests.
Keep the top 20%, this would allow you to reduce staff and sublease out
the space not being used. The benefit would be fantastic test scores which
would increase enrollment for the next year. With careful planning you
should be able to grow this around 10% a year. This would be the better
model, except that from what I have read on this blog, it is already being
utilized in a number of states already.
Jim Powell
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