Charter school founder June Brown is on trial in Philadelphia for collecting multiple salaries from the charter schools and management firms she opened.
Brown is accused of defrauding the four charter schools she founded of $6.7 million and then conspiring with two former administrators to obstruct justice by orchestrating a cover-up.
Meanwhile, business leaders in Philadelphia hope to open more charter schools in that beleaguered city, where the public schools have been decimated by budget cuts and layoffs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Regular public schools have no profits to recycle into campaign donations and no high paying jobs as lobbyists or corporate execs for politicians when they leave office, so politicians see no reason to fund them.
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“Regular public schools have no profits to recycle into campaign donations and no high paying jobs as lobbyists or corporate execs for politicians when they leave office, so politicians see no reason to fund them.”
I wonder about the reasons for the unquestioning embrace of charters too. Ohio has a LOT of data on charters (they perform as well as the public schools they replaced) and yet we double down on them every year, and have done so for a decade. In Ohio, in Cleveland and Columbus, charter schools ARE the status quo.
I think some of it has to do with pushing K-12 education off the politician’s plate and onto the foundations, EMO’s, etc.
Running a good, solid public school system is hard, and you’re always asking voters for money. Why not let professional managers and The Gates Foundation or the Dell Family or Eli Broad or any number of EMO’s do it? Call it “ed reform”, outsource the whole thing, and be done with it.
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“Why not let professional managers and The Gates Foundation or the Dell Family or Eli Broad or any number of EMO’s do it? Call it “ed reform”, outsource the whole thing, and be done with it.”
They have no interest in running a public school system – they’re only interested in making money…hence the push for charter schools, tests, computers and textbooks.
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Charters are increasingly a license to print money. Shameful.
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