Have you ever wished you had a bullet list to explain succinctly why charter schools are a terrible idea? Steven Singer has created that list. He says that “school choice is no choice.” The school chooses the student, the student doesn’t choose the school.
Ask yourself: why do we need a dual school system? One gets to choose its students, the other must accept everyone.
What a bad idea!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One system, the traditional non-profit one that puts the child first, is also transparent and parents have an local community elected school board that was elected to represent their interests and parents have someone to complain to when they think their children are not being served properly.
But the profit based — that puts the child second behind profit — autocratic corporate charters are opaque and if a parent has a complaint they are often told to take their child and leave. But if there are no other choices because the public schools have been closed like in New Orleans, then there is no other choice but the autocratic, often fraudulent and inferior corporate charters that lie, lie, and lie some more to fool parents into thinking they are actually better than the traditional public schools they destroyed.
While there are some that would object to your “tone” I would suggest they first refute facts on the ground.
The relationship between citizens/members of a community and their public schools can be very different than that between people/customers/clients and private [whether openly or disguised] businesses.
Public schools have to accept everybody. Period. End of story.
Private businesses? How many times have I seen the sign (or a variant thereof): “No shirt. No shoes. No business.”
Second point on the bullet list:
[start]
When you choose to go to one of these schools, they don’t have to choose to accept you. In fact, the choice is really all up to them. Does your child make good grades? Is he or she well-behaved, in the special education program, learning disabled, etc.? If they don’t like your answers, they won’t accept you. They have all the power. It has nothing to do with providing a good education for your child. It’s all about whether your child will make them look good. By contrast, public schools take everyone and often achieve amazing results with the resources they have.
[end]
Third point:
[start]
Charter schools like to tout how well they help kids learn. But they also like to brag that they accept diverse students. So they end up accepting lots of children with special needs at the beginning of the year and then giving them the boot before standardized test season. That way, these students’ low scores won’t count against the charter school’s record. They can keep bragging about their high test scores without actually having to expend all the time and energy of actually teaching difficult students. Only public schools take everyone and given everyone their all.
[end]
The real, not rheeal, difference with charter schools? They consciously omit hanging outside their compounds of $tudent $ucce$$ the educational equivalent of the sign that proclaims “No shirt. No shoes. No service.”
Thank you for your comments.
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I agree. Some would object to my tone but then I’d just give them more of that tone. I’m angry — very angry. Have you ever heard the saying that you don’t want a U.S. Marine or former Marine parked on your butt? That’s where my angry tone comes from. Anyone who objects — too bad.
Lloyd, the “Non-profit” designation of most charter school operators is seriously in question.
The I.R.S.’s definition – https://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organizations/Exemption-Requirements-Section-501%28c%29%283%29-Organizations
clearly states -” it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”
And all those bus trips to state legislatures are just the tip of the iceberg.
It becomes more problematic when the charter is one of nearly 130 Gulen ( Turkey)
Schools sending US tax dollars back to Turkey to support Gulenist political institutions that the Turks have declared a terror organization.
Parents, students and Legislators, State and Federal, have been treated to trips to Turkey to promote the culture and Charters.
There are Gulen charters on 2 US Military bases and there have been attempts to establish more.
The FBI has investigated but no action taken. Turkey’s President, Erdogan has hired a Washington DC law firm to help block the establishment or reapproval of Gulen’s US schools.
Using OUR tax dollars to fund one side of a foreign civil conflict does not seem wise or legal or lawful or constitutional, does it?
Paz,
Charters may not attempt to influence legislation? Not only do they hold rallies at city and state legislative bodies, but their boards and charter operators themselves give large sums to elected officials.
There’s also the false advertising (under FTC guidelines)- calling themselves “public” when they lack transparency and the assets are owned by private entities.
Heck, Utah has a “charter school day on the (capital) Hill.” Tons of charters go to the capital on that day. There is not an equivalent for true public schools.
This is a great clear, concise list of the problems with charters. We should send it to all our representatives. I already bookmarked it to be ready for my conservative friends and family members that extol the virtues of “choice.”
This excellent piece should be retitled to also include school vouchers and tax credits.
“CHOICE” Really? depends on the perspective.
Charter schools – NOT parents – do the choosing.
First they choose the parents,
then they choose the students.
I would defy any charter proponent to prove otherwise.
Tim?
One word. Proper noun. Question mark.
Not holding my breath waiting for an answer.
😎
KTA
Charter “choice” is a rigged game. Its straight up bullshit actually.
And everybody in the business knows it.
They choose the most concerned, engaged, and committed parents by a combination of default, snake-oil salesmanship, trumped up requirements, and a pathway made up of mazes and hoops designed to wear down all but the strong willed parents.
They choose the best most compliant students via pre-testing, no-excuses discipline (teachers forcing children to make mouth bubbles is a borderline master-slave relationship), suspension (5 year olds? seriously?) impossible retention policies, counseling out, and an additional set mazes, hoops, and bureaucratic psycho-babble.
I still don’t begrudge any parent who wants their kid in a relatively safe and orderly environment when the only alternative is a defunded, broken down, under-staffed, chaotic public school. Just stop the unfair comparisons and stop taking money and much needed resources away from the public school system. And stop pretending they are “public” schools. Public schools never willingly quit on their responsibility to communities, parents, and children. To date, approximately 25,000 charter schools have closed up shop because of mostly financial reasons.
Typo: should read 2,500.
It is relatively easy to point out all the flaws associated with charters. However, we have many reasons to be concerned. The super rich neoliberals continue their next assault of villainthrophy. We need people with political clout that can’t be bought and who care about the future of our young people. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2016/05/newark-showed-way-chanzuckerberg-to.html
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times has complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” One typical charter school scam is that they pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members who pocket the money. Another unbelievable scam is that although charter schools use public tax money to purchase millions of dollars of such things as computers, the things they buy with public tax money become their private property and can be sold by them for profit…and then use public tax money to buy more. So far, one state supreme court has ruled that charter schools aren’t really public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public through a school board that’s elected by all the members of the community. Charter schools insist that they are public schools. Well, if they are as they claim, then charter schools should be required to at least file with the state the same public-domain quarterly and annual audited financial reports that real public schools file so that the public can see how public tax dollars are being spent. That’s only reasonable; it’s not a restriction or an undue burden — after all, every ordinary citizen has to file state and federal income tax reports every year. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being diverted away from educating America’s kids and are ending up in private pockets.
Scisne: lack of fiscal transparency and self-serving money grabs in “public” charters?
Gives new meaning to the word “public”…
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# 11
TAX funded PUBLIC schools are accountable to ELECTED boards that represent the taxpayers. Charters are not obligated to that same accountability. We fought a war for that very reason. “Taxation without REPRESENTATION is TYRANNY.”
The claim that public schools educate and accept every child who comes to the schoolhouse door just isn’t true.
— In 2015-2016, the New York City Department of Education spent $655 million dollars to send children out of public schools (http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/funding/overview/default.htm). The vast majority of US school districts pay for private school placements, even high-resource, ultra-low-needs suburban districts.
— Similarly, many parallel public school districts have been created to more efficiently educate children whose needs can’t be accommodated in traditional public schools, like the 25,000-student District 75 in New York City (http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/SpecialEducation/D75/AboutD75/default.htm); in the leafy suburbs, it’s the BOCES Special Act Districts (http://www.swboces.org/about.cfm?subpage=16). Students who remain in a traditional public school in New York City but require a self-contained setting are not evenly distributed throughout the system, or guaranteed a seat in their neighborhood or a nearby school; indeed, many of the city’s most popular schools do not have a single self-contained classroom (http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/15/K321/AboutUs/Statistics/register.htm) and cannot be accessed by children with physical disabilities (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/nyregion/inquiry-shows-struggles-of-disabled-new-york-students-and-their-families.html).
— The NYC DOE operates schools protected by difficult gate-keeping exams that are biased against blacks and Hispanics—the various specialized high schools (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/nyregion/specialized-high-school-admissions-test-is-racially-discriminatory-complaint-says.html) and K-8 “gifted and talented” schools (https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150929/upper-west-side/map-see-how-racial-segregation-persists-at-gifted-talented-programs).
— Migrant students across the country (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b7f933ef6e054c2ca8e32bd9b477e9ab/ap-exclusive-migrant-children-kept-enrolling-school) and in New York State (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/nyregion/new-york-compels-20-school-districts-to-lower-barriers-to-immigrants.html) are routinely turned away from schoolhouse doors.
–School districts fiercely guard schoolhouse doors from children who happen to live not just outside the district (http://hechingerreport.org/can-you-steal-an-education/), but within the same district (http://nypost.com/2011/03/31/kindergarten-cops/) and city (https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160502/riverdale/assemblyman-tried-block-minorities-from-attending-riverdale-school-suit), or even from children who are already enrolled (http://weareossining.blogspot.com/2010/02/ossining-residents-vent-frustration.html).
–The idea that traditional public school parents don’t shop for schools or exercise choice is laughable on its face: this is exactly what they do when they decide where they are going to live (http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/01/26/elizabeth-warrens-quiet-support-for-public-school-vouchers). Because of exclusionary zoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning), ongoing steering, redlining, reverse redlining, mortgage and housing discrimination (http://wroinc.org/assets/Fair-housing-3-years-WEB.pdf), and acts of intimidation and harassment by private citizens and law enforcement officials, minority children do not have access to the same schooling choices as whites, particularly in northeastern and Midwestern metropolitan areas (https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf).
Charter schools in New York are open to any child who lives in the state and enrollment is purely voluntary. By law they are nonprofit and can only contract with nonprofit management organizations. They are subject to annual third-party financial and operation audits, and a total of three authorizer audits every five-year charter term. The enrollment of NYC charter schools is 92% black and Latino and 77% FRPL-eligible. Charter school attrition is comparable to traditional public schools with similar student characteristics (http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2015schoolattrition.pdf) and charter schools serve comparable numbers of special education students, 16% to 18% (http://www.nyccharterschools.org/sites/default/files/resources/NYC-Charter-Facts.pdf).
Anti-charter commenters will slough off the creaming, sorting, stacking, and excluding done by traditional district schools: “yes, they operate selective exam schools, but those schools don’t claim to work miracles,” e.g. This reasoning is irrelevant to parents zoned for schools that have a long track record of poor outcomes, and who can’t move to Hastings-on-Hudson or the zone for PS 321.
Anti-charter commenters will overlook the massive screening and segregating sorting that’s occurred and occurring due to the relationship between school assignment and residence (https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/ate11/faculty-profile/files/Highsmith&Erickson_AJE_2015.pdf) and focus instead on the perception that charters worsen segregation. In some states, that may be the case. In New York City and other large metropolitan areas, schools are, in the words of Iris Rotberg, “already so highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and income that further increases are virtually impossible,” and the trend toward re-segregation was underway long before charters even existed.
Anti-charter commenters, who would never in a million years send their own child to the kinds of schools that the vast majority of New York State charter-going students are zoned for, insist that we pursue a “separate but equal” solution: all those schools need is more resources and more time. I’ll wrap up with a long quote from one of the legal minds whose work led to New Jersey’s having the nation’s most equitably funded schools, per NPE:
“[D]ouble segregation by race and poverty is systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes. Research has shown for a half century that children learn more when they are in schools with better prepared classmates and excellent, experienced teachers, schools with strong well-taught curriculum, stability and high graduation and college going rates. Concentrated poverty schools, which are usually minority schools, tend to have a high turnover of students and teachers, less experienced teachers, much less prepared classmates, and a more limited curriculum often taught at much lower levels because of the weak previous education of most students. They have much higher dropout rates and few students prepared for success in college. . . .
“Money can buy important things such as good preschool training, strong facilities and educational resources, if it is well targeted, but it does not typically buy the same kind of teachers, curriculum, level of instruction, level of peer group academic support and positive competition, and stability of enrollment of classmates and of faculties that are usually found in white and stably diverse schools . . . For the last half century federal and state policy has been focused on efforts to make highly disadvantaged schools more equal and hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested, but very intense educational inequalities remain.”
Public opinion polls show deep and consistent support for charters, despite the opposition from special interest groups, and Steven Singer’s message is largely falling on deaf ears. That’s terrific news for families who are all too aware of what Tractenberg describes.
What Tim’s long post says – in short:
Public schools have gifted and talented programs. They use many millions of dollars out of their total budgets to pay for private school placement for severely handicapped and very high needs students.
Therefore, it is perfectly fine for charter schools to rid themselves of every expensive and struggling student. Tim keeps insisting there is absolutely no difference between a child not getting into Stuy and having to attend a different NYC public school, and a charter school putting an unwanted kid (almost always poor and minority) on a “got to go” list and suspending those 5 year olds to get them off their books so they don’t have to pay for them. Because Stuy! PS 321!
According to Tim, charter schools have no moral obligation to teach every child until we dismantle Stuy. Until that is done, charter schools should be encouraged to make lots of money by kicking out high needs kids. They have no moral obligation to teach the kids they find too difficult because Stuy!
Tim’s hatred of Stuy and PS 321 is in direct proportion to how desperately his favorite charter schools want the kids in those schools to attend their school instead because of course, the more kids from Stuy and PS 321 they can get, the fewer of those unwanted low-income high needs kids his school will have to suspend until they get the picture that they should leave.
It’s pretty disgusting, but Stuy! Charter schools target at-risk kids but Stuy! So Tim wants us all to make sure they are enable to continuing the abuse.
NYC Public School Parent,
You hit the nail on the head! Tim is saying as long as any public school program has any admissions criteria, charters can continue to cherry pick whomever they want and exclude kids with disabilities and kick out those who have low scores.
Tim also fails to note that those severely handicapped students that are placed into separate programs are still the responsibility of the sending school district. Only charters wash their hands of any and all responsibility to those they reject.
Through compulsory education laws and their taxing authority, state and local governments collect funds for the sole purpose of educating children. Those funds go where the kids do.
When a child’s parents withdraw her from a charter, the charter no longer receives that funding. The same is true when a child is mainstreamed out of a private school placement paid by the district; when a child leaves a zoned school for a gifted and talented school; or when a child moves to a leafy suburb.
For decades everyone has been quite comfortable with outsourcing the publicly funded education of certain children to private providers, even as the buck ultimately stopped with the child’s local district. Charter schools are no different, other than their scale and the fact they are accessible to all students.
Tim, I really can’t figure out if you are being purposely obtuse with that answer or if you just lack the education to understand the point you just made.
The gifted and talented programs are part of the entire system. The principal at Stuy doesn’t profit because she figured out how to kick out expensive kids and she can spend the money to pay herself and the administrators most talented at making the unwanted students feel “misery” a high salary to reward them for those special skills.
School based budgets in this system are hugely affected by the high cost of educating students with special needs privately or educating them in any public school. That’s why there is no incentive for the DOE Chancellor to reward a school that weeds out expensive kids — that cost is still borne by the system and every student in the system — including the ones at PS 321 — will have their budgets cut because those students’ higher cost will have to be borne by ALL of them.
Except the charter school students, of course. Every student placed on the “got to go” list is a WIN for the charter school! They are permanently off their books and that is more for the charter school.
Thus the biggest rewards at the most unethical charter schools go to the principals who rid themselves of the most students! No wonder certain charter school principals were praised and promoted so quickly and their suspension rates and “got to go” lists were sky high! That is what your system rewards.
Nothing was ever stopping an unethical charter school from accommodating the huge number of at-risk students who were pushed out of their schools by teaching them in separate classes or paying for their tuitions at the special needs schools that apparently huge numbers of them supposedly needed according to their “experts” who were highly paid to tell parents to find another school for their “severely disturbed” 6 year old. I can guarantee you that if the charter actually was responsible for the $100,000/year tuition at the special needs private schools they claimed so many of their unwanted 6 year olds absolutely required, they would not have been so quick to pretend that was the case. Since that money would come right out of their budgets instead of it coming out of the budgets of every single child in a public school.
I find your desperate attempts to defend the fact that charter schools have been caught out pushing out at-risk kids who can’t be taught quickly and cheaply so be laughable and yet truly sad. Either you believe those kids are as worthless as the charter folks who you admire keep telling us they are, or you know they aren’t but just don’t care as long as your dishonesty gets you what you want.
Charter school chains now educate more kids than many small cities and yet they force the kids who remain in public schools to pay for the expensive kids they kick out. Why don’t they keep EVERY child or pay the private school tuition of the many that they keep insisting are so truly violent after spending a few months taught by “model” teachers in charters that they need a private school for severely disturbed kids?
A “best and worst” list is needed. The “best category”- Scholars for Public Schools. The “worst list”- Education Faculty Hacks for the Richest 0.1%.
“School Choice”
Charter picking,
Like cherry picking,
Selects the very best.
The ones who bore
The highest score
On every single test
“In an announcement that received wide media coverage, James H. Shelton this week was named the first head of the education component of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a new corporation, dedicated to charitable ventures, that is funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan. According to Zuckerberg’s announcement of Shelton’s appointment, “Jim will bring all of his own experience in improving personalized learning and helping underserved communities.”
It was unclear whether that description was meant to include Shelton’s current service on the corporate board of directors that oversees troubled for-profit college Kaplan University. In January 2015, Shelton left his job as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, which had been engaged in increased scrutiny of the for-profit college industry. In November 2015, Shelton joined the board of Graham Holdings, whose Kaplan Inc. subsidiary includes Kaplan University.
By the time Shelton joined the Graham Holdings board of directors, Kaplan University had been accused of a range of questionable acts, with many former students, often from low-income backgrounds, claiming they were misled by Kaplan and left worse off than when they started.
Graham Holdings directors receive $150,000 in annual compensation.”
I just hope public schools resist the big marketing push for “blended learning” coming from the government/industry/foundations.
There just has to be a recognition that this is a revolving door echo chamber and it’s riddled with huge conflicts of interest. That’s a fact. All of these people move from the foundations thru government and into and out of private sector product sales.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/new-head-of-zuckerberg-ed_b_9860126.html
They are all members of the education underworld. The tantalizing scent of ROI and public education are a very bad mix.
Chiara,
A group of former US Ed Dept officials from the Duncan years bought a large failing for-profit college corporation and said they would use their expertise to bring it back to profitability
This is pretty funny. One of the candidates for state superintendent in Ohio owns a charter chain.
As is always the case in this state, public schools (93% of students) are completely ignored in any discussion of public education so we’re having another “education debate” that neglects to mention public schools:
“Sommers also downplayed his school’s value-added grade, calling the measure “very difficult to understand” and instead suggesting that another progress measure that his school uses is more important.
“Our value-add on NWEA MAP results puts us in the top 20% nationally,” Sommers told The Plain Dealer, so he is puzzled at how the state ranks his school so differently than NWEA does.
“To that extent, it’s confusing to us,” he said, adding that his staff does not know what to do with Ohio’s value-added data.
“I can’t say I don’t have confidence in it (state results),” Sommers said. “It tells us what the state of Ohio needs. But when we actually want to look at data that drives instruction, we use NWEA MAP.”
Oh, well. So much for the VAM measure! Invalid. Apparently no one cares and we’ll all continue to pretend it means something.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/05/is_the_charter_school_run_by_s.html
RageAgainstTheTetsocracy
May 8, 2016 at 9:08 am
They are all members of the education underworld. The tantalizing scent of ROI and public education are a very bad mix.
I just hope pubic schools make good decisions. They’re signing “pledges” to institute the administration’s blended learning agenda. That language worries me. No one should be signing a “pledge” to pour limited funds into this and no one should be allowing Facebook (or God forbid, Kaplan University) to direct public school funding priorities.
There’s nothing magical about tech companies. They’re no less self-interested and profit-driven than any other company despite their carefully cultivated ultra-hip image.
Reasonable people should be wary of this. There is nothing wrong with questioning these foundations or asking questions about conflicts of interest that arise in the DC revolving door culture.
“There’s nothing magical about tech companies.”
This statement should be their guiding light.
“The school chooses the student, the student doesn’t choose the school.”
I hope a charter school doesn’t choose my kids. How can I find out if this is happening!?
I don’t think you have to worry unless you have applied to the charter and then the charter looks carefully at the application to make sure the child fits what they are looking for. Parental choice is an illusion. The only choice the parent had was to fill out the application after being seduced by the corporate advertisement. The choice is with the charter. That is why corporate charters spend so much money on media propaganda ads touting their schools as better than traditional public schools, because to get at that money, the corporate charters have to fool enough parents to apply before the charter can cherry pick from the applicants.
Corporate charter advertisements are no different than when the milk industry claimed “Everybody needs milk” and then they were taken to court because everybody doesn’t need milk. In fact, millions of people are lactose intolerant and calcium from cows milk is not easily absorbed and used by the human body.
Misleading product claims are not rare and now that education has become a marketplace product to get rich from, the lies have become a flood.
“It can be difficult for consumers to distinguish false advertising claims from true ones, especially when they are made by credible-sounding advocates. When companies with enormous spending power are behind such claims, increasing profits is often prioritized over providing consumers with accurate information.” …
“Misleading claims are more common in some industries than others. In many cases, companies prey on consumers seeking solutions in fields where there isn’t always an easy answer.”
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/05/20/the-9-most-misleading-product-claims/
In advertising, there’s a big difference between pushing the truth and making false “claims.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/false-advertising-scandals-2011-9
Here is how you can find out:
Enter the lottery for a spot in a non-Kindergarten grade. Before being allowed to enroll, your child will be given an exam and told whether he is allowed to enroll or not.
You are obviously the kind of parent the charter school desires, so your child will most certainly be placed in his rightful grade, or if the charter school really wants him, will fawn over his brilliance and tell you how he can skip a grade due to his unique giftedness. No doubt you will assume every parent is treated as nicely as you are. Maybe your child won’t even have to take that so-called grade placement test and perhaps only at-risk minority kids are subject to that. What do you think?
Of course, we do hear from the parents of kids who aren’t quite as desirable as to what happens to their kids. After they take that test, they are told their kid’s “lacking” Kindergarten education didn’t leave him ready for 1st grade and he must be held back. This has been publicly documented by parents who gave up the spot and those who took it because they thought the charter school was really looking after their child’s best interest and not the charter’s best interest.
A charter school can’t choose the kids of parents who don’t enter the lottery. That’s why there is so much money being spent to encourage affluent college educated parents to enter the lottery and so much catering to their desires to convince them to attend. Shorter days? Of course! I know we have been claiming long days are necessary, but if the little darlings of the parents like you have expensive sports and music lessons to attend, we are delighted to change our policies!
The charter really really wants to “choose” your kids, flerp, but they can’t do so unless you enter the lottery and they want to make sure their charter is everything you want it to be, even if it means pretending that their claims that long days and strict discipline were absolutely necessary.
I would like to suggest reconsideration of #10 on the list – charter schools are supported by the feet of the millions of students who are flocking to them. If they were not, they would go away tomorrow.
“charter schools are supported by the feet of the millions of students who are flocking to them. If they were not, they would go away tomorrow.”
Charter schools aren’t supported like that when there is a well-funded public school as an option. They are supported like that when the choice is a charter school subsidized by millions to offer what lots of money can buy to the students who won’t cost them any money.
People also supported their private health care insurance because it was cheap and seemed good. And as long as your child remained healthy and had no illnesses that couldn’t be cured with a dose of antibiotics, you were fine and that private health insurance could profit nicely. As long as your child could be treated inexpensively, they were happy to profit from offering health care to your child. Charter schools are no different as long as you have the right kind of child that will allow them to profit.
Your thinking would also support allowing health insurance companies to now drop whatever patients they want to drop because the healthy patients are “happy”.
jdhollowell, PT Barnum said it best: there’s a sucker born every minute
My daughter put her 3 children in charter schools, I think they stink! No bus service, unless it’s for the sports team, you pay for everything, if you need for kids to wear uniforms & pay for them go to a religious school! Unless your a stay @ home Mom & have a car your out of luck. If the money used to build & operate the schools would go to public schools they would be better!
The Growing Business of Education
Once upon a time, fresh pure drinking water was plentiful and available at no cost to anyone. Slowly over time, that fresh free drinking water ever so slowly started to become polluted and contaminated by growing industry and loose regulations, not to mention political interest groups that began turning their heads in the name of greed. As that clean pure drinking water began to become scarce, that was the in for capitalization of the bottled water industry. This is metaphoric on so many levels for the field of public education today as we know it or at least the way we used to know it at its genesis.
Public Education was born as a form of free pure flowing knowledge to all. The same way that we should all be entitled to free pure drinking water, unpolluted by industry in the name of greed and politically corrupted lobby groups. The standard should be the same for public education. As public education is slowly, but rapidly being infiltrated by profit margins, and loose regulation, it too is slowly becoming a scarcity. Candidly speaking, No Child Left Behind, (NCLB) was born with good intentions just like the clean pure free flowing rivers that many rely on, but has too many loopholes for profiteers to rob federal money from the public education sector.
The education sector needs to have educators at the helm whose intentions are pure running the show, not a business man or woman who dose not belong there unless their intentions are to begin the demise of public education as we once knew it. If we really want to see America “Great Again”, then we need to put all of the proper resources into place it instead of tearing it apart.