The charter industry is split by an internal quarrel between the brick-and-mortar charters and the virtual charters.
Report after report has concluded that the virtual charters do not live up to their claims. The latest–from CREDO at Stanford–found that students in virtual charters lost a year of math instruction for every year in the virtual charter, and nearly half a year of reading. What do you call a school where no one learns anything? A failure.
Peter Greene writes here about the charter vs. charter dust-up.
Here is a news story about the battle between the traditional charters that have buildings and their Ponzi cousins.
Since elected officials are unwilling to clean up the mess in the charter industry, will self-regulation work? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
To discover if self-regulation works, look no further than the food industry — or maybe you don’t want to or shouldn’t look if you don’t want to lose sleep and end up being stressed out with fear.
“During the past two decades, the food industry has taken over much of the FDA’s role in ensuring that what Americans eat is safe. … The food industry hires for-profit inspection companies, known as third-party auditors, who aren’t required by law to meet any federal standards and have no government supervision.”
A word of caution, don’t click on the Bloomberg link unless you are strong enough to deal with the truth and the threats you will discover that exist to your health and life with every mouthful of food you consume.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-11/food-sickens-millions-as-industry-paid-inspectors-find-it-safe
The FDA is trying, so far without success, to wrest back control of food inspection from the industry.
This is a snapshot of the world the neo-liberals, the neo-conservatives and the libertarians want the rest of us to live with even against our will. What’s happening in the food industry is happening to public education as it is privatized.
The same thing is happening to medical care, the police, firefighters, the military, the prisons, the national parks, and even the roads we drive on.
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I forgot to mention the water we drink.
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Making the public private often begins with so-called private-public “partnerships,” also known as one-foot-in (private) and one-foot-out (public) arrangements. Aim is to socialize the costs and privatize the profits. All of your examples are on the mark. Add public institutions of higher education.
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You are so right about this multi-faceted invasion. Evidence or not, the march toward one size fits all privatization continues. Privatization of schools now resembles a “hostile takeover.” Whether it is the Third Way or not, the goal is to move in and blur the lines between public and private, and gain access to public money in order to build private equity. The government is complicit in fostering privatization of anything and everything. If the public continues to sleep, they will see Medicare and Social Security undergoing some sort of “reform” that will benefit the oligarchs at the expense of ordinary people.
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Thanks for the link, Lloyd!
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What all of this (food, education, medicine) has in common is corporate statism. We won’t fight it being divided as it infects both major political parties. Preaching for a second: Ralph Nader and “Unstoppable”….a good read!
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We cannot get ed reform politicians in Ohio to work on public schools.
We’re paying a huge group of people in Columbus to work exclusively on charters, which are 7% of schools in the state
It’s insane. It’s all charters all the time. Utter and complete capture by this lobby.
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When this latest charter controversy is settled, maybe one or two of the public employees at the Ohio Dept of Ed could turn their attention to the 93% of schoolsin the state that are NOT charter schools?
They knew that was the job description, right? They’re aware we still have some public schools?
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I read the suggestions from the various end reform lobbies and one of them is amusing. If self-regulation doesn’t work they suggest public school districts take over this sector.
That’s nice. They created this rolling disaster and now they want to shove it off on public schools.
That’s okay. They can keep this corrupt mess themselves. I don’t want the garbage for-profit scams they invented.
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Just beyond the horizon: charter chains vs. local mom-and-pop charters.
After the public schools have been reduced to a rump institution, a convenient scapegoat, vestige and dumping ground for those students the charters won’t take, then there will be shakeout in Charterland, with the chains (via their billionaire patrons) getting their proprietary elected officials to concoct budget crises that call for austerity for all but the KIPP’s, SAs and other Overclass-anointed McSchools.
The local mom-and-pop charters, whatever the good intentions and hard work of their teachers and administrators, will be quickly sacrificed, since in the grand scheme of things they were never intended to be anything but window dressing for privatization.
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