Charles Pierce is an incisive blogger for Esquire. Whenever he writes about schools, he is right on. In this post, he warns people in Massachusetts against a Question 2, which would expand the number of charters by 12 a year forever. Pierce knows that hedge fund managers and billionaires the funding this campaign, and the proposal is deliberately deceptive, appealing to people to improve their public schools. The real purpose, as we know, is to undermine public schools and fund privately managed schools that do not answer to the community that pays the taxes to support them.
Pierce quotes liberally from Carol Burris’s excellent report on the lack of oversight of charters in California.
He writes:
“There’s now a bill before Governor Jerry Brown that would tighten the public accountability standards for charter operators within the state. The evidence is now abundantly clear in a number of states: As it is presently constituted, the charter school movement is far better as an entry vehicle for fraud and corruption than it is for educating children. The fact that the charter industry is fighting to maintain its independent control over taxpayer funds is proof that the industry knows it, too.”
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a48531/california-charter-schools/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The charter industry has become a boondoggle of waste and fraud. What has happened in California, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania highlights the need for regulation, oversight and accountability. I agree with Mr. Pierce that the harmful impact of charters to create a school for a few causes harm to the public schools the majority of students attend. It is this parasitic relationship that is so insidious and draining to public schools. When he considers the lack of value for the $310 million spent on charters in California, he concludes the following.
“Roll that number around in your head, especially if your kids go to a public school where they have to pass the hat for art supplies. That’s $310 million in public money for lousy results. If the corporations and oligarchs financing education “reform” want to spend $310 million to run schools, they should spend their own damn money to do so.”
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This feels something like the recent exposure of Trump’s charity: get other people to donate money and then publish the fact that YOU are doing the giving. These school “reformers” get the label of being philanthropic but are now often manipulating public money rather than their own — all as a means to keep control over the school reform conversation.
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It’s an isolated problem. If “isolated” means OH, MI, PA, FL, AZ, IN and CA.
The Obama Administration are visiting the pre-approved ed reform states and cities this week- Tennessee, New Orleans and DC.
They steer clear of problematic areas, like the entire Great Lakes region 🙂
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Chiara,
I wonder if King will celebrate the non-achievements of the Tennessee Achievement School District?
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Diane…please post the link to the Carol Burris report on California charter schools for those who may have missed it.
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Good local coverage of a charter school trial in Ohio:
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/09/ecot_online_school_funding_fig.html
The echo chamber seems to have missed another data point.
This is literally the largest school in the state, WHOLLY a creation of ed reformers, and it’s as if it doesn’t exist in edreformland.
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Frontline last night ran an expose of the for profit colleges. The charter school fiasco emulates that kind of mentality and the people who are cheated by it.
GREAT propagandists and purchasers of politicians who seemingly believe that the U. S. treasury is an entity to be exploited.
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I recommend, very highly, Mr. Pierce’s excellent book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.” Incisive and hilarious.
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Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll look into it.
That must be a hoot, if his book is anything like this characterization by Pierce, “Of all the sanctimonious fckwads infesting our politics, the school reformers are unquestionably among the fckiest and the waddiest.”
(Quote from Pierce’s June 29, 2016 piece in Esquire, “Reminder: Education Is Not a Damn Marketplace And charter schools are not working” located here:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a46314/charter-schools-not-working/ )
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Homeless Educator, I’m quite sure you’d like it….
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And yet, private charter schools across our nation are allowed to divert hundreds of millions of public school tax dollars away from educating America’s children and into private pockets. Any thoughtful person should pause a moment and ask: “Why are hedge funds the biggest promoters of charter schools?” Hedge funds aren’t altruistic — there’s got to be big profit in “non-profit” charter schools in order to hedge funds to be involved in backing them.
And even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) 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.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
One typical practice of charter schools is to pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxy companies which then pocket the public’s tax money as profit. Another profitable practice 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, and sell again, and again, and again, pocketing profit after profit.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities; nevertheless, they get public tax money. And, as the NAACP and ACLU have learned, charter schools are often engaged in racial and economic-class discrimination.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. Lawsuits challenging the legality of giving public tax money to private charter schools must be filed in every state in our nation.
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“Hedge funds are not known for altruism.” Most hedge funds are quite the opposite, vulture capitalists. They buy companies, load them up with debt, then sell off the parts for profits. Of course, workers lose jobs, and pension obligations fall by the wayside, but the hedge fund typically makes out like a bandit. Most hedge fund managers have a “black belt” in opportunism. They know how to squeeze blood out of a stone. They smell blood in these blind, reckless laws, and they are looking to exploit the flaws. In addition to the real estate schemes and private equity grabs, some of the schools may qualify for tax credits and tax loopholes. The only thing they hate as much as unions is tax. It is a sweet deal for them and a very bad one for the local tax base. They get the taxpayer to underwrite their risk while they privatize and hide profit.
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Double dipping is passé to these shysters. A number of the scams have involved triple, quadruple and quintuple dipping. That includes 1.) when non-educator Pa gets a six figure income for being principal of the school and 2.) his education management organization gets paid to oversee the school 3.) while as owner/landlord of the building the school occupies, Pa charges the school rent and 4.) non-educator Ma and 5.) their kids are on the payroll, too, for working in various capacities. PLUS, if Pa invested in the charter school in a low income area (as most are), he takes advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit, where he can double his investment in 7 years!
“Charter School Gravy Train Runs Express-to-Fat City”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/09/10/charter-school-gravy-train-runs-express-to-fat-city/#3ef74fae70e5
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I know Charlie Pierce from Stephanie Miller’s progressive talk radio show, where he’s a frequent guest. He’s smart and funny. Glad to see he’s leading the vanguard of muckraking journalists into the morass that is school reform.
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He is on once week on Stephankie Miller in the mornings – he is right on.
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“Charter Schools are a Vehicle for Graft and Profit”
As we used to say in grade school when someone came up with a brilliantly inane statement: No shit, Sherlock!
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