Deion Sanders is a superstar athlete. Texas loves superstar athlete. So, when Sanders decided he wanted to open charter schools, he had no trouble getting a charter in Dallas and another in Fort Worth. His big idea was to combine college prep and athletic prowess. A winning combination.
His first school opened in 2012. It was closed by the state in 2015, because of administrative chaos, a mountain of debt, and dwindling enrollment.
The schools opened with great promise. What could possibly go wrong?
Some spotted the plan as a scam from the outset.
The New York Times saw the school sputtering; it fielded excellent sports teams, but got an F for academics.
When they closed, the funerals were brief.
Here is a timeline of the “spectacular collapse” of the schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The now infamous Prime Prep Academy shut its door permanently a year ago with less than an hour’s notice. Students walked away from the Dallas and Fort Worth campuses with no school. Employees left without jobs or paychecks for their final month of work.”
People on the Left say part of the goal of ed reform is to CREATE chaos. To get people accustomed to the idea that K-12 public education is not “public” and there won’t be a system that ensures everyone gets a seat because the end goal is to create a system with a lot of uncertainty- like the “food trucks” that DeVos points to as a model. Here today, maybe gone tomorrow. That’s not a mistake, they say, but the plan.
We just saw this in Ohio with the sudden closure of ECOT. They didn’t treat it like a public system at all. They CAN do that now because there IS an existing public system to absorb the risk inherent in the experiments, but what if they get their way and there ISN’T a public system? What then?
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we redesigned our public school system a couple of years ago. It’s partly rural so they were spending a boatload on transportation costs and replicating administrators across buildings. It took YEARS to plan, because there was this underlying duty that had to be met and it was don’t disrupt current families or, God forbid, leave them without a school. All hell would break loose if those duties weren’t met.
If we were a charter school I guess we wouldn’t have to plan for that, because, you know, hopefully another food truck will be on the corner that day and if it’s not there’s always the “default” public system to fall back on. They hope. They rely upon.
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This country has an “attention span” disorder.
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When movie, rock, and sports stars think they know everything, we are in trouble.Their EGOS get in their way.
And sorry but NO OPRAH for me.
A RADICAL Idea: Let’s elect PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS, NOT reality TV folks, hotel owners, movie stars, rock stars, sports stars, political hacks, marketers, lawyers, televangelists, and the rest of that elite group of no nothings and thugs. They mostly live in a BUBBLE.
And of course, this one: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/dnc-chair-tom-perez-democratic-partys-grim-metaphor/
SIGH…
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Did you see the look on the kid’s face in the picture under the “funerals were brief” link? Now that’s betrayal.
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Yet, there was little outrage from the fiscal responsibility crowd here in Texas. The hypocrisy is astounding.
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