Bill Phillis reports that one–half of Ohio’s authorized charter schools either never opened or closed.
This is not a sound use of limited public funds.
See the database here.
He writes:
Of the 600 charters that were authorized by the state to operate, 291 either didn’t open or have closed.
The good news is that half of the charters that were authorized are out of business. The bad news is thousands of students were harmed by the disruptions.
The Ohio charter experiment was never treated as an experiment. It moved from a $10 million pilot project to a billion dollar annual industry without any evaluation, scant accountability and no transparency.
In the process students are harmed and taxpayers fleeced.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have no plan. :0)
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Canada is very similar to USA in many ways but not all. The GDP/population of USA is slightly higher. We have a tiny number of charters in Alberta. The major difference is our poverty rate of 10% as compared to USA of 20% . Poverty defined as income less than half the median income. According to PISA we have passed Finland and are now 2nd in western world. We are certainly not smarter than anyone else. We do one other thing. In Ontario (40% of Canada) the poorer your school the more money you get. The rich schools get the least. About 5% of kids are in private ed.
This is not rocket science. Very simple formula. Mitigate poverty, fund poor schools better.
Canada must not have political graft. Charter operators own Ohio’s GOP. The state’s been gerrymandered for grifters. Ohioans can’t even get the state’s GOP top lawyer to move forward on charges brought against the largest virtual school operator in the state.
Canadians must have interest in the greater good. American who vote Republican are solely interested in their own well-being.
I’m certain Canadians have their own problems with graft, but it’s surely less, they’re polite about it, and more likely to say they’re sorry. 😹
Linda,
In Canada corporations and unions are forbidden from making political contributions. They still try but often get caught. Individuals can give but they are severely limited. Canada has the electoral laws that Bernie Sanders and others advocate.
Doug,
You have explained why no establishment Dem should be elected and why Bernie should be.
The U.S. suffers from an odious front for the rich, the Center for American Progress (sister to the hedge funds of DFER) which media portrays as the “liberal” voice despite CAP’s funding from oligarch, Bill Gates.
When the rich capture both parties, it’s convenient for them to pretend the policy differences are between Democrats and. Republicans.
“Non-partisan” hides great harm, like the Gates-funded SETDA. The true division, which establishment Dems help the wealthy to obscure, is oligarchy vs. democracy.
Agree. Canada has 3 major parties.
Conservatives roughly match your GOP 30-40% party
Liberals roughly match Democrats. 30-40% party
New Democratic Party. Roughly match Bernie Sanders. And AOC. 20-30% party but often govern many provinces.
This makes all the difference. NDP can often force, cajole, shame Liberals into doing the right thing as Bernie does. We just do it from the outside.
Also, Canada is lucky it doesn’t have the Gates-funded Fordham Institute.
Oh that your last sentence could be posted on billboards across the USA
Canada is basically what a USA retooled by Bernie Sanders and AOC would look like. It works well for us.
Neoliberalism captured both major parties in the late 1970s and produced a weak neoliberal in Carter and then a string of strong neoliberal Administrations starting with Reagan, so the US became the world leader in the neoliberal transfer of wealth and power to the top 1%. Public education here was swallowed by the neoliberal whale that swallowed all corners of the public sector and turned them into corporate revenue streams–public parks, public housing, public transit, public hospitals, public services, etc. 40 yrs of intense transformation from the top down will require strong medicine to revive society from the bottom up. We will see which of the many Democratic candidates for Pres. is willing to write such a prescription.
Awhile ago, Gates had a pervasive campaign to make libraries digital. Today, the local library printed out my statement of books checked out. The paper identified how much I’d saved, like it was a discount store purchase.
Everything has to be monetized because Gates has no soul. Everything communities do to share their lives with their neighbors has to be devalued and converted to a monetary transaction because Gates lacks human emotion.
That is because Bill Gates is not human. He belongs to the same species Donald Trump came from. Not human. Hell Spawn maybe.
Gates is a monopolist, pure and simple. He lives his life in accordance with a deadly sin. If you want to see his devilish picture, look up ‘greed’ in a dictionary.
Oh, you’re just one of those glass half-empty people.
What a waste. Half the charters are not open; the other half need to be closed. I am a glass half empty, pour the other half out kind of person. Fill another glass with clean, clear, refreshing public school water and dump the half glass of poisoned charter school sludge out on John Kasich’s head. With the beverage issue sorted out at Diner of Ohio, justice can be served.
With so much corruption tied to education’s privatization and corporatization, Phillis can’t investigate everything.
If he could, he should start questioning Ohio’s SETDA public employees from the state department of ed. If states get financial advantage from the association’s “partners” and in return the state employees have endorsed the organization’s lobbying and other activities for the benefit of the agenda of Gates (he funds the organization) and, the “partners”, then they are betraying democracy.
A parallel- (1) Elected Republican politicians advance the ALEC agenda (Koch-funded) and, (2) public employees claiming non-partisanship use their state positions to “govern” SETDA, which advances the Gates’ agenda. How much “governing” are public employees really doing for the association? And, by whose authority are they directing SETDA’s economic and political activities e.g. helping ed tech stat ups to scale up, fostering public private partnerships?