Whenever there is a battle over the expansion of charter schools, we read in the papers that “charter parents” prevailed and the teachers’ union lost.
Why don’t the stories say “charter lobbyists prevail,” and public schools and their students lost?
Why do reporters always assume that only the unions oppose charter expansion.
Why are “charter parents” seeking more charter schools?
Don’t their children already attend a charter school?
Here is the conundrum.
Who benefits when legislators allow unlimited expansion of new charter schools?
Not the parents. Their children are already in a charter school.
How many charter schools does one child need?
This unrestricted expansion is solely for the benefit of the charter operators and their lobbyists.
As we have seen again and again, charter operators use the children and the parents as pawns to expand their empire of privately managed schools and enrich themselves.
Unlimited expansion of new charters does not benefit any charter school parent.
It sucks money away from existing public schools, the schools that 90% of the nation’s are enrolled in.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters have always been the pet project of the 1% and are often backed by dark money. Charters arrived on the scene with lots of hype, but not much substance. The wealthy made sure that the charter laws would be generous and even sometimes preferential to charter operators. It is no accident that in most states there is little to no regulation as the system was designed that way. Charter operators like to call this the free market, but it is more of a rigged market when the charter lobby ensures that charters keep getting a bigger “market share,” not based on need, but politics. Charters not only drain public school budgets, they often get generous donations from wealthy individuals seeking tax breaks. Some charters are sitting on a mountain of cash from Wall St. looking for tax exemptions. The entrenched charter lobby become the puppet masters of many of the so-called representatives, and it becomes a challenge to unseat them.
We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
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It is odd though. How the entire public school population is folded into “labor unions” but no one does a comparable conflation of charter schools and charter operators.
It would seem like the two sides have to be portrayed in terms of EITHER students or schools. It’s odd to “disappear” every single public school student and insert this weird proxy of “labor unions” to describe millions of students and thousands of schools.
It’s deliberate, I think. Ed reform believe “labor unions” are easier to demonize than schools and students, so they just omitted our kids. It has to be that, because they’re not actually looking at every public school and not seeing students and schools but instead seeing “labor unions”, right? Because that’s nuts.
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“How the entire public school population is folded into “labor unions” but no one does a comparable conflation of charter schools and charter operators.”
And that is one reason I suggest that we always refer to charter schools as PRIVATE charter schools.
Private charter school owner today was indicted. . .
Private charter school closed abruptly today, owner not found. . .
Etc. . . .
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I have to say too, there may be public school parents who see their child’s school as a labor union, but I have never met one. I’ve heard all kinds of discussions about and around our public schools- critical, complimentary,- but they never were about the fact that our teachers are members of a labor union. The biggest disagreements here are about discipline- which behavior should be disciplined and isn’t or which shouldn’t be and is. That and accusations of favoritism of one kind or another seem to be the most contentious.
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And, the terrible ideas just keep coming:
“As state funding for public schools shrinks, supporters of Learn Everywhere point to the program as a way for schools to save money. The Commissioner highlighted this at a May 15, 2019 presentation in Dublin. With students taking classes at private and nonprofit organizations, districts could cut programs offered at their local public schools.
SBOE member Ann Lane also alluded to this at their April meeting: “It will be interesting… as a student chooses to take credit outside of the building because it will translate, down the road, to savings for some districts,” she told the Board. ”
In this ed reform idea, public schools will award credits for private programs that families pay for- obviously, this will “cut costs” for public education, because schools will no longer offer the courses that parents pay for individually.
No concern at all for the students who can’t pay. They’re just out of luck. It’s like they wake up in the morning and ask “how can we make public schools worse today?”
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“and the terrible ideas keep coming…”
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Well, MA voters certainly put paid to that contention in their referendum last year—despite oodles of $$ poured into campaign by out-of-state charter interests (not unions). BTW, Chiara: Ohio, like MA, allows “indirect initiative statutes”—which are citizen-initiated, through the collection of signatures. So you too in Ohio can rally public-school communities to challenge charter school expansion, & prove the lie to this anti-union red-meat bait that anything challenging charters is originated by unions.
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The waiting lists for charters are greatly exaggerated. Charter enrollment is greatly exaggerated. The charters want everyone to think parents are crying out for choicy choice. They’re not. It’s Trumpian level dishonesty. Smoke and mirrors.
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LCT,
The waiting lists are phony.
They are a marketing ploy.
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Charter chains are basically a Ponzi scheme.
As with all Ponzi schemes, the people at the top of the pyramid are the primary beneficiaries.
The charter chain has to keep expanding to keep the pyramid from collapsing.
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