Peter Greene notes that Kentucky passed a charter law but hashttp://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/10/ky-pushing-old-charter-myths-in-new.html so far wisely refused to fund them. Along comes a local marketing consultant to explain why charters are a great idea. Greene explains why charters are a very bad idea indeed.
The arguments for charters are bogus, he shows.
The marketing consultant says, why not give charters a chance. Greene responds that we have 30 years of experience with charters:
Finally: some public schools stink.
So why not give parents a choice. I would say because parents don’t want a choice as much as they want a non-stinky school. Vissing cites a local school that came up low on Kentucky’s ridiculous 5 star school rating program. Those parents would like to send children to a good school. Why, I wonder for the gazillionth time, wouldn’t we try to make the school not suck? The old argument is that students can’t wait, that it takes too long to change a school, yet somehow we’re proposing that a school can be go from nonexistent to awesome in the same short time.
Bonus round: charter schools are not public.
Kentucky charter advocates have gotten the memo to call charter schools “public charters schools.” They are not. Public schools are owned by the public, operated by elected representatives of the public, are completely transparent to the public, and serve all of the public.
Kentuckians, do not be snookered by these mythical myths and the charter advocates who push them. You’re a fresh market; at a minimum, you deserve a fresh sales pitch.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You can read more about the author of the editorial promoting charter schools here, on the page of his political organization:
http://americansfirst.org/
Quite the right-wing extremist, and a racist, Trumpy campaigner against immigration.
Americans first, my tush. This is an immigrant country.
It’s really boilerplate ed reform- cheerlead charter schools, offer absolutely nothing to public schools other than a promise to cut their funding.
Public schools don’t exist in the ed reform echo chamber. There are only charter schools and potential new charter schools.
A public school student, to them, is just a person who hasn’t yet transferred to a charter or private school. They don’t add any value or make any contributions to existing public schools because they don’t believe the schools should continue to exist and they’re working as hard as they can to make them extinct. If your goal was a wholly privatized system would you invest anything in public schools or support them or their students? Of course not.
This is from DFER and it’s (supposedly) what they work for:
https://www.the74million.org/article/jeffries-new-poll-finds-voters-favor-innovation-school-choice-fair-funding-and-accountability-the-democrats-should-listen/
The only one of these promises ed reformers have actually worked for or achieved is the expansion of charters and vouchers. They have a long list! They supposedly include public schools in their efforts! It’s just that they never actually get anything done except for expanding charters and vouchers.
Public schools are their last priority, which means the students IN public schools are their last priority. They simply don’t return any value to students in existing public schools, so supporters and advocates for public schools should stop hiring them.
NO DFER for me. NO GOP for me.
Go Bernie.
I put Peter’s article up, with your intro..
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Beware-Kentucky-Here-Com-in-General_News-Argument_Charter-Schools_Education-Costs_Education-Laws-191017-905.html
my comment at OEN
Everyday, in every way, the states are being hounded by the power elite to end public education. Talk about Fake news… “charter schools are not public.Kentucky charter advocates have gotten the memo to call charter schools “public charters schools.” They are not. Public schools are owned by the public, operated by elected representatives of the public, are completely transparent to the public, and serve all of the public.
A great article from Mr. Greene. But Kentucky is a state with enormous numbers of poor people dependent on the social welfare safety net who nonetheless go the polls time after time and vote for the rapacious Moscow Mitch McConnell, who fights tooth and nail, every day, to help the rich and hurt the poor.
Moscow Mitch works every day to help himself and his wife and those who keep them in power.
The lead editorial in today’s New York
Times is about conflicts of interest and shady dealings in Moscow Mitch’s family.
Good day, class, and welcome to Florida Man Five-Minute University, where we teach you the inside secrets that can make Kentucky, just like Florida, a capitol of the con. Let me say upfront that in Florida, it’s not just selling swampland to Yankees anymore, folks! Today’s topic: HOW TO RUN A NONPROFIT CHARTER FOR PROFIT.
Here’s the deal: because you are pretending to be a type of public school, you get a set allocation, per student, from the state. So, ANYTHING YOU DON’T SPEND ON STUDENTS AND TEACHERS, you can divert to your own enrichment. So, the two keys to making you rich enough to buy a membership at Mar-a-lago are a) to spend as little as possible on students and teachers and b) to divert funds to yourself.
But first, a few preliminaries:
Locate your new charter school in a comparatively affluent district with conservative, middle-class parents. Because standardized tests measure socioeconomic status, doing this will save you a lot of headaches later on. You won’t have to worry about low test scores and school grades. If you can’t do this, locate in a poor area, but remember that you will have to get out before the state authorities close you down. You’ll have to take the money and run earlier.
Your law will say that you can’t use admission tests to exclude students, but as grifters in Florida figured out long ago, laws are made to be skirted. So, for example, you might consider asking for a writing sample from prospective applicants and using the excuse that some students’ writing isn’t consistent with readiness for your writing curriculum. If that doesn’t work, just pile on the entrance forms—create pages and pages and pages and pages of them, including many for the kid. This will be enough to discourage poor parents and exclude challenged students who will bring down your test scores.
Create a no-excuses, three-strikes-and-you’re-out discipline policy that provides you with another means for kicking out low-performing students and students with cognitive and emotional challenges.
Make 80-90 percent of the curriculum, in math, English, and other tested areas test prep. Depersonalized education software is great for this.
SPENDING AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE ON STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
Keep class sizes as high as the law will allow. In charters, there’s no union for teachers to complain to.
Build a large, impressive-looking structure with good signage outside, but furnish it minimally with student desks. Used school furniture can often be bought in bulk, at bargain prices, from failed charters around the nation. Alternatively, rent an abandoned business site (there are plenty of these in Kentucky!), gut it, and put dumb computer terminals around the walls for running depersonalized test prep software, which can be rented on the cheap. You might even be able to get away with charging parents fees for their kids’ use of the software.
Important: Don’t build or furnish a gymnasium, science labs, art labs, a library, an auditorium, a theatre, or a nurse’s office. An empty field for track and calisthenics and field sports like football and soccer will do. If you must, build a combination tennis court and basketball court outside—simply some asphalt with a carport-type (but taller) aluminum cover will do. Your golf team can practice at local golf courses, and parents can pay for that. Your baseball team can practice at community facilities, and again, parents can pay any necessary fees. School meetings can be held at the cafeteria.
Keep staff to a minimum. One or two part-time janitors doubling as audio-visual supply persons is enough, and one or two part-time cafeteria people. Hire your relatives.
Order premade frozen lunches and charge a large markup for these. Place lots of vending machines in the cafeteria. These are real money-makers. You don’t need a school psychologist, nurse, security guard, or librarian. You will need a guidance counselor to deal with student schedules.
You will need a testing and an internet connection so that students can take standardized tests. The cheapest alternative, there, is to buy dumb, refurbished terminals from a third-world country. You will need a computer company to service these and keep them operating. Hire a relative to do this, or start your own separate company for this purpose. For the benefit of parents, refer to your testing center as the Media Lab and Library. If people ask where the books are, explain that these are all online because you are such a progressive, state-of-the-art school.
Don’t provide supplies for your teachers beyond a bare minimum at the beginning of the year. When your teachers arrive, they should find in their mailboxes, for the entire year, say, one small box of paper clips, one row of staples taken from a box of staples, one red Bic pen, one black whiteboard marker, and one ream of white paper. What are the teachers going to do? Complain? They don’t even have a union. Tell your teachers that they can request that their homeroom students bring in classroom supplies. Teachers can distribute a list of needed supplies to these students at the beginning of the year.
Require your teachers to decorate the school hallways and classrooms with bulletin boards and student work (always approved by you), at their own expense.
Keep class sizes as large as the law will allow and larger if you can get away with it.
Arrange with textbook companies to get new free or reduced-cost textbooks in exchange for piloting new textbook programs. Where you can’t do that, purchase cheap online depersonalized education software in lieu of texts. Get your parents to hold bake sales and the like to pay for this. Students can access these from their computers at home, and those who can’t because they are too poor—well, this is another way to force those kids out. Furnish every teacher with a refurbished laptop and a projector for displaying text or online software in the classroom. Don’t purchase dedicated whiteboard projection systems. Create a parent committee to run fundraisers to purchase these over several years.
Pay your teachers the least allowed under the law and provide minimal benefits.
THE REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF: DIVERTING FUNDS TO YOURSELF
Raise money from investors to build a building and outfit it (or to gut that abandoned K-Mart). Tell your investors that you are not in the school business, really, but in the real-estate business. Start a for-profit construction company and pay yourself to build the building. Better yet, pay your cousins, golfing partner, mistress, or spouse do this. Lease your building to the school at considerably more than the cost of your mortgage or repayments to investors.
Start a for-profit management company to manage the school. Staff it with your cousins, golfing partners, mistresses, spouses, and yourself; pay all of these people very large salaries; and provide them with handsome benefits packages. Make the management fees adjustable so that at the end of the year you can zero out any balance in the school coffers, leaving just enough to pay your principal and assistant principal during the summer.
Start companies to do janitorial services, tech services, heating and air conditioning, accounting and personnel services, and so on for the school, or have your cousins, golfing partners, mistresses, or spouse to this. Charge the school management fees for managing these services.
Build that equity in your building and property at taxpayer expense!
So, that’s the short course. However, before jumping in, you might want to review the thousands and thousands of court cases against charter operators around the country. These provide lots and lots of further examples of how to skim taxpayer dollars in the “nonprofit” charter biz. And they also provide plenty of examples of what not to do—of how to take the money and run before the authorities catch up to you.