William Gumbert relies on data from the Texas State Education Departmentvto demonstrate they the state’s woefully underfunded public schools outperform the well-funded overhyped charter schools.
The real puzzle in Texas and elsewhere is why billionaires and financiers continue to fund failure.
See the analysis here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Texas legislature is guilty of “throwing good money after bad.” While they emulate “business practices” in theory, their practice of little to no control over the money is reckless. They have chosen to ignore scandals and missing funds. With more than 54% percent of replication grant recipients receiving a D-F rating, why do these failing private charter schools not get closed? The Houston schools are B rated with only one failing school, and the governor wants to take them over. This is hypocrisy that shows the real motive is not about educational improvement. It is about undermining public education by transferring more public funds into private hands.
Your last sentence is the answer to the puzzle. In a privatizer’s eye, there is gold in them there hills, and they want access to it. Side benefit would be the elimination of a strong union movement.
YES. “and the governor wants to take them over…” ONLY because there are profits to be made.
Reblogged this on Cloaking Inequity and commented:
Here’s an interesting counternarrative.
The federal review of grant applications is a total farce. I have looked at some of these reviews. Critical comments are sometimes included, but then the score on that same criterion is high, so the total score is near perfect. The whole program has become a slush fund for Devos and for people who keeping on making money from the charter industry. The reviewers, whose names are undisclosed, appear to be shills from the industry.
I read New York state’s application for a Race to the Top grant in 2010. The reviewers’ comments were completely uninformed. I recall that the review commended the state for its improved NAEP scores, even though the scores had been flat for many years. NY won $500 million but gave a promise to increase the number of charters and to evaluate teachers by test scores and to adopt the Common Core.
It’s not a puzzle. The answer is: Because they can. Texas was, as I’m sure you know, the leader in the movement to privatize public education; and all the years of Republican rule, assisted by scores of Blue Dog Democrats, makes it the poster child for the privatization movement. And now the governor is using the pandemic to expand it even further.