Jan Resseger writes here about the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed new regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program. To a significant extent, the Department has incorporated recommendations offered by the Network for Public Education aimed at blocking for-profit entrepreneurs from winning federal funding. The charter lobby is fighting furiously to block these new regulations. Public comment is open until April 13.
Open this link and send your comment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, thanks so much!
If ever there was a reliable analyzer of current issues in public education, it is Jan!! Thank you for the tough work of making sense of the nonsense!!!
Jan Resseger is a national treasure.
This is an excellent analysis of the reckless federal charter schools program that has been used to close the public schools of Black and Brown students while funneling them into private charter schools in several cities. We should not be using federal money to help shut down public schools to produce profit for private companies. We should be providing the public schools with the resources and wrap around services they need to do a better job for vulnerable students.
This typical shuttering of public schools and transferring of minority students to separate and unequal private schools should not be using federal dollars to enhance segregation. The current lack of rules allows this practice of repeatedly sending poor, Black and Brown students to separate and unequal corporate schools while white students continue to attend authentic public schools. The name for this unfair process is discrimination, and the federal government should not be supplying funds to promote inequitable treatment of children.
Here’s the Comment I submitted on the Federal Register site. Feel free to copy and paste if you want to:
CHARTER SCHOOL FRAUD: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate charter school operators that the IG investigation declared that: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets. There is NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because they fail to pass the minimum test for being genuine public schools: They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
The Ohio Supreme Court also ruled charter schools are private.
Charter schools are public the way that the New York Public Library is public. And they’re private the way that the New York Public Library is private.
Charter schools are nothing like public libraries. They are neither “public” or “private” in the same way.
Public libraries serve all people in a community – they don’t choose which people are deserving and which are not. They don’t publicly humiliate the children who are using too many of their resources to save money. They don’t hold a lottery for library cards and then tell patrons that unless they attend 3 required meetings and do everything that the library demanded that they do at all times, their card would go to someone else.
NY Public Libraries are the opposite of charters. They are very forgiving of overdue books and fines accumulated by the poorest children whose families can’t pay them. They don’t use public humiliation to try to get patrons who they don’t want to serve to leave.
If the NYPL was “public” like charters are “public”, as soon as a low-income kid forgot to return a book, that child’s name would be plastered all over publicly so everyone who entered the library could see that the child was a “thief” or they would plaster their “wall of shame” the name of all the children who hadn’t paid their fines. Maybe they’d give them one chance to demonstrate their “generosity” before they publicly humiliated the children they hoped would never return to their library or borrow a book again.
Instead, the library is forgiving of children’s fines. They are forgiving when children forget and talk too loud. They WANT children to read, even if they forget to return a book.
The goal of librarians is to encourage children to feel good about learning. If they were like charters, the goal of librarians would be to brag that 99% of the children who used their library were reading above their grade level, and they would make sure that kids who struggled with reading who did not provide the library with bragging rights are shown the door and encouraged never to return.
We are all very grateful that the NYPL is nothing like a charter school.
Here’s my comment:
Charter schools, at best, and as an idea, present a constant moral hazard to “entrepreneurs” both in terms of funding (their setup invites bad actors) and in the choosing and steering of curricula . . . ideological, and away from content and teachers who would prepare students to live and work in, and to be responsible for, citizenship in the ongoing experiment of democracy.
Any “innovations” that charter schools potentially do (but too often don’t) can be done in PUBLIC SCHOOLS . . . without separating the nation’s education of its citizens from the network of PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS and local input that are directly connected to their democratic (small d) political ground. Charter schools have the potential of not only splitting away funding from public schools and their students, but in splitting the political foundations of the Country itself. Public schools and we live in a democratic political environment that has a capitalist economy, not the other way around; whereas charters schools too-easily enable the view that a capitalist economy IS a political system and so transactional living is all there is.
Even developing Federal regulations is already a foot in the door of even HAVING charter schools and the hazards they bring with them in the first place. Also, entrepreneurs are notoriously good at getting around regulations–too many are known to make it their job, rather than making students their #1 priority.
Federal funding to PUBLIC SCHOOLS only PLEASE! But the constant implementation of HEAVY-DUTY REGULATIONS if we must have them.
CBK