I remember when the idea of charter schools was first introduced. Charters would provide innovative schools whose basic purpose was “to save poor kids from failing public schools.” Vouchers had the same rationale.
Charters would provide better academics, more transparency, and more accountability. Charters would require less funding than public schools because they would be free of bureaucracy. Parents would hold them accountable by pulling their kids out. The competition with charters would improve public schools.
None of this turned out to be true.
Consider South Carolina. Entrepreneurs are using the charter law to create competition for private schools, at least on the sports field.
The moment was nearly nine years in the making.
A large crowd was on hand in January to see the Gray Collegiate Academy War Eagles basketball teams play in the school’s new on-campus gymnasium in West Columbia. No more bus rides downtown to Allen University, where Gray played most of its home games since opening in 2014.
“It brings everything that we have been working toward for nine years, full force,” Gray Collegiate athletic director and football coach Adam Holmes said. “There is nothing that we don’t have and can’t work toward to get.
“Our academics is second to none. Now, we have a turf football and soccer stadium, state-of-the-art gym, baseball, softball fields on campus. Hopefully, this will elevate us even more.” Less than two months later, Gray’s boys and girls basketball teams won state championships.
In the past 12 months, Gray also won state titles in softball and competitive cheer, and it won the 2021 football state title.
What once was a dream for Gray Collegiate was now reality. But for many of the high school teams that have had to play the War Eagles, the milestone of Gray adding new on-campus facilities might sound like more of a nightmare.
In their eyes, here is a burgeoning Goliath in athletics, a public charter school with advantages in attendance guidelines and whispers of recruiting tactics that result in all-star rosters that can dominate opponents. Gray and other charter schools — along with several private schools that compete in the public school league — are increasingly dominating small school athletics in South Carolina.
In the current school year, 13 of the 16 S.C. High School League fall and winter sports team championships in Class A and Class 2A were won by charter or private schools.
Administrators at traditional schools are starting to push back. One, the superintendent of Fairfield County schools, said he would not force teams in his district to play games against Gray if they didn’t want to.
The tension is pushing high school sports in South Carolina to a tipping point that could reshape not only their structure and oversight but force a fundamental reckoning on how the state deals with core issues such as fairness, sportsmanship and the boundaries of competition.
Read more at: https://www.thestate.com/sports/high-school/article271087367.html#storylink=cpy
Please open the link and keep reading. Is this why we needed charter schools? To create an athletic powerhouse that dominates the state?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charter schools should not be able to build a sports empire built on the back of the public schools. Sports, particularly in the South where there are fewer diversions for students, are big business even at the high school level. High school football coaches often make six figure salaries while teachers are lucky to make $50,000 per year. Attendance at sporting events is a money making proposition for the charter school owners at the expense of students in the public schools.
The article mentions a bond for building the stadium in the article, but it does not say who is responsible for carrying it. In Florida school districts are required to hold the bond for charter schools which is a big concern to local boards of education that worry that a charter school closure could leave the district and taxpayers in a vulnerable position. School districts should only be responsible for their own financial decisions instead of allowing private companies to saddle them with debt over which they have no authority. States should start passing laws to protect school districts from responsibility for sports expansion in private charter schools. Charter schools should have to pay for the costs and any building bonds.
SICKENIING.
Charters are BAD!
As a tax payer, I’d like to not have to subsidize CTE, whether in charter or traditional public schools.
And this is alarming: Gray Collegiate Academy is spending $4.3 million to build an athletic complex funded through a bond issue, and spent $72,000 on a new athletic bus with a wrap-around facade. So a regular yellow school bus was not good enough?
This obsession for sports in a charter school may also be linked to another extremist obsession – religion.
“Making the sign of the cross before swinging at a baseball pitch, kneeling in prayer after making it to the end zone and thanking God in post-game press conferences are among frequent practices observed by professional athletes. Tom Krattenmaker, author of ‘Onward Christian Athletes,’ says many ballparks have been turned into pulpits and players into preachers. It is a reality that some say has become all too common. …” — 1st paragraph
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122361555
Recall that the Supreme Court upheld the right of a football coach to have a prayer session on the field at a high school game.