Carol Burris wrote an article that was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog, in which she explains that charters are the leading edge of the privatization movement. Corporate education reformers are scrambling to make a distinction between charters and vouchers, but the reality is that charters clear a path for vouchers. Once you sell the public on the idea of school choice, it is increasingly difficult to say that parents may choose a corporate charter chain but can’t choose a religious school. Once you erode the principle of public education as a public good, open to all, responsible for all who enroll, you turn citizens into consumers. Whether they choose a charter or a voucher, their choice diverts public money away from public schools. Jeb Bush argued in his 2012 speech at the Republican National Convention that parents should be able to choose their child’s school the same way they choose a carton of milk at the supermarket: whole milk? 2%? 1? Fat-free? Chocolate? Buttermilk? That is actually a ridiculous argument, because a parent doesn’t reach into a case and select a school. Choices are constrained by geography and transportation. A parent may choose the best private school in town, but the school is unlikely to accept voucher students, and the state voucher won’t cover the tuition. A voucher will in fact cover the tuition only for a religious school that is unlikely to have certified teachers or any of the educational riches of the school that costs $50,000 a year.
Charters are no better than vouchers. They are part of the same universe of “school choice” that Trump and DeVos are selling. In DeVos’s Michigan, 80% of the charters operate for profit. Detroit is awash in charters, yet Detroit is the lowest-performing urban district on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. State legislation may call them “public,” but there is nothing “public” about charter schools except their funding. They have private boards; many are allowed to hire substantial numbers of uncertified teachers. If their goal is high test scores, they select their students carefully to reach their goal.
Burris writes:
During the past 60 years, public education has been the frog in the pot of water, as school privatizers and “education reformers” have slowly turned up the heat. Over 1 million students receive a taxpayer-funded voucher to attend a private school, and close to 3 million attend charters schools. Whether the adjective “public” is in front of the word “charter” or not, charters are at the forefront of school privatization.
Opening a charter is akin to opening your own business — but the cost and risk are fully funded by the taxpayers. In most states, taxpayer dollars provide the initial “investment.” This is an odd business model in which the corporation gets income for every customer who walks through the door, regardless of the individual ability to pay. And if the business fails, “owners” are not out a dime, but the customers, who are in this case children, are stranded.
It is remarkable that the American public has allowed such risk-free, taxpayer-funded entrepreneurship to occur.
If you think that publicly funded, largely unregulated businesses would be ripe for shady deals, oversized compensation and outright fraud, you would be right.
In September of 2016, the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Education Department issued its final audit report titled a “Nationwide Assessment of Charter and Education Management Organizations.” The report assessed “the current and emerging risk” that is posed by charter management organizations for fraud, waste and abuse.
The audited period was less than two years — between late 2011 and the early months of 2013. Thirty-three charters in six states were selected for review. Of the 33, the department found that 22 lacked the necessary internal controls, resulting in a significant risk to Education Department funds. The report also made it clear that the Education Department itself is not doing enough to protect taxpayers from charter management fraud. (The present secretary, John King, led one of the top five charter chains, Uncommon Schools.)
Burris cites a small sample of the many charter school frauds and scandals that have emerged in recent years. Misappropriation of funds is not surprising in a sector that receives public funding with little or no supervision or oversight.
She writes:
What will the future hold under DeVos, who believes that “the more of a ‘marketplace’ we have for education, the more, I think, the better”?
Will we have more charter schools with entanglements with foreign governments? Will we have taxpayer-funded charter schools run by white supremacists? Will vouchers go to schools run by jihadists? Will fraud and abuse escalate? These are serious questions to ponder when the marketplace is the only regulator of school choice.
Donald Trump claims our public schools run by locally elected boards of education are “government schools” that fit better with the old Soviet Union. I wonder whether he has thought through his alternative. Freewheeling, government-funded schools, unaccountable to the taxpayers, sound awfully more dangerous to me.
