Apparently, that’s what our State Boards of Education, under Democrats and Republicans alike, seem to believe. It’s far more important to hand our educational system over the rent-seeking for profit (whether they call themselves non-profit or not), charter school chains.
In Pennsylvania, the charter schools call the shots and the public school system is being slowly destroyed. See here and here, for example, although apparently the New Democratic governor there is trying to stem the tide, but he’s running into headwinds due to the gerrymandered state legislature.
In California, they are stuffing charters down the throats of the people, regardless of their wishes:
This article provides an inside view of the charter racket in California.
If local districts oppose charter schools, it doesn’t matter. No matter what they say or how well the community organizes, the die is cast. State officials will approve the charter application, regardless of its flaws.
Rocketship charter chain wanted to move into the Mt. Diablo district. It had a federal grant to expand, and the chain wouldn’t let community opposition stand in its way. The district did not want Rocketship’s computer-based approach. It did not want a corporate chain whose headquarters was sixty miles away. Neither did the county board of education, which rejected Rocketship.
“This is the opposite of local control,” said Nellie Meyer, the superintendent of the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, who called the proposal deeply flawed and was followed by MDUSD’s general counsel, Deborah Cooksey, who said Rocketship had collected its petition signatures “under false pretenses,” by telling people—including parents who were non-English speakers—their kids could get kicked out of school if they didn’t sign.
“This is going to be something that will divide our community,” said Gloria Rios, who has lived in the Monument Corridor near the northeastern Bay Area city of Concord for 20 years and has three children in the district’s public schools. “Our children will suffer the consequences, and these funds can be used for the schools we already have.”
Rejected by the local community and the county board of education, Rocketship went to the State Board of Education.
Slam dunk.
We no longer have an interest in educating our children to think, at least not the children of the bottom 99.9%. We are mainly interested in manufacturing worker drones, who have been taught to believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds and they can’t really do much better than making $9.00 an hour working at Wal-mart. The charter school movement is designed to achieve that end, while shoveling money towards the top .01%.
The linked article points out that Rocketship has a 20% per year teacher turnover rate. That alone should disqualify it from consideration to operate a school with public funds. But charter schools have an interesting business plan. They hold that if you disempower teachers and pay them less you will get better educational outcomes, provided, of course, that money keeps flowing to the CEOs of the charter chains. This would be considered reasonable only in America, where 40% of us don’t consider climate change a serious threat, and a like amount of Americans believe God rolled his big sleeves up and a brand new world began. That means basically, that we start out with a base of 40% of the people who you can fool all of the time, meaning you only have to fool another 11% on any given issue. As I’ve said before, Lincoln forgot to note that you only have to fool most of the people most of the time to get your way.
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