The charter movement has since expanded to include 43 states plus the District of Columbia, and over 2.5 million students—or about 5 percent of the total K-12 public student population. Arianna Prothers, Education Week June 4, 2016
Charter schools are 25 years old. My, how time flies.
Yesterday, Education Week printed an interview with Ember Reichgott Junge, the Democratic state senator who sponsored the charter school legislation first signed into law in Minnesota.
School reformers have always sold charter schools as exciting and groundbreaking schools, but, as most know, and as you can see from Reichgott Junge’s interview, charter schools, in general, never lived up to the hype.
Charter School Corruption
First, Reichgott Junge speaks a lot about how charter schools continue to need autonomy.
But if you search Google for “charter school corruption,” and any state with approved charter schools, you will find a lot of problems with autonomy.
That’s not to say there aren’t some decent charter schools. But the sad reality is that many individuals have used charter schools to bilk the country of tax dollars that were meant for real public schools. And we have seen little accountability.
How much money has been lost to corrupt charter operators? I’m not sure. One 2014 study by Integrity in Education found $100 million in tax dollars was wasted in just 15 states.
Charter Schools Lack Innovation
What everyone also knows is that, after 25 years, most charter schools have not turned out to be the laboratories of invention we were promised.
Most charters get tough on children and don’t teach those who have the largest number of difficulties. But that’s truly not innovation.
Even Reichgott Junge admits there is little innovation. Charter schools run much like traditional public schools. Almost everyone agrees that charter schools have not been the innovative schools they were supposed to be.
Teachers, who used to hear how charter schools would be schools that would fix what they couldn’t, can’t say that enough. Charter schools have done nothing innovative.
So why celebrate 25 years of mostly charter school failure?
Today’s Charter School Birthday Cake
Entrepreneurs—Not Educators
Reichgott Junge makes some excuses and claims sometimes charters don’t get the federal funding they need to let trained entrepreneurial leaders be innovative.
Note. Entrepreneurs is a business-like word.
The business sense in me says that is one of the problems of charter schools.
Why Have Charter Schools?
Also, the fact that in 25 years if charter schools haven’t been innovative or given public schools anything new to think about, isn’t it time to turn off the funding spigot?
If so-called entrepreneurs want to start a school—let them start a private school and invest their own money or the money of the venture philanthropists.
Instead, Reichgott Junge ponders whether it would be better to make charter operators present something unique, a detailed plan, before the charter was approved.
But wasn’t that the original plan in regard to charter schools?
Reichgott Junge seems to understand the detailed plan part. But her timing is both late and troubling.
She claims future innovation should mean charter schools and traditional public schools work together. This raises the question, why have charter schools at all?
Personalized Learning—The Future for ALL Schools!
But here is what she sees as the future. Reichgott Junge says I’m looking more towards the innovation of personalized learning, of project-based learning, of what I call the 21st century learning.
And she emphasizes charters and traditional schools should work together on future innovation.
I think she is implying ALL schools need to do online personalized instruction.
What a jump! From 25 years of nothing unique to a future of more unproven experimentation! How much longer will it take the American people to demand their tax dollars be spent on quality public schooling instead of unproven tripe?
No celebration here.
Reference
Going once …Going twice … Going, Going, gGone!… to the highest bidder! Fess up! Who’s really surprised that schools are the next gold-mine for drooling hedge-funders and tech magnates? Big Banks, Big Pharma, and Big Oil … move on over. It’s Big Education’s turn.
The lure of charter schools … with the ever-repeating money stream via taxes … was just too, too lucrative to ignore. And now the sharks are just fattening their odds and slimming their risks by ruining the long-standing public school system.
These charters are ostensible saviors of the last resort for children stuck in failing, inner-city educational mills. But the inner cities are the starting blocks. They see education in an entirely new structure and with an outcome never before considered … profit.
To cull some schools from the system … a few at a time for now … sets the pattern. Profiteers hard-sell the “success” story and entice others to sign on … and the money siphoned from public schools further cripples already crippled schools. It’s a classic business “build and destroy” mission.
Combined screecher resources and skewered assessment results … think Common Core! … and more and more schools become ripe for take-over. Charter operators bully their way into new situations … which, in turn, allow others to come forward to reap profits from arming these new schools swimming in redirected taxpayer monies. Everyone is in on the action. … from software providers to textbook pushers. Even the tutoring industry gets a booster shot.
So the spigots are open and the tax monies now drain into the pockets of entrepreneurs who are more about flash than about substance. Classroom performance is now superseded by the bottom line.
Charter schools will come to dominate the scene. And in true entrepreneurial form, schools will become more and more like race cars … covered with product logos and insignias of all sorts.
Expect sport scoreboards with product info flashing all game long. Campuses will be decorated by signage that speaks to the generosity of business X and Y. We might not get a Whopper High School, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get something called the MicroSoft Magnet School for Technology. You know … something extra sexy that would awe the ordinary taxpayer into a state of silly gratefulness.
Sports’ uniforms will look like those patchy outfits race car drivers wear … with logos all over the place. Cafeteria foods will be franchised out … even transportation will be “Uberized” in some fashion because … well … if there’s money to be made, they’ll make it.
Teachers will be properly orientated company men and women … and students will be the product. The goal is to spit and polish the product just well enough to get by quality control and then … then it’s off to the bank.
Older teachers will run to retirement hills, and those too young to retire will simply quit because they will not have the intestines for what is unfolding.
So, there you have it. Schools will have new ownership, but the same funding … your tax dollars. The faculties will have been rinsed free of old blood and new, conforming teacher-bots will read from the curriculum scripts exactly as they are written … and nod their heads like bobblehead dolls.
Phony civic-minded entities that wish to maximize their exposure in order to maximize their advertising clout will pay for the privilege to be associated with the scam-school. And politicians will share in the looting of the public schools by getting loot from the looters. I’m sure you can follow that.
Taxpaying parents will have zero control over their tax dollars, and their children will be short-changed not for a few years … but for as long as they might live.
That’s the future.
More and more control by fewer and fewer powerful people who control powerful mechanisms to become more powerful every day. Sounds like a tongue-twister, but it ain’t. It’s real.
Going … Going
Denis Ian
Thanks Denis. I would add that many of these charters will be Rocketship schools with technology and few, if any, teachers. But aside from that you covered it all!