Public education creates a public | Charter schools drain public resources | greatfallstribune.com

Public education creates a public | Great Falls Tribune | greatfallstribune.com:

Public education creates a public

Charter schools drain public resources with no benefit

• FILED UNDER

• Opinion
• Great Falls

This week my husband and some two dozen other men will observe a tradition they inaugurated decades ago. They’ll gather at a local watering hole to break in the holiday season. Their professions range from medicine, education, the law and the arts to retail, finance, railroading, and beer distribution. They are Catholics, Protestants, and atheists; Republicans, Democrats, and independents; the fit, the faltering, and the flabby. Yet this week they’ll all share the same tables, laughing at stories they’ve heard hundreds of times before.

Apart from callously and cruelly abandoning their wives for the evening, they have one common denominator: They went to high school together in Great Falls in the 1960s. But that’s enough. Enough to bring them together this way for 40 years and counting. Enough to turn a deaf ear to their wives’ harrumphing about the shallowness of that “until death do us part,” vow. Theirs is a brotherhood. As ranchers say, they’re “herd-bound.”

Other than their unfeeling and unconscionable treatment of their wives on this occasion, there’s nothing unique about this group. Their bond, with its roots in public education, has been replicated for decades in groups of men — and women! — who first came to know one another as public schoolchildren. Unfortunately, the story behind that bond is being rewritten by the burgeoning trend of charter schooling.

The charter school movement is based on a set of false-premise dominoes. Public schools are failing, charter proponents allege. So sending kids who really want to learn to charter schools, where