Salon.com: National Charter Management Organizations Exposed
The truth about charter schools: Padded cells, corruption, lousy instruction and worse results
Charter schools are sold as an answer. With awful discipline and shocking scandals, many really cause new problems
Jeff Bryant Salon.com Friday, Jan 10, 2014
Imagine your 5-year-old boy went to a school where he was occasionally thrown in a padded cell and detained alone for stretches as long as 20 minutes.
Or you sent your kid to an elementary school where the children are made to sit on a bare floor in the classroom for days before they can “earn” their desks.
Or your kid went to a school where she spent hours parked in a cubicle in front of a computer with a poorly trained teacher who has to monitor more than 100 other students.
Maybe you don’t have children or send them to private school? So how do you feel when you find out the local school that you pay for with your taxes is operating a scam that diverted millions of dollars through fake Medicaid billing?
Or the school used your tax dollars as “grants” to start up other profit-making enterprises … or pay lavish salaries – $300,000, $400,000 or more – to its administrators … or support a movement linked to areclusive Turkish cleric being investigated for bribery and corruption.
Welcome to the world of charter schools.
Are there wonderful charter schools doing great things for kids? Probably. Are all these cumulative anecdotes an unfair representation of the value that charter schools can bring to some communities? Maybe.
But neither of those questions matters because of what the charter