CURMUDGUCATION: The Charter Bond Time Bomb

CURMUDGUCATION: The Charter Bond Time Bomb:
The Charter Bond Time Bomb

Inspired by the stunning NEPC report on just how deeply and thoroughly charter schools are used as a mechanism for sucking public tax dollars into private pockets, I've been trying to read up on this stuff, in particular by looking through the work of one of the reports co-authors, Bruce Baker (Rutgers University). Baker operates the blog School Finance 101, and it's an excellent resource for those trying to make sense out of the arcane world of, well, school finance.

I'm dipping into Baker's work to lay out one simple progression that takes charters from vexing to terrifying in just a few steps of property acquisition, in the process setting a ticking time bomb. I'm going to try to lay this out in my own words, mainly as an exercise for myself (one of my personal and professional principles of learning is this: want to really understand something? try to write about it), but I recommend you follow the links and read the full originals. (Also, any mistakes in what follows are mine, not Baker's).

STEP ONE: Double Purchase and Zero Ownership

In this piece, Baker explains how the taxpayer buys the same property twice, and ends up with no control over it. Here's how I think it works.

I buy a house. Well, I take out a mortgage on the house. But now I'm on the hook financially for the house. I make my payments. I may even pay it off.

Then Chris comes along and proposes to buy the house from me. And Chris's proposal is that I take CURMUDGUCATION: The Charter Bond Time Bomb:

NCLB Revisionism

Well, that didn't take long.

Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.

Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.

In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.

Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...

As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it. 

What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's NCLB Revisionism