What the Promoters of School Choice Week Forgot to Mention Last Week
School Choice Week was celebrated all over the country last week. Such staged “events” are always congratulatory, which is why it is a good idea to think about what the supporters of school choice forgot to mention.
School choice is the term we use to define an education marketplace in which parents no longer must send their children to the assigned public school but can instead choose a publicly funded charter school or receive a tax-generated voucher to pay tuition at a parochial or private school. So, how’s school choice really going?
In December, Bruce Baker of Rutgers University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University released a policy brief that warned: “A substantial share of public expenditure intended for the delivery of direct educational services to children is being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for personal or business financial gain…. Public assets are being unnecessarily transferred to private hands, at public expense, risking the future provision of ‘public’ education. Charter school operators are growing… self-serving private entities built on funds derived from lucrative management fees and rent extraction… Current disclosure requirements make it unlikely that any related legal violations… are not realized until clever investigative reporting, whistleblowers or litigation brings them to light.” Professors Baker and Miron conclude that the charter marketplace is enriching charter operators at public expense and that inadequate regulation makes it hard to identify and prosecute violations of the public interest.
Here is what the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) described in an October report,Charter School Black Hole: “The system insulates each element from accountability for what actually happens….” The federal government has relinquished oversight to the states, which have then turned over regulation to charter school authorizers in what CMD calls, “a classic What the Promoters of School Choice Week Forgot to Mention Last Week | janresseger: