Don’t Be Charter-Fooled
Major problems in the charter school sector have been detailed by many researchers and writers over the years. In the last year or two, however, persistent charter school problems have been exposed with much greater depth, breadth, and regularity by more individuals and organizations.
It has become abundantly clear to more people that the charter school sector is riddled with too many serious difficulties to hide. The consequences of these problems are just too severe to deny.
In this context, some “leaders” in the fractured crisis-prone charter school sector have remained hidebound, arrogant, and dogmatic, nonchalantly ignoring endless valid criticisms and simply chugging along as if everything is hunky dory.
Others in the charter school sector have feigned concern and expressed an ostensible desire to “acknowledge problems” and “improve.” The hope is to fool the gullible by recasting the heavily tarnished image of these deregulated schools so as to prettify them and counteract growing resistance to them.
But can a charter school not be a charter school?
As a general rule, state laws deliberately and consciously establish charter schools as entities (performance-based contracts) that are destined to have all the problems that they have. Charter schools are deregulated, deunionized, and privatized by conscious design. They are not public schools, no matter how often one claims they are.
The problem is not that charter schools are not living up to their “original promise,” but that they are doing exactly what they have always been carefully set up to do: function as pay-the-rich schemes in the context of a continually failing economy and discredited political system.
Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools have always been neoliberal through CONTINUE READING: Don’t Be Charter-Fooled | Dissident Voice
