Can Deregulated Charter Schools Not Be Deregulated Charter Schools?
Privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools have always been a top-down neoliberal economic project.
The main features of neoliberalism, launched at home and abroad in the late 1970s, are privatization, deregulation, and abdication of government responsibility for the well-being of people.
Charter schools meet all three criteria: they are deregulated arrangements that reflect government abandoning responsibility for education by handing it over to the private sector and the “free market,” where chaos, anarchy, and violence prevail. This is why so many millionaires and billionaires have been involved in the charter school sector for decades. For owners of capital, charter schools are a much-needed pay-the-rich scheme in the neoliberal period. Charter schools temporarily protect a section of the rich from the inescapable effects of falling profitability under capitalism.
Charter schools became marketized, privatized, deregulated arrangements decades ago when wealthy pioneers of charter schools consciously sought to deprive traditional public schools of their “exclusive franchise,” their so-called “monopoly,” on education. Neoliberal and privatizers wanted education to be outsourced and conducted on the basis of a performance-based contract, where government still pays for everything but the public is eliminated and CONTINUE READING: Can Deregulated Charter Schools Not Be Deregulated Charter Schools? | Dissident Voice
