Network for Public Education Releases New Report on Charter School Closure, Churn, and Instability
Last week the Network for Public Education (NPE) released a fine new report tracking school closures over time in the charter school sector. The comprehensive new study, Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures from 1999-2017, tracks built-in instability in this education sector which sucks money out of the public schools.
Charter schools are paid for with public tax dollars and surely ought to operate for the benefit of their students and the communities where they are located. But the charter school sector has been troubled from the beginning. For years we have learned about problems in charter schools, one school at at time, one scandal at a time: academic failure, graft and corruption, sudden school closures, selection of students in a sector that is supposed to be open to all, the violation of students’ rights through punitive discipline and pushout schemes, and other problems. It has been hard to get a handle on overall trends, as a succession of breaches of the public good were reported one-at-a-time, city-by-city in the press. The Broken Promises report instead documents a long trend.
NPE’s new report begins by defining the marketplace philosophy underneath the idea of charter schools: “Charter schools began in the 1990s as an experimental alternative to public schools. Today charter schools are a multi-billion dollar sector composed of both nonprofit and for-profit corporations that embrace the philosophy of the marketplace. The survival of charter schools, much like the survival of small businesses, depends on their ability to out-compete other schools and to attract new customers. Unlike businesses, however, public tax dollars are used to pay charter operators who personally assume little financial risk. The public places bets on schools in a marketplace model. Too often, it is a losing gamble. Supporters of charters see school failure as a natural feature of the model.” The overly simplistic assumption is that the schools which don’t serve children well will cease to attract CONTINUE READING: Network for Public Education Releases New Report on Charter School Closure, Churn, and Instability | janresseger