Charter School Fatigue
Charter schools have always attracted criticism due to the serious problems inherent to them, but it is no secret that in recent months charter schools have been taking it on the chin a little more than usual.
This is not unexpected.
More detailed reports, articles, and investigations are exposing with greater regularity the multi-faceted corruption and endless Jerry Springer-style scandals long plaguing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, especially so-called “no-excuses” charter schools, virtual charter schools, and “miracle” charter schools.
Bizarre student enrollment management practices, coupled with poor transparency, shady real estate deals, inflated administrator pay, inaccurate waiting lists, high teacher turnover rates, almost no teacher unions, frequent arrests, numerous investigations, sloppy charter school applications, the siphoning of billions of dollars from public schools, the colonizing of physical facilities that rightfully belong to public schools, a severe obsession with unsound tests, and a refusal to analyze real conditions in education and society, all feel like a bit much.
People do not want any more deregulated, segregated, non-transparent “schools” that cherry-pick students, close regularly, and drain public money from over-tested, under-funded, and constantly-shamed public schools that accept all students all the time.
Just as “innovation” fatigue has started to settle in, so too has charter school fatigue. It is perhaps not ironic that charter schools have long been heralded as an “innovation.” But wherever it was applied, “innovation” ended up solving no problems; it just created new ones, namely embroiling people in more neoliberal schemes, policies, strategies, and initiatives that destroy the natural and social environment. “Innovation,” like so many other neoliberal buzzwords, proved to not serve the public interest. “Innovation” was always anti-evidence and an ideological device to block people from seeing what the CONTINUE READING: Charter School Fatigue | Dissident Voice
