Deregulation and Charter School Swindles

[Hannah Bell]

Competition

Two main ideas inform the charter school movement. The first is that competition is an essential ingredient in school improvement. Charters are said to provide that.

The trouble with this argument is that competition doesn't select the best, only the most popular. McDonald's doesn't produce the best-tasting or most-nutritious food, for instance, but its heart attack specials certainly are popular. A second-rate school might prove similarly competitive if it provides a tawdry but reassuring education to the children of the low-information crowd. Fearful your kids will discover you are an ignoramus? Send them to Alpha Charter where they will never learn to doubt.

Deregulation

The second main idea behind charters is that state directives are strangling public school innovations. That's why charters are exempted from many regulations restricting the operations of traditional public schools.

The trouble is that deregulation creates opportunities for mountebanks to pilfer the public purse, abuse children, and the like. As a matter of fact, to the extent that charter operators have freedom of action, the confidence tricksters and bunko artists among them find opportunities for fraud and misuse of public funds. What is more, the politicians (and/or their relatives) who push charters often end up feeding at the charter school trough themselves.

Other Scandals

We shouldn't be surprised, then, that Philadelphia's experience with charter school scandals is widely shared. A Google search for "charter school fraud" turns up 498,000 results. We read, for example, that Ohio charter schools, officially known as community schools in the Buckeye state, have become "cash repositories to be siphoned of sponsorship and management, in one case by a former Republican state legislator who wrote the legislation creating charter schools." That politician's daughter is cashing in too.<6>

Deregulation Writ Large

Charter schools are hardly the only enterprise to give deregulation a bad name. At this writing the U.S. economy may be headed for its worst crises since the Great Depression. Many commentators cite the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a 1999 banking deregulation bill, as the primary cause. The act, signed by President Clinton by the way, repealed Depression-era regulations and encouraged the creation of sub-prime mortgages, including no-money-down, interest-only loans to individuals with poor credit histories. Those mortgages were subsequently packaged and sold as securities. The Bush administration, blinded by the philosophy that market forces provide all the regulation necessary, ignored numerous warnings of an impending collapse.<7> Thus did deregulation produce the conditions that triggered an economic train wreck, Deregulation similarly precipitated the savings and loan crises of the 1980s and '90s. In that case a new federal law permitted S&Ls to depart from their original mission of receiving savings and providing mortgages and venture into commercial loans and issuing credit cards instead. S&Ls soon were lending money to shaky ventures they were ill equipped to assess.<8> Eventually more than sixteen hundred banks either closed or required federal assistance at a cost to federal taxpayers of $124.6 billion.

What's the common element in both of these financial debacles? Deregulation. What is at the heart of the charter school movement? Deregulation.

Conclusion

Given President-elect Obama's support for charter schooling, the movement may multiply during his administration. If so, expect still more fraud and scandal, because whatever their merits, charters present as big an opportunity for swindlers and charlatans as does televangelism.<9>

Also expect to hear of more and worse non-fiduciary scandals -- high stakes test cheating and sexual abuse come to mind—as the full fruits of reduced oversight are realized. As the saying goes, "When the cat's away, the mice will play."

http://www.newfoundations.com/Clabaugh/CuttingEdge/Charters.html


But of course, the opportunity to steal is the motivation for the Wall Street heavy hitters pushing charter schools.

So in that sense - they're successful!

[donco6]

1. K&R, and to add -

Here in Colorado, charters have a different flavor than other places in the country. Here they were instituted primarily to allow white flight parents in the suburbs to create their own little homogeneous schools so their kids don't have to sit next to the brown kids they left the city to avoid.

In Brighton, for example, land developers set aside chunks of land in their plat for "charter schools" specifically. They recruit parents to form their own charter, and use that charter as a sales tool later. They now have these little white islands in an increasingly Hispanic county. It's pretty disgusting.

We do have a few charters that are geared at special populations. In my district, we have one that serves monolingual Spanish high school students - about the highest risk kids you can get. We took them on because that's a population that's underserved. Of course, their graduation rate gets folded into ours, and we'll be punished for that, because many of their kids don't graduate in four years. (Here in CO, you're only a "graduate" if you move from 8th to graduate in 4 years - get held back once and you're never a graduate, even if you eventually complete")

So, on the one hand, I support the charters that are formed to target a specific need - but when they're formed to protect the majority from having to work together with other races - I find that truly disgusting.

[alp227]

2. Great post right here.

Deregulation is FAR worse than those supposed evil regulations by the state because your tax dollars are going to people who can't really be held accountable for their idiocy. So when you hear proponents of limited government decrying the state's "excessive management" of public schools, make sure that these come to mind:
- charter school fraud
- the economic collapse
- Hurricane Katrina
- lead in toys imported from China

[Dinger]

3. K & R. Thank You Hannah For Posting This

:)

[LWolf]

4. K & R nt

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. I worked briefly in a charter for a few weeks one summer

Long story. Principal was a former co-worker whom I greatly respected and was in a bind. So I agreed to help her out.

Anyhow in the middle of my time there the company that sponsored the charter pulled out and the school was left to find another sponsor. And one day in the middle of a lesson in my classroom, some men came in with boxes and started packing up the books and other materials in the classroom. Some of that stuff was mine and thank God I have always plastered my name on all my classroom materials so I was able to retrieve my belongings.

But what blew me away was when these movers walked over and took the pencils out of the hands of my students while they were working.

I am going to repeat that. The movers took the pencils from my kids while they were doing their work.

That is the image I hold in my mind whenever anyone suggests charters may work better for our kids. And when anyone suggests the profit driven business model needs to be adopted by our public school districts.

This also explains my adamant opposition to charter schools. Or at least a large part of it.