Michigan to Ease Charter Restrictions, Professor Says They Are “Corporate” Schools

[Modern School]

Michigan is preparing to ease rules on charter schools even further. Supporters have argued that charter schools have been very successful in Michigan. Many claim they are better than traditional public schools and increasing them would improve educational outcomes for the state.

In reality, charter schools perform the same or worse than traditional public schools. However, they have been very successful is in making profits, so successful that a Western Michigan professor says they should more accurately be called “corporate” or “franchise” schools. According to the Grand Rapids Press, Western Michigan professor Gary Miron made this statement during testimony before a state Senate Committee that was weighing whether to make it easier for charter schools to open in Michigan. (Miron, it should be noted, is an advocate of charter schools, at least conceptually).

Of course investors and other education profiteers are the ones crying the loudest for an easing of restrictions on charters. What do they care about quality of effectiveness? A profit is a profit.

Michigan’s plan for increasing the number of charters includes lifting the cap on the number of charter schools that colleges and universities can run, increasing the number of cyber charters, and making it easier for parents to petition districts to convert their traditional schools into charters.

Modern School
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/09/michigan-to-ease-charter-restrictions.html

[iemitsu]

1. poor michigan.

i hope they can thwart this plague.
even in washington state, where we have voted three times against establishing charter schools, districts are trying to open them as magnet schools and then close the comprehensive high schools due to under-enrollment.
the recent tacoma teacher's strike was driven by the gates, eli broad, and heritage foundations insistence that the certified contract allowed the administration to move teachers and fire them at will. this is another strategy to get support for "charter" like schools.
the process is re-segregating the schools.

[Angry Dragon]

2. It is my understanding that charter schools came about to

help the students that had trouble dealing with the standard public school
Now it seems that charter schools only want the best and brightest and
shoves the troubled, the poor, the under achievers, the disabled back into
the public school system and still they do not achieve any better results than
the schools they are replacing.

They are turning schools into factories and money making machines for themselves.

[Starry Messenger]

3. They are corporate schools.

I've been calling them franchises for a couple of years. And if they gain any more ground, eventually they will hit the monopoly stage and we'll live in a world where little kids will be wearing Chase/Starbucks/Edison Academy Inc. smocks and singing classroom songs to the glories of capitalism. HATE THEM.