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Author: Shawgi Tell

  • Charter Schools and “Paperism”

    It is standard practice for most charter school owners, operators, promoters, commentators, reporters, and even some “critics” of charter schools to habitually describe charter schools, word-for-word, as they are spelled out in state charter school laws (while often overlooking inconvenient or unflattering descriptions as well). Even those who try to be somewhat nuanced or grounded in their descriptions of charter schools engage in this pattern.

    This is “paperism”—dogmatically repeating what appears on paper without deeply thinking about, let alone questioning, how charter schools actually operate in practice. Part of this stems from an ossified prejudice that says there is no gap between charter school rhetoric and charter school reality. Whatever appears on paper is automatically assumed to be correct and indisputable. One is supposed to instantly believe what they read in state charter school laws while ignoring how charter schools work in real life. In this way, words on paper are reified to the extreme, thereby fostering anti-consciousness.

    Writers who enumerate the differences between charter schools, public schools, and private schools in order to “educate the public” about their “educational options” are one of the groups most guilty of paperism. Such writers pop up regularly and nonchalantly repeat all kinds of things that bear little resemblance to how charter schools really operate. More often than not, such forces promote a neoliberal view of phenomena, thereby undermining the public interest and a socially responsible path forward. Such a view distorts reality by mixing facts with myths, half-truths, omissions, and falsehoods.

    In doing so, many charter school promoters and commentators present a distorted view of charter schools to the public, causing many to reach comclusions about charter schools that are different from the reality of countless charter schools. For example, charter school supporters and commentators consistently promote half-truths and disinformation about student admission and enrollment practices (including “lotteries”), tuition policies, teacher credentials and qualifications, funding sources, the nature and philosophy of high-stakes standardized tests, student achievement, the origin and rationale for charter schools, the “publicness” of charter schools, the condition, history, and programmatic offerings in traditional public schools, the nature of charter school accountability, the meaning of “choice” versus rights, so-called “innovation” in charter schools, and the factors common to all charter schools no matter how “different” they are said to be from each other.

    Charter school supporters and commentators do not present the whole story so that people are properly informed and oriented. They regularly overlook many important facts and relationships. Coherence, context, connections, and correct conclusions become major casualties in this flawed scheme designed to wreck public opinion.

    Importantly, charter school promoters and commentators fail to analyze, let alone reject, a fend-for-yourself, egocentric, consumerist, competitive, “free market” model of education. They do not see education as a modern social responsibility and basic right that must be guaranteed in practice. In their view, it is superb that parents are “customers,” not humans, who have to “shop” for a school the same way they shop for shoes and hope they find something good. A brutal dog-eat-dog world of competing consumers (”winners” and “losers”) is seen as the best of all worlds. In this outmoded set-up, all the pressure is put on parents to figure out everything. They have to ask a million questions, verify a million things, and hold tons of people accountable every day in an exhausting, never-ending, up-hill battle—all while trying to earn a living in an increasingly chaotic, expensive, and alienating world. The unspoken assumption is that zero social responsibility for basic needs like education in a modern society is somehow acceptable. You are entirely on your own in the name of “choice,” “freedom,” and “rugged individualism” in this arrangement that privileges private property over all else. There are no guarantees or certainty in this kind of world. Thus, if your charter school is one of the many that fail and close every year in America—oh well, better luck next time!

    The racist and imperialist doctrine of Social Darwinism is taken to the extreme in this old set-up in which only “the fittest survive.” Meaningful accountability and redress are largely absent in this divisive context. This arrangement is also buttressed by a set of ideas that uncritically presupposes that all forms of government are inevitably bad, dangerous, undesirable; the risk-taking ego-centric consumer is the end-all and be-all, the center of the universe.

    To be sure, these neoliberal forces do not possess, let alone defend, a modern definition of “public” or the “public interest.” They do not see charter schools as the privatized education arrangements that they are. They ignore or downplay the fact that charter schools differ from public schools in their structure, operation, governance, oversight, funding, philosophy, and aims. They casually treat deregulated, segregated, unaccountable, de-unionized charter schools operated by unelected private persons as if they were public schools. Despite dozens of differences between charter schools and public schools, many charter school supporters, researchers, and commentators continue to irresponsibly assert that both types of schools are public schools, as if “public” can mean anything one wants it to mean. Key differences between these two types of schools magically disappear in this ahistorical approach to phenomena.

    The gap between charter school rhetoric and charter school reality has been wide for 34 years. Relentless top-down neoliberal disinformation about charter schools has left many rudderless and confused. This will not change until the pressure to not investigate phenomena is actively rejected. Disinformation and anticonsciousness can take hold, spread, intensify, and wreak havoc only when serious uninterrupted investigation disappears.

    Special Note

    On the question of the origin of charter schools as being schools that supposedly started out decades ago to empower teachers by giving them the “flexibility,” “freedom,” and “autonomy” to “innovate” and “think outside the box,” it is revealing that 34 years later, 95% of charter schools are not started, owned, or operated by teachers. “Innovate” is just a another way of undermining teachers unions and the institution of public education in a modern society. “Innovation” includes demonizing public schools and attacking collective bargaining agreements that enshrine the valid claims of workers.

    About 90% of charter schools are deunionized. It is thus no accident that charter school teachers are less experienced and less credentialed than public school teachers, and they are also paid less while working longer days and years than their public school counterparts. Not surprisingly, the teacher turnover rate in charter schools is very high coast to coast. This constant upheaval invariably undermines learning, continuity, stability, and collegiality.

    More charter schools equals more problems for education, society, and the economy. Charter schools on the whole do not solve any major problems, they just exacerbate them. Privatization makes everything worse. Fully fund public schools and keep all private interests out of public education at all times. No public wealth of any kind should be funneled to private entities.

    The post Charter Schools and “Paperism” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Split Supreme Court Ruling on Catholic Charter School Still a Big Win for School Privatizers

    On April 30, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) heard the much-awaited and much-discussed case of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School v. Drummond, which originated in Oklahoma.1

    On May 22, 2025, less than a month later, and without issuing an actual opinion, the SCOTUS delivered a 4-4 split ruling on the landmark case, which effectively leaves intact the lower court’s decision (in Oklahoma) that blocked the establishment of the online K-12 religious charter school. While it is not known how the eight Justices voted, it is likely that three “liberal” Justices and one “conservative” Justice (Chief Justice John Roberts?) joined forces and voted against the religious virtual charter school.

    “Conservative” Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from this pivotal case months ago because of a conflict of interest. She is connected to a Notre Dame Law School clinic that backs the Catholic virtual charter school. Her presence may well have produced a different ruling. Barret is seen as playing a key role in future education cases that further erode the public-private divide.

    The Oklahoma State Supreme Court ruled 6-2 on June 25, 2024, that St. Isidore of Seville Catholic K-12 Virtual Charter School is unconstitutional and cannot open and enroll students. Writing for the majority at the time, Justice James Winchester said that, “the contract between the state board and St. Isidore violates the Oklahoma Constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act and the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” Reflecting decades of widespread confusion about the “publicness”/”privateness” of charter schools, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court correctly identified the Catholic cyber charter school as sectarian but erroneously claimed that charter schools are public schools. To be clear, there is no such thing as a “public” charter school or “hybrid” public/private charter school in the United States. Not a single charter school in America is operated by publicly elected officials. There are dozens of other big differences between charter schools, which are contract schools, and public schools.

    It is also worth noting here that virtual charter schools across the country have a notoriously abysmal academic record and a long history of fraud and corruption. Further, both brick-and-mortar charter schools and virtual charter schools often operate with little accountability and offer fewer services and programs than traditional public schools. They also tend to have fewer nurses and more inexperienced teachers than traditional public schools.

    The main takeaway from the 4-4 split decision from the SCOTUS is that thousands of deregulated charter schools across the country, all operated by unelected private persons, will continue to siphon hundreds of millions of public dollars a year from methodically under-funded and demonized public schools. The May 22, 2025, U.S. Supreme Court decision in no way stops or restricts school privatization and the assault on traditional public schools by so-called “public” charter schools that fail and close every week. Indeed, no matter how the court vote worked out, privately-operated charter schools of all kinds would still continue to bleed public schools of money and property in the name of “choice” and “freedom.”

    Another takeaway is that cases like this one are likely to come before the SCOTUS again. This is not the first and last such case to come before the Supreme Court. Neoliberals and others are determined to blur the critical distinction between public and private so as to maximize profits in a failing economy that has left owners of capital with no choice but to raid the public sector for their self-serving interests. This financial parasitism is always undertaken under the veneer of high ideals. In other words, charter schools have long been a political-economic project, not an educational one. Endless disinformation about “empowering parents” and “expanding choices” cannot hide this.

    While opinions and views issued by the SCOTUS are often interesting and revealing, there is practically no chance that any court ruling anywhere will change the fundamentally privatized character of non-profit and for-profit charter schools. Neoliberal ideology permeates all spheres and sectors in society, generating anticonsciousness everywhere. Privatization and deregulation, hallmarks of the charter school sector, are key aspects of the neoliberal agenda launched 50 years ago at home and abroad. This is why all charter schools, unlike traditional public schools, operate largely independently of the government.

    Charter schools are private by design, not by accident. They have been about privatization, not “innovation” or “choice,” from the very start. The oft-repeated assertion that charter schools did not start out as privatization schemes 30+ years ago but were hijacked along the way by privatizers and set on a terrible path is incorrect and inconsistent with the historical record.

    Not only are charter schools created and started by unelected private citizens, they also cannot levy taxes, avoid many laws and regulations, treat teachers as “at-will” employees, are mostly deunionized, routinely cherry-pick students, have high teacher turnover rates, siphon tons of money from public schools, increase segregation, and more. What would be the point of making them “public” or “more public” if the 34-year-old raison d’etre for their existence and operation is to be set up independent of and different from traditional public schools (see here, here, here, and here)? It is wishful thinking to believe that 8,000+ autonomous, rules-free, “innovative” charter schools will stop being privatized arrangements and suddenly become state actors after existing and operating as private actors for more than three decades.

    In the final analysis the fundamental principle at stake is that the public sphere and the private sphere are distinct spheres with different structures and purposes, and that no public funds or public property should ever be handed over to the private sector. Public money and public property belong only to the public and must be used for purely public purposes, free of the narrow aim of maximizing profit for a handful of individuals. Public funds and public property must not flow to any private entities, religious or secular.

    Retrogressive trends and forces can only be reversed by an empowered polity that opens the path of progress to society. Such a historic responsibility is not possible without organizing spaces for serious discussion and analysis of what is going on. Neoliberal views and ideas serve only to block the path of progress on all fronts.

    ENDNOTE:

    1 Some have stated that Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is an Islamophobe. Drummond has long stated that religious charter schools would open the door to the promotion of “radical Islam.” Justice Samuel Alito even said, “We have statement after statement by the attorney general that reeks of hostility toward Islam.”

    The post Split Supreme Court Ruling on Catholic Charter School Still a Big Win for School Privatizers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Can a Charter School Not Be a Private Entity?

    Despite endless insistence by privatizers that charter schools are public schools, many people spontaneously think that charter schools are not public schools.

    Much of the public does not automatically see charter schools as public schools proper. They are viewed as being different from public schools and put in a separate category than public schools.

    When asked what they think a charter school is, the average person often says something like: “I’m not really sure, aren’t they some sort of private school, I really don’t know, but I have heard of them, they seem like private schools to me.”

    In this vein, people often share different things they have heard about charter schools. For example, they have heard that charter schools are deregulated schools, take money from public schools, have high teacher turnover rates, cherry-pick students, offer no teacher retirement plan, have no teachers union, pay teachers less than public school teachers, etc. Such facts naturally infiltrate the public sphere and produce a certain social consciousness about charter schools, which have been around for 33 years.

    Although the mass media works overtime to promote disinformation about the “publicness”/”privateness” of charter schools, it is significant that people generally see charter schools as being private in some way. There is a pervasive sense that charter schools and public schools are dissimilar entities with different structures, functions, aims, and results.[1] A main problem here though is that while people are aware of certain facts about charter schools they rarely have an integrated, cogent, well-worked-out analysis of what charter schools represent as an education arrangement in the U.S. A detailed big-picture view connecting many important dots is often missing, leaving many vulnerable to disinformation about charter schools.

    A main reason for the widespread public perception of charter schools as private education arrangements is that charter schools do in fact differ from public schools in many ways, despite neoliberal efforts to mix up the “publicness” and “privateness” of these two different organizations.

    But to add even more confusion to the mix, even some prominent “critics” of charter schools claim that charter schools are neither completely public nor completely private in character. They are supposedly “a little bit of both;” they are “a mix” of public and private.

    According to this view, charter schools, all of which are owned-operated by unelected private persons, organizations, or companies, are supposedly “hybrid schools”—they are semi-private and semi-public, so to speak.

    In other words, charter schools ride the public/private fence without being fully one or the other. This implies that one aspect (public or private) does not eclipse the other, which suggests that it is erroneous to see charter schools as the essentially privatized arrangements that they really are.

    Keeping in mind that the U.S. constitution does not recognize education as a basic human right, it is important to discuss whether charter schools really operate as public schools or privatized education arrangements. This is not a trivial issue. Moreover, can charter schools be considered “hybrid” schools with both private and public features in the proper sense of both words, as some claim?

    For starters, public and private mean the opposite of each other; they are antonyms. Importantly, public law deals with relations between the state and individuals, while private law deals with relations between private citizens. Contract law, for example, is part of private law. Charter schools are contract schools. Charter means contract. Thus, the laws that apply to charter schools differ from the laws that apply traditional public schools. This is why, for example, teachers’ rights in charter schools are not the same as teachers’ rights in public schools.

    Public refers to everyone, the common good, all people, transparency, affordability, accessibility, universality, non-rivalry, non-discrimination, and inclusiveness. Examples of public goods include public parks, public libraries, public roads, public schools, public colleges and universities, public hospitals, public restrooms, public housing, public banks, public events, forests, street lighting, and more. These goods are available to everyone, not just a few people. They are integral to a civil society that recognizes the role and significance of a public sphere in modern times. Such public provisions can be optimized only in the context of arrangements that are genuinely and thoroughly democratic.

    Private, on the other hand, means exclusive, not for everyone, not for the common good, not for all people, not collective, not governmental, not free, not broadly obtainable, only available to or accessible by a few. Something is private when it is “designed or intended for one’s exclusive use.” Examples include private property, private facilities, private schools, private clubs, designer shoes, Ferraris, first class plane tickets, mansions, and more. Such phenomena usually cost money, they are based on ability to pay.

    To further elaborate, private also means:

    -Secluded from the sight, presence, or intrusion of others.

    -Of or confined to the individual; personal.

    -Undertaken on an individual basis.

    -Not available for public use, control, or participation.

    -Belonging to a particular person or persons, as opposed to the public or the government.

    -Of, relating to, or derived from nongovernment sources.

    -Conducted and supported primarily by individuals or  groups not affiliated with governmental agencies or corporations.

    -Not holding an official or public position.

    -Not for public knowledge or disclosure; secret; confidential.

    In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion;[2] it is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, collective well-being, or benefitting everyone. This is why when something is privatized, e.g., a public enterprise or social program, it is no longer available to everyone; it becomes something possessed and controlled by the few, for the few. This then ends up harming the public interest and social progress. Privatization typically increases corruption, reduces efficiency, lowers quality, raises costs, and restricts democracy. This applies to so-called “public-private partnerships” as well.

    It is also worth noting that something does not become “public” just because it is called “public” many times a day. Simply repeating over and over again that something is public does not magically make it public. Nor does an entity spontaneously become “public” just because it receives public funds. This is not the definition of “publicness.” Thus, for example, as contract schools, charter schools do not automatically become state actors (i.e., public entities) just because they receive public funds. “Publicness” requires something more under State Action Doctrine.[3]

    It is not surprising that there has always been a big chasm between charter school rhetoric and reality. Over-promising and under-delivering has been a stubborn but down-played feature of this deregulated private sector for 34 years. This can be seen in the large number of charter schools that have failed and closed in three decades, leaving millions out in the cold (see here and here).

    Charter schools may look, sound, and feel public on paper, but they work differently in practice and under the law. Most charter schools operate in a manner that is the opposite of their description on paper. They do not live up to their description on paper.

    Unfortunately, many do not question the description of charter schools on paper. They impulsively assume that if something is written on paper and declared “legal,” then it is automatically valid, unassailable, and true in reality. They embrace “paperism.” Critical thinking disappears in this scenario and anti-consciousness takes over. Dogmatic repetition of legal text takes hold and all thinking freezes.

    The reason this obstinate large gap between rhetoric and reality remains under-appreciated by many to this day is because neoliberal discourse on charter schools keeps everything at the superficial level, regularly eschewing deep analysis, especially analysis that exposes the private character of charter schools and rampant corruption in the charter school sector. And combined with confounding what is on paper with what exists in reality, many are prevented from discerning the inherently privatized character of charter schools and the significance of this conclusion for education, society, the economy, and the national interest.

    To be clear, charter schools are not hybrid public-private schools, nor are they public schools, properly speaking. They are private entities. And in the final analysis, the fundamental principle at stake is that public funds must not flow to private entities or so-called “semi-private” entities because public funds belong only to the public. The private sector has no legitimate claim to public funds that belong solely to the public. Only the public sector can control and use public funds for public goals.

    Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are private businesses, regardless of their size, name, education philosophy, type, authorizer, general makeup, or location. Charter schools have always been owned-operated by private organizations. They are not state actors. They are not political subdivisions of the state or government agencies. They are not organic or natural components of state public education systems. They are not set up like that under state laws.  Charter schools are not created by the State even though they may be delegated certain functions by the State. Creation and delegation are not synonymous. Furthermore, delegating a function (a way of doing something) is not the same as delegating authority (enforcing obedience). Charter schools are started/created by unelected private persons.

    Charter schools have always been a different type of entity altogether: contract schools owned-operated by unelected private persons or organizations. They are performance-based contracts entered into by two distinct parties: a private organization and the government (or government-sanctioned entity). Naturally, partnering with the government is not the same as being part of the government. This is an important distinction in State Action Doctrine. Charter schools are not an arm of the government like traditional public schools are. They are not acting on behalf of a governmental body. Nor do they act with the same authority as the government. Interestingly, the appearance of the word “charter” before “school” is actually one of the many ways charter schools are distinguished from traditional public schools. It is also significant that the unelected private persons or corporations that own-operate charters, typically business people, derive more than an incidental benefit from owning-operating a charter school. Charter school administrators and trustees, for example, often derive a large amount of wealth and privilege from owning-operating a charter school.

    For these and other reasons charter schools are intentionally called “independent,” “autonomous,” and “innovative” schools that do not follow most of the laws, rules, and regulations followed by public schools. These descriptors are key to the non-public character of charter schools. Consistent with “free market” ideology, charter schools are deregulated “schools of choice”—something “consumers” seek, even though most of the time it is the charter school that “chooses” the “shopper.”

    Another major feature of the private character of charter schools is that, unlike public schools, they cannot levy taxes either. This is a particularly revealing difference between charter schools and public schools. Only the State and specific political subdivisions of the State (e.g., traditional public schools, cities, counties) can levy taxes. Charter schools are not part of this sovereign power. Also unlike public schools, charter schools are generally not zoned schools and their teachers are treated as “at will” employees, just like in a corporation. Many states even legally permit teachers to work in charter schools without any certification. Numerous other differences can be found here.

    Public schools, on the other hand, are state agencies, actual government entities (1) created, (2) authorized, and (3) overseen by the State. They are therefore engaged in state action, while charter schools are not. Put differently, “Action taken by private entities with the mere approval or acquiescence of the State is not state action.”

    As “autonomous,” “independent,” “innovative, “rules-free” schools, charter schools are not entangled with the state in the same way that traditional public schools are. The state’s mere labeling of an institution as public or private does not determine whether it is a state actor in State Action Doctrine. Under the law and in practice, the state exercises far more control over traditional public schools than it does over charter schools, which are “schools of choice,” at least on paper. Enrollment in a charter school is voluntary. In this sense, charter schools are more like private schools that have dotted the American landscape for generations. The main point is that the State does not coerce or compel charter schools to act in the same way as public schools proper. The degree of “entanglement” between the State and the entity in question is a very important consideration in State Action Doctrine. Artificial indicators, superficial signs, or various labels are not sufficient forms of “deep entwinement” with the State. The State must be “significantly involved” in a private entity’s actions in order to conclude that State action (and therefore the 14th Amendment) is at play. For decades, the actions of deregulated charter schools have not been attributable to the government, certainly not in the same way as the actions of traditional public schools have.

    This is precisely why various provisions of the U.S. Constitution do not apply to privately-operated charter schools. Many private actions are not subject to constitutional scrutiny under State Action Doctrine. Certain constitutional standards generally do not apply to acts of private persons or entities. Constitutional standards apply mainly to the States and their subdivisions (like cities, counties, and school districts). Thus, as deregulated private actors, charter schools are generally not subject to liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983,[4] while traditional public schools are. Never mind the fact that government has long been dominated by narrow private interests anyway. All levels of government today privilege private interests over the public interest. Americans exercise no control over what takes place in society.

    The main reason neoliberals tirelessly repeat the disinformation that charter schools are public schools, or that charter schools have enough meaningful public features about them to render them “public” schools, is in order to justify siphoning billions of dollars a year from traditional public schools that have educated about ninety percent of America’s youth for generations. Charter schools could not seize these public funds if they were not called “public.” If they were openly recognized as the privatized entities that they are, what valid claim would they have to public funds? Public funds belong to the public. Why should public funds be handed over to private interests?

    To go further, charter schools are privately-operated schools that increase segregation, intensify corruption, spend millions on advertising, have high teacher turnover rates, and constantly seek ways to maximize profits regardless of whether they are designated as non-profit or for-profit entities. They are fundamentally pay-the-rich schemes that are proliferating in the context of a continually failing economy dominated by major owners of capital. For these and other reasons, the intrinsic character of charter schools cannot be changed easily or quickly, especially given how long they have been around and how charter school laws have been written for 34 years. Can a charter school not be a charter school? Charter school owners-operators are big supporters of no governmental control and have long-referred to charter schools as “free market” schools.

    For more than three decades this neoliberal financial parasitism has been cynically carried out in the name of “serving the kids,” “empowering parents,” “promoting innovation,” “getting results,” “providing choices,” “busting teacher unions,” and “increasing competition.”

    Individualism, self-interest, consumerism, competition, and a dog-eat-dog ethos—the  so-called “free market”—frame and drive this assault on public education and the public interest. Charter school advocates have long promoted a survival-of-the-fittest view of human relations. They believe parents are consumers who should fend-for-themselves in their quest to secure a “good education.” They think it is normal if a charter school fails, closes, and abandons everyone. This is how “businesses operate,” neoliberals casually declare.

    Charter school promoters do not view parents and students as humans with an inalienable right to education that must be guaranteed in practice. You are basically on your own as you spend an extensive amount of time “shopping” for a “good” school. Fingers crossed. There are no guarantees of stability, quality, or security. Such an arrangement is claimed to be “the best of all worlds” in which the “fittest” survive while the “weak” fail. There is supposedly no conceivable alternative to this Social Darwinist ethos and the discredited racist doctrine of DNA that underlies such an obsolete ideology.

    The  private character of these outsourced contract schools also comes out in the fact that all charter schools in the U.S. are not only governed by unelected private persons, but many, if not most, are routinely supported, operated, or owned directly by wealthy individuals and organizations that are wreaking havoc in other spheres of society in the name of progress. In fact, many charter schools are openly operated as for-profit schools, which means cashing in on kids is their “education model.” Students are seen as a source of profit for these privately-owned-and-operated contract “schools of choice.”

    Widespread patronage and nepotism in the charter school sector only add to the problems plaguing this deregulated sector, and a persistently low level of transparency and accountability in this deregulated sector does not help either. Charter authorizing bodies, the entities that supposedly oversee charter schools for a fee, have had little impact in ensuring high standards and quality in this nonpublic sector. In practice, “free market” accountability has actually lowered quality and standards.

    Philosophically, legally, academically, organizationally, programmatically, and socially charter schools have little in common with public schools. They have more in common with private organizations and corporations than with public entities.

    It is no accident that in recent years, neoliberal disinformation about the “publicness” and “privateness” of charter schools has become more debased in a desperate attempt to justify the expansion of charter schools across the country. Deliberate mystification about the “publicness” and “privateness” of charter schools has been at the forefront of neoliberal ideology and school privatization, disorienting even some critics of charter schools. But such “justifications” do not work because they lack legitimacy and authority; they are belied by reality.

    A main thrust of the decades-long neoliberal antisocial offensive of neoliberals is to blur the distinction between public and private so as to promote narrow private interests in the name of serving the public interest. Such a top-down agenda carried out under the veneer of high ideals is self-serving because it damages education, society, the nation, and the economy. It undermines a modern nation-building project that empowers people and rejects monopolization of the economy by major owners of capital.

    Charter schools prove that not every “innovation” that comes into being in the name of “education reform” benefits education, society, the economy, and the national interest.

    The oral arguments presented on April 30, 2025 in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) on the public funding of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic K-12 Virtual School in Oklahoma show that there is a strong push to treat charter schools as the private entities they are, and that the long-standing critical distinction between public and private is marred by more confusion and disinformation than ever. Keeping in mind that charter schools are “public” only on paper, if SCOTUS deems charter schools to be state actors (i.e., public schools), then the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies, which means that charter school cannot be religious. However, early news reports suggest that, for the first time in history, SCOTUS may well approve the funneling of public funds to private religious actors like St. Isidore. While no court decision will change the long-standing private character of charter schools for the last 34 years, a final decision on this divisive landmark case by the SCOTUS is expected in June 2025. More on this in a future article.

    The first charter school law in the U.S. was established in Minnesota in 1991. Today, about 3.8 million students attend roughly 8,000 charter schools across the country. Charter schools are legal in 47 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

    ENDNOTES:

    [1] The vast majority of teacher education students in the United States pursue teaching credentials in order to teach in a traditional public school. Very few, if any, are striving to become charter school teachers.

    [2] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

    [3] It should always be borne in mind that the State today is a State of the rich and not a State that serves the public interest.

    [4] The 14th Amendment is central to State Action Doctrine.

    The post Can a Charter School Not Be a Private Entity? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hundreds of Charter Schools Will Fail, Close, and Abandon Thousands of Families in 2025

    The nation’s first charter school law was passed in Minnesota in 1991. Today there are roughly 3.8 million students enrolled in about 8,000 charter schools across the country. Charter schools are legal in 46 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

    Over the past 30+ years, thousands of charter schools have failed, closed, and abandoned millions of students, parents, teachers, education support staff, principals, and others—all in the name of “choice,” “competition,” “innovation,” “accountability,” “results,” “empowering parents,” and “busting teacher unions” (see here, here, and here). In Michigan alone, 36% of charter schools fail in the first five years.

    The lives of many have been disrupted by frequent charter school failures and closures. And many of these closures are sudden and abrupt, catching many off guard and leaving them stressed out and anxious about what to do next. Shock, anger, grief, and abandonment are often experienced by those left out in the cold by constantly-failing charter schools. When a charter school fails and closes, parents, teachers, and administrators have to scramble frantically to figure out how to place many students in another education setting with the least amount of disruption and instability.

    Financial malfeasance, mismanagement, low enrollment, and poor academic performance are the top four reasons charter schools fail and close regularly. These long-standing problems usually operate together, they are interrelated, producing a perfect storm of continual failure and harm.

    2025 will be no different. Hundreds of charter schools will again fail, close, and violate thousands of students, parents, teachers, education support staff, and principals. The top-down antisocial neoliberal offensive in education will remain strong. Powerful private interests will continue their onslaught on the public interest under the veneer of high ideals.

    To be sure, as charter schools multiply across the country, even more closures and tragedies will occur. More charter schools equals more failures and closures. In this way, chaos and turmoil are further normalized in the sphere of education. Volatility and uncertainty become more entrenched. Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts, two other forms of education privatization, play a significant part in increasing anarchy in education as well.

    Such chaos and disorder are the natural result of a “free market” education set-up that glorifies a fend-for-yourself ethos that embraces disorder, mayhem, and insecurity. Every irrational thing takes hold quickly in such a set-up where everyone fends for themselves and hopes that “things work out.” Meaningful guard rails exist nowhere and everyone is pressured to blindly embrace individualism, ego-centrism, consumerism, and competition, thereby undermining the general interests of society.

    With no sense of irony, charter school promoters have gone so far as to characterize such turmoil and destruction as a “good thing.” In order to fool the gullible, they nonchalantly assert that numerous charter school failures and closures “might actually be a good thing.” They desperately want people to believe that it is perfectly natural, legitimate, and acceptable for a social responsibility like education to be commodified and marketized. Charter school closures supposedly “prove” that “the free market is working” and that charter schools are “accountable.” “Bad” schools, after all, should be closed so that new entrepreneurs can start new charter schools the same way an investor starts a new shoe store. But thousands of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals brutally abandoned every week by failing charter schools beg to differ. They refuse to be disinformed and gas-lighted. It does not feel good to be violated and betrayed, especially in such a cold way.

    Who thinks schools failing and closing all the time is in any way a good desirable thing? Especially in the 21st century? Is it possible to disguise frequent failure, closure, and destruction as something positive and healthy? Should people believe that no alternative exists to endless failure and chaos? Is it impossible to organize education in a human-centered way centuries after the scientific and technical revolution?

    In this connection, it is important to stress that the American public school system is not failing, it is being methodically and intentionally destroyed by neoliberals who are then setting up failed charter schools and dividing people along different lines. Public schools have been ruthlessly subjected to the “starve it (of funds)—test it—punish it—privatize it” neoliberal strategy for 50 years. Neoliberals and their entourage are wrecking everything in order to rapidly seize public wealth in the context of a continually failing economy. People should reject all neoliberal disinformation about what constitutes “failure,” why something is “failing,” and why “it needs to be closed.” Neoliberals should not be deciding what is “bad” or “good” for education and society. Analysis and discussion that favor the people is needed.

    In the final analysis, subjecting parents, students, teachers, and others to the law of the jungle while depriving public schools of billions of dollars is inhumane and unnecessary in the 21st century. Social Darwinism is outdated. Such a doctrine emerged in the late 1800s to divide people and justify imperialism, racism, and inequality. The whole notion of basing modern life on winning and losing is obsolete. Competition makes everyone a loser. Disorder, volatility, and leaving people high and dry are not inevitable or the “best of all worlds.” There is a human-centered alternative to this capital-centered world.

    “Free market” education is socially irresponsible and destructive. Pro-social change is needed immediately. The need today is to defend the right to education while opposing the privatization and marketization of education. Say no to the commodification of education. Teaching and learning is a complex process that takes place over years in a multi-faceted web of direct human relations; it cannot be commodified, quantified, or rushed. Private interests should not be able to cash in on kids. Youth must not be exploited to enrich private interests. Such an outlook and approach molest the most basic premises and principles of human learning, growth, development, and dignity.

    Privatization ultimately increases corruption, restricts democracy, raises costs, reduces efficiency, and lowers the quality of services. It does not improve things. It makes everything worse while enriching private interests. It prevents the healthy balanced extended reproduction of society by fracturing the economy and taking money out of it.

    No public funds, properties, assets, or authority should ever flow to charter schools because charter schools, whether they are called nonprofit or for-profit, are fundamentally private entities. Calling something public 50 times a day does not magically make it public in the proper sense of the word. Public schools and charter schools have almost nothing in common. Charter schools are public only on paper. Public wealth must remain in public hands at all times.

    In a modern society based on mass industrial production public schools must be free, fully-funded, world-class, and controlled by a public authority worthy of the name. Private interests must not be permitted to touch public education or any social programs because these belong to working people and society.

    The architects of the retrogressive neoliberal agenda in education and other spheres are unable and unwilling to affirm the rights of all. They cannot be relied on to open the path of progress to society. They will remain engaged in wrecking activity under the banner of high ideals. Neoliberals will continue to present themselves as saviors and guardians of education and society while actually destroying the fabric of education and society.

    In the current context, everyone must remain vigilant, investigate and discuss everything non-stop, affirm their conscience, and speak up in their own name. Reject neoliberal bullying and aggression in all its forms. Defend the public interest. Fight for a modern nation-building project that puts human rights, not property rights, center-stage.

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  • Oklahoma Supreme Court Repeats Disinformation That Charter Schools Are Public Schools

    In a much-awaited case brought forth by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond (Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board), the Oklahoma State Supreme Court ruled 6-2 on June 25, 2024, that St. Isidore of Seville Catholic K-12 Virtual Charter School is unconstitutional and cannot open and enroll students in Fall 2024.

    The online religious charter school is sectarian and not permitted to receive any public funding, said the court. Writing for the majority, Justice James Winchester said that, “the contract between the state board and St. Isidore violates the Oklahoma Constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act and the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” He added that, “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.” Winchester also stated that, “What St. Isidore requests from this court is beyond the fair treatment of a private religious institution in receiving a generally available benefit, implicating the free exercise clause. It is about the state’s creation and funding of a new religious institution violating the establishment clause.”

    The Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause make up the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Justice Dustin P. Rowe dissented from much of the majority opinion while Justice Dana Kuehn dissented entirely with the majority.

    Reuters stated that the religious online charter school would have siphoned about $26 million from public coffers in the first five years of operation. The real amount is likely higher. Charter schools across the country siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools, increase segregation, and fail and close regularly.

    This unprecedented ruling blocks what would have been the first publicly funded religious charter school in the U.S. It invalidates the approval in October 2023 of St. Isidore by the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, an entity comprised mostly of unelected private persons. Charter school authorizers around the country typically consist of many unelected individuals from the business sector. Such entities usually embrace capital-centered ideas and policies.

    The sponsors of the deregulated virtual charter school, the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa, have openly stated that the religious virtual charter school would be open to students statewide, rely directly on Catholic teachings, and use public funds to operate. Catholic leaders have never concealed their mission to evangelize students at the online religious charter school. In fact, St. Isidore students would not only “be taught Catholic doctrine,” they would also be “required to attend mass,” reported Oklahoma Voice.

    The Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the termination of St. Isidore’s contract with the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which became the new Statewide Charter School Board on July 1, 2024. “The [nine-person] board will succeed the [five-person] Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which oversaw only online charter schools in Oklahoma,” says The Oklahoman. The new entity will oversee all charter schools in the state and will be comprised mainly of unelected business people with greater responsibilities and powers.

    For their part, the Catholic sponsors of the virtual charter school have pledged to appeal the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they plan to open the online religious charter school in the 2025-2026 school year. On July 5, attorneys for the online religious charter school asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court for a stay of its order to have its contract rescinded by the new Statewide Charter School Board until the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case. The new Statewide Charter School Board, which met for the first time on July 8, held off on terminating the virtual school’s contract. The new unelected board claims that it is waiting to see how legal proceedings play out in the coming weeks and months. On July 17, Drummond scolded the new board for not rescinding the contract for the Catholic virtual charter school. He told the new board, “You must know and accept that no state agency, board, or commission may willfully ignore an order from Oklahoma’s highest court.” Private religious forces are hoping that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court that further abolish the distinction between public and private will work in their favor.

    Such developments and contradictions arise in the context of neoliberal forces working for the last few decades to restructure the state in ways that change governance and administrative arrangements to expand privatization. Blurring the public-private distinction is central to neoliberal efforts to further privilege private interests while marginalizing the public interest. This is why today there is little distinction between the state and Wall Street. We live in a system of direct rule by the rich. Private monopoly interests, not the public, control the economy and the state. In the years ahead, major owners of capital will strive to further dominate the state so as to privatize more institutions, programs, enterprises, services, and governance itself.

    “Public” and “private,” it should be stressed, are legal, political, philosophical, and sociological categories that mean the exact opposite of each other; they are antonyms. Confounding them is problematic, both conceptually and practically. It is self-serving, not just intellectually lazy, to mix up two sharply distinct categories like “public” and “private.” It is like saying hot and cold mean the same thing. In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion; [1] It is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, or benefitting everyone.

    State constitutions typically prohibit states from using public money to support or benefit religious institutions and entities. As a general rule, states cannot use public money to fund religious schools. Historically, there has been a powerful trend in U.S. society to keep religion and state separate (the so-called “wall of separation between church and state”). Modern conditions and requirements dictate that states must avoid sponsoring, promoting, funding, or privileging any religion. There can be no “religious liberty” when a state sponsors, funds, privileges, or entangles itself with any religion or sect. The state is supposed to represent the interests of all members of the polity, regardless of religion.

    The Oklahoma Supreme Court argued that had St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School opened as a regular nonsectarian “public” charter school instead of a religious charter school, it could have received public funds and operated normally.

    In reasoning in this manner, the court correctly negated publicly-funded sectarian education arrangements but erroneously sanctioned the continued funneling of public funds from public schools to deregulated charter schools that are public only on paper. In other words, the highest court in Oklahoma saw no problem with charter schools siphoning public funds from public schools. The court overlooked the fact that charter schools in Oklahoma, like the rest of the country, are privately-operated and differ legally, philosophically, pedagogically, and organizationally from public schools.

    The court thus blundered when it repeatedly referred to charter schools as public schools in its ruling. It uncritically repeated flawed and banal assertions about the “publicness” of charter schools. It incorrectly characterized charter schools as state actors even though private entities are typically the only entities that hold charter school contracts in the U.S.

    It is generally recognized that how an entity is described on paper can often differ greatly from how it operates in reality. There can be a large chasm between the two. People understand that words and deeds are not always aligned. Indeed, there has always been a big gap between rhetoric and reality in the charter school sector. Charter school owners and promoters have long confused words on paper with empirical realities. They want people to believe that just because something is on paper, it is automatically true, valid, and unassailable. They have taken abstraction of certain ideas to incoherent and detached levels, while also merging legalese and lawfare to advance their agenda. For 32 years charter school owners and promoters have strived to create a legislative veneer of respectability, but lack of legitimacy remains a nagging problem in the charter school sector.

    To be clear, all charter schools in the U.S. are privately-operated and governed by unelected private persons. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not run by publicly elected people. In fact, many charter schools are directly owned-operated by for-profit corporations that openly cash in on kids as their education model. For example, most charter schools in Michigan and a few other states are openly for-profit charter schools. But even so-called “non-profit” charter schools regularly engage in profiteering.

    Legally, private operators of charter schools exist outside the public sphere, which makes them private actors, not state (public) actors. Charter school operators are not government entities or political subdivisions of the state. This is why most constitutional provisions apply to public schools, which are state actors, but do not apply to the operators of charter schools or the students, teachers, and parents involved with them. Charter schools teachers, for example, are legally considered “at-will” employees, the opposite of public school teachers. The rights of teachers, students, and parents in public schools are not the same as the rights of teachers, students, and parents in charter schools.

    For these and other reasons, charter schools are deregulated independent schools. As private actors, they are not subject to the same requirements as traditional public schools. They do not operate in the same way as public schools. They are not “entangled” with the state in the same way that public schools are. Charter schools do not have the same relationship with the state as public schools. The state, put simply, does not coerce, compel, influence, or direct charter schools to act in the same way as public schools. The state does not play a significant role in charter school policies and actions, certainly not in the way that it does with traditional public schools. This means that the state cannot be held responsible for the actions and policies of private actors.

    In the U.S., state laws explicitly permit charter schools to avoid most laws, rules, statutes, regulations, and policies governing public schools. Charter schools can essentially “do as they please” in the name of “autonomy,” “competition,” “accountability,” “choice,” “parental empowerment,” and “results.” It is no accident that charter school advocates boast every day that charter schools are “free market” schools, which means that they are based on the law of the jungle. President Bill Clinton, a long-time supporter of charter schools, once correctly called charter schools “schools with no rules.” Charter schools have long embraced social Darwinism and a fend-for-yourself ethos.

    The “free market” ideologies of competition, individualism, and consumerism are therefore central to the creation, operation, and expansion of charter schools. Fending-for-yourself in the pursuit of education is seen as natural, normal, and healthy by charter school owners and promoters. There can supposedly be no better way to organize education and life according to charter school owners and promoters. Thus, when a charter school fails and closes, one is supposed to quickly and effortlessly find a new school, complain about nothing, move on, and nonchalantly accept that “this is just how life is.” In this outdated, disruptive, and unstable set-up, one is expected to be a “rugged individual” who embraces inequality and competition. Winning and losing is supposedly inevitable. Put simply, neoliberals and privatizers do not view education as a basic human right that must be guaranteed in practice. Commodity logic—the logic of buying and selling—guides their outlook and agenda.

    Further, the notion, promoted by some, that charter schools are “public-private partnerships” is also flawed and dangerous because it implies that there is a public component to charter schools and that a fair, balanced, equal, meaningful, and mutually-beneficial relationship can exist between the public sector and the private sector. This neoliberal notion covers up the fact and principle that public funds belong only to the public and must not be wielded or controlled by the private sector at any time. If the private sector wants income and revenue, then it should generate income and revenue through its own activities and operations, without using the state to seize public funds that do not belong to it. Public funds must serve the public and not be claimed by private interests through new governance arrangements that harm the public. So-called public-private “partnerships” further concentrate accumulated social wealth in private hands and restrict democracy.

    It is disinformation to claim that the public sector needs the private sector for government, society, institutions, infrastructure, and programs to exist and function at a high level. The public sector would be far healthier and more human-centered if a public authority worthy of the name kept all public funds in public hands at all times and used public funds only to advance the general interests of society. It should also be recalled that the private sector has been rife with fraud, failure, scandal, and corruption for generations. We see this in the news every day. Privatization does not guarantee efficiency, success, or excellence. Privatization invariably increases corruption and negates human rights.

    Other differences between charter schools and public schools include the fact that, as privatized education arrangements, charter schools cannot levy taxes like public schools and do not accept or keep all students. Unlike public schools that accept all students at all times, charter schools, which are said to be “welcoming,” “free,” and “open to all,” routinely cherry-pick students. In addition, many charter schools are legally permitted to hire uncertified teachers.

    Charter schools also frequently fail to uphold even the few public standards enshrined in state charter school laws (e.g., open-meeting laws, reporting laws, enrollment requirements, and audit laws). These are laws and requirements they are supposed to embrace but often violate. It has often been said that the charter school sector is not transparent or accountable, even though it seizes billions of dollars every year from the public, leaving the public worse off—and all under the veneer of high ideals. Dozens of other differences between public schools and charter schools can be found here.

    Charter, by definition, means contract. Charter schools are contract schools. Contract law is part of private law in the U.S., not public law. Private law deals with relations between private citizens, whereas public law deals with relations between the state and individuals. Thus, the legal basis and profile of charter schools differs from the legal basis and profile of public schools, which is why, as noted earlier, charter school students, parents, and workers have different rights and protections than public school students, parents, and workers.

    Charter schools in the U.S. are private entities that enter into contract with the state or entities approved by the state. The state does not actually create the charter school, it mainly delegates (not authorizes) a function to the private contractor of the school; it is outsourcing education; it is commodifying a social responsibility. This outsourcing of constitutional obligations to private interests does not automatically make said interests state actors.

    A private actor does not automatically and magically become a public agency with public power just because it is delegated a duty by the state through a contract. Generally speaking, not a single charter school in the U.S. is owned-operated by a public entity or government unit. Unlike public schools, charter schools are usually created by private citizens, often business people, and often with extensive support from philanthrocapitalists. These private forces or entities do not suddenly become public entities just because they contract with the state or an entity approved by the state. Partnering with the government is not the same as being part of the government. And simply receiving public funds to carry out a function does not spontaneously transform a private entity into a public entity. It is well-known that thousands of private entities in the country receive some sort of public funding but they do not suddenly stop being private entities.

    Nor can charter schools be deemed public just because they are called “public” 50 times a day. Repeating something endlessly does not instantly make something true. There would actually be no need to call charter schools “charter” schools if they were public schools proper. The word “charter” before the word “school” instantly sets charter schools apart from public schools. The word “charter” creates a demarcation. Similarly, there would be no need to call charter schools “schools of choice” if they were traditional public schools. “Free market” phrases such as this one also communicate a difference between charter schools and public schools. Today, ninety percent of the nation’s roughly 50 million students attend a public school in their zip code. Neoliberals have successfully starved many of these schools of public funds over the past 45 years.

    It is also worth noting that the academic performance of cyber charter schools in the U.S. is notoriously abysmal (see here, here, and here). Equally ironic in this situation is that Epic Charter Schools in Oklahoma, a massive online charter school, has been charged by various government authorities with different crimes in recent years. The owners-operators of Epic Charter Schools have been charged with embezzlement, money laundering, computer crimes, and conspiracy to defraud the state. Such crimes have been widespread in the entire charter school sector for three decades. Equally noteworthy is the fact that under Oklahoma law charter school teachers do not have be certified to teach.

    Currently, there are more than 60 privately-operated charter schools in Oklahoma. About 3.8 million students (7.4% of U.S. children) are currently enrolled in nearly 8,000 charter schools across the country.

    The inescapable law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism, especially since the mid-1970s, continues to coerce capital-centered forces to privatize as much of the public sector and social programs as they can in order to maximize profits and avoid extinction. Capitalist economies everywhere are in deep trouble and are becoming more reckless in their narrow quest to maximize profits as fast as possible. Greed is at an all-time high.

    Capital-centered forces will continue to restructure the state apparatus to advance their retrogressive agenda under the banner of high ideals. This includes raiding the public education sector and privatizing it in the name of “serving the kids,” “empowering parents,” “promoting competition,” and “increasing choice.” So far, “school-choice” schemes have made some individuals very rich while lowering the level of education and harming the public interest.

    Charter schools represent the commodification of education, the privatization and marketization of a modern human responsibility in order to enrich a handful of private interests. The typical consequences of privatization in every sector include higher costs, less transparency, reduced quality of service, greater instability, more inefficiency, and loss of public voice. Whether it is vouchers, so-called “Education Savings Accounts,” or privately-operated charter schools, education privatization (“school-choice”) has not solved any problems, it has only multiplied them. [2]

    Charter schools are not public schools. If privately-operated charter schools wish to exist and operate they must do so without public money. Public funds belong only to the public and must be used solely for public purposes. This means guaranteeing a range of services, programs, and institutions that continually raise living and working standards. It means serving the common good at the highest level and blocking any schemes that undermine this direction.

    FOOTNOTES

    [1] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

    [2] See The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2023).

     

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  • Charter Schools Will Desert And Violate Thousands In 2024

    Privately-operated charter schools have been around for 32 years. They fail and close every week, abandoning and harming hundreds of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals. Neoliberals cynically call this “free market accountability.”

    These closures, moreover, are often sudden and abrupt, revealing deep problems and instability in the charter school sector. Parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals often report being blindsided by such closures and how they have to anxiously scramble to find new schools for students.

    Officially, 2,315 charter schools failed and closed between 2010-11 and 2021-22 alone (an 11-year period). On average, that is 210 privately-operated charter school failures and closures per year, or four charter school failures and closures per week. The real number is likely higher. Over the course of 30+ years more than 4,000 privately-operated charter schools have failed and closed. That is a high number given the fact that there are under 8,000 privately-operated charter schools in the country today.

    The top four reasons privately-operated charter schools fail and close every week include low enrollment, poor academic performance, financial malfeasance, and mismanagement. Thus, for example, every week the mainstream media is filled with articles on fraud, corruption, nepotism, and embezzlement in the charter school sector. Not surprisingly, arrests and indictments of charter school employees, trustees, and owners are common.

    While fraud, corruption, nepotism, embezzlement, and scandal pervade many institutions, sectors, and spheres in America, such problems are more common and intense in the charter school sector.

    Despite all this, a dishonest neoliberal narrative keeps insisting that these privately-operated schools are superior to the public schools that have been defunded and demonized by neoliberals for more than 40 years. The public is constantly under top-down pressure to ignore or trivialize persistent charter school failures and problems.

    In this context, the public should reject relentless neoliberal disinformation that public schools are a commodity or some sort of “free market” phenomenon. It should discard the idea that parents and students are consumers who should fend-for-themselves while “shopping” for a school. The law of the jungle has no place in a modern society. Such a ruthless survival-of-the-fittest approach to individuals, education, and society is outmoded, guarantees winners and losers, perpetuates inequality, and increases stress for everyone.

    The public should defend the principle that education in a modern society is a social human responsibility and a basic human right, not a commodity or consumer good that people have to compete for. A companion principle is that public funds belong only to public schools governed by a public authority worthy of the name.

    Charter schools are not public schools. They are privatized education arrangements, which means that they should not have access to any public funds that belong to public schools. Public funds should not be funneled to private interests. School privatization violates the right to education.

    Currently, about 3.7 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,800 privately-operated charter schools across the country. The U.S. public education system, on the other hand, has been around for more than 150 years and educates about 45 million students in nearly 100,000 schools.

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  • 2,315 Charter Schools Failed And Closed In 11 Years

    Although they have been around for more than 30 years, and although they are frequently touted as being superior to public schools, the U.S Department of Education reports that between 2010-11 and 2021-22, an 11-year period, 2,315 charter schools failed and closed in the U.S.

    That is a huge number of school closures in a short time frame. By any measure, it is hard to call such a phenomenon “successful.”

    And this figure probably does not capture the real number of charter schools that have failed and closed over the years, leaving thousands of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals violated and out in the cold.

    In 2024, hundreds more charter schools will fail and close, leaving many more people feeling angry and disillusioned. The same will happen in 2025 as well, further tarnishing the reputation of charter schools.

    Charter school promoters casually assert that such failure and closure are great and fantastic. “Free market” failure is supposedly an unassailable timeless virtue even if it effectively disrupts, violates, and harms thousands of people every year for completely avoidable reasons. What’s more, there is apparently no alternative to this outdated set-up. Disorder, volatility, and leaving people high and dry are considered inevitable and the “best of all worlds.”

    In this obsolete outlook, instability and chaos are misequated with “innovation” and “improvement.” “Failure” becomes “success” and disruption and anarchy become “progress.” Reality is turned upside down in this view which renders everything in a detached and abstract way, as if real people and real injury are not involved when charter schools close every week (often abruptly and mid-year), forcing many to scramble stressfully to find a new school. Such a perspective has no conception of an education system that is stable, dependable, continuous, and consciously directed by a public authority worthy of the name.

    In 2023, proponents of “free market” education still see everything from the lens of a dog-eat-dog world. They maintain that everyone has to fend-for-themselves like an animal even though it is possible to easily meet the needs of all humans many times over without disruption and chaos. Social Darwinism is prioritized over everything else in this scheme. A society fit for all is avoided at all costs, while a society based on outdated hierarchies, inequalities, and privileges is perpetuated.

    Today, approximately 3.7 million youth are enrolled in about 7,800 charter schools across the country while 45 million students attend the nation’s 100,000 public schools, which have been around for more than 150 years.

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  • Michigan: 36 Charter Schools Failing

    About eight months ago, the Michigan Department of Education revealed that at least 36 charter schools are failing in the state of Michigan. Many other charter schools are considered close to “low-performing.” This is not a small number of charter schools. It is not unreasonable to assume that several dozen more charter schools are in troubled waters (see here, here, and here).

    The vast majority of charter schools in Michigan are openly for-profit charter schools. A chaotic “Wild West” pro-competition ethos prevails in the state because of the proliferation of such deregulated schools governed by unelected private persons. Parents and students are expected to fend-for-themselves like shoppers and consumers. Nothing is guaranteed in such a set up. A February 2023 news article reports that:

    Once again, Michigan has the dubious distinction of being the state with the highest percentage of charter schools run by for-profit corporations in the nation. Eighty-one percent of Michigan’s nearly 300 charter schools contract with private management companies, often referred to as Charter Management Organizations (CMO).

    These private companies routinely engage in a range of shady real estate transactions and self-dealing to maximize profit at the expense of kids. To be sure, nepotism, patronage, corruption, and fraud are more intense in the charter school sector than other sectors in society. Charter schools are also notorious for having weak accountability and transparency. Secrecy is a priority.

    Charter schools have long over-promised and under-delivered. They are not the silver bullet promoters repeatedly claim they are. They are plagued by many serious problems. They not only fail and close regularly, they also hire fewer experienced teachers than public schools and have fewer nurses than public schools. Many do not offer meals, transportation, sports programs, or libraries. In addition, charter schools choose parents and students, not the other way around.

    It is difficult for charter school supporters to defend the position that charter schools are better than public schools, especially since charter schools have now been around for more than three decades in the U.S. Everyone can see that charter schools have a long trail of failures. Even the staunchest charter school advocates do not deny this. On the contrary, with no sense of irony they define regular failure and upheaval as “success,” the so-called “free market” at work. This is a capital-centered view of life, relations, and the world.

    It is also indefensible for charter schools promoters to say, “well, at least some charter schools are doing well, isn’t that good?” Such a poor track record in Michigan and beyond does not justify siphoning billions of dollars a year from constantly-demonized public schools. There remains a big chasm between charter school hype and charter school realities.

    In the final analysis, public schools methodically set up to fail by neoliberals who then turn around and set up failed charter schools, and then also divide people while charter school operators cash in on kids in the name of “choice,” “saving the kids,” or “parent empowerment” is unacceptable and untenable. It is not a human-centered orientation and agenda.

    Speak up. Defend the right to education. Oppose public funds for charter schools. Say no to education based on the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market.” Reject the commodification of education.

    According to Chalkbeat (2023):

    There are about 370 charter schools in Michigan enrolling roughly 150,000 K-12 students, or 10% of the total. Some of those schools are organized into groups called charter districts. Most charter school students live in urban areas, notably Detroit, where nearly 50% of all public school students attend charter schools. Nearly two-thirds of charter school students are enrolled in southeast Michigan.

    In addition, “In exchange for oversight, [charter school] authorizers can take up to a 3% cut of a charter’s state funding.”

  • Charter Schools On Paper Versus Charter Schools In Reality

    There has always been a large chasm between how charter schools operate in reality versus what is said about them on paper.

    Three examples:

    One: all charter school laws state that charter schools are public, yet there is really nothing truly public about them in practice. Simply being called public or receiving public funds does not automatically make a school public under the law. Other legal criteria must be met.

    Two: all charter school laws state that charter schools are open to all students, yet thousands of charter schools routinely use selective enrollment practices, which usually means that they frequently under-enroll special needs students, English Language Learners, homeless students, “poor behaving” students, and other types of youth.

    Three: all charter school laws state that charter schools are tuition-free, yet thousands of charter schools deploy strategies that put parents in a position where they have to spend money on various things and/or (“voluntarily”) perform certain functions normally performed by paid credentialed professionals. In many cases, parents are even required to sign a contract saying that they must carry out certain responsibilities if they want everything to go smoothly and avoid consequences.

    Many other examples could be given that show that what is written on paper about charter schools is usually very different from what actually happens in practice.

    Today there are about 3.7 million students enrolled in roughly 7,800 privately-operated charter schools in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No Let-Up In U.S. Economic Decline

    As the mainstream media continues to make irrational and diversionary statements about the economy, facts show and experience confirms that people’s living and working standards continue to steadily decline. The economy continues to move in the wrong direction. Poor economic conditions persist, which is why the vast majority remain pessimistic about the economy and recognize that the current direction is unsustainable. The 30 statistics below speak volumes about actual economic conditions and cut through the worn-out media disinformation that “the economy is doing great.”

    *****

    “28 million Americans still lack health insurance.”

    “21 million workers are still paid less than $15 per hour.”

    “The federal minimum hourly wage is just $7.25 and has not increased since 2009.”

    “69% of Americans in Cities Live Paycheck to Paycheck.”

    “More than 200,000 Dallas [Texas] residents are 60 or older, and at least 30,000 of them live on incomes of less than $1,000 per month.”

    “1 in 10 low-income households had a retirement account balance in 2019, compared to 1 in 5 in 2007.”

    “In America’s “internal colonies,” the poor die far younger than richer Americans.”

    “At the beginning of 2023, the top ten percent of earners in the United States held 69 percent of total wealth. This is a slight increase from the fourth quarter of 2022 when the top ten percent held 68.2 percent of total wealth.”

    “Amazon Fresh lays off hundreds of grocery store workers, reports say.”

    “Microsoft confirms more job cuts on top of 10,000 layoffs announced in January [2023].”

    “Economic growth to slow and unemployment to rise, CBO projects.”

    “U.S. Leading Economic Index Falls Again in June [2023].”

    “U.S. gas prices hit 8-month high.”

    “Cost of living: High prices leading to poor nutrition in people.”

    “Fed approves hike that takes interest rates to highest level in more than 22 years.”

    “Big Bankruptcies Rise at Faster Pace This Year.”

    “New York Fed Reports Surge In Credit Application Rejections.”

    “Now You Can’t Get A Car Loan.”

    “Young People Are Missing Auto Loan Payments At Near Record Numbers.”

    “Price of Used Houses now the Same as Price of New Houses.”

    “House sales plummet to their lowest level in over a DECADE as families in large suburban homes cling to cheap mortgage deals – with just 1% of US properties changing hands in 2023.”

    “It’s Getting Even Harder to Afford a ‘Starter’ Home in the US.”

    “Atlanta-area evictions surpass 70,000 in first half of year.”

    “Experts shine a light on the invisible toll of informal evictions.”

    “A majority of Harris County [Texas] renters are ‘cost burdened’ by rising rent prices, report says.”

    “The average tuition at US private colleges grew by about 4% last year to just under $40,000 per year, according to data collected by US News & World Report. For a public in-state school, that cost was $10,500, that’s an annual increase of 0.8% for in-state students and about 1% for out-of-state.”

    “Many [Tampa] Bay area [Florida] families unable to access early childhood education, causing childcare crisis.”

    “High cost makes child care inaccessible for many Iowans, report finds.”

    “Millions more Americans [100 million] have medical debt than student debt.”

    “62% Of Food Derived From Forced Labor Is ‘Likely Produced In The U.S.’”

    *****

    Is this what a booming, resilient, humane economy looks like? The reality is that economic conditions are also awful in Europe and other countries. Globally, millions are worse off now than they were a few years ago.

    The current downward economic spiral has been going on for some time now and it is clear that the powers that be are unable and unwilling to solve any problems, they just keep making things worse while hoping people believe disinformation about a “great economy.” The rich became historically superfluous long ago; they are a huge cost, burden, and obstacle to society.

    Only working people and their allies can turn around the situation. Relying on the rich and their politicians to develop an economy that provides for the needs of all is not working.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Economic Conditions Continue To Worsen For Millions

    While the monopoly-controlled media incessantly promotes disinformation, incoherence, and irrationalism about the U.S. economy, real people are experiencing harder economic conditions with each passing month. Below are 30 recent statistics that bear this out.

    *****

    “More than half — 54% — of American millennials and Gen Z are still financially dependent on their parents, according to a survey from credit bureau Experian released on Monday [June 26, 2023].”

    “According to a Newsweek poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, 55% of Americans are “very” or “fairly” concerned about paying off credit debt this year. The total credit card balance of Americans is at its highest point since the U.S. Federal Reserve began tracking the data, and current metrics indicate that Americans are using credit to mitigate inflationary pressures.”

    “Household debt continues to rise nationwide.”

    “A recent survey conducted by Clever Real Estate polled 1,000 Gen Xers born between 1965 and 1980 to find out how they fare when it comes to personal finances and the road to retirement. A staggering 56% of Gen Xers said they have less than $100,000 saved for retirement, and 22% said they have yet to save a single cent.”

    “In February [2023], the U.S. personal savings rate was estimated to be around 4.6 percent—much below the decades-long average of about 8.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.”

    “US grocery prices rose in May [2023].”

    “1 in 6 People Received Help from Charitable Food Sector in 2022.”

    “Many Americans face hunger crisis as food insecurity rises.”

    “Earlier this year [2023], 32 states reduced Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, prompting experts to warn of a ‘hunger cliff’. The move came at a challenging time for recipients, with inflation at all-time highs and COVID-benefits being phased out.”

    “The slump in US manufacturing continued for an eighth straight month in June [2023] on the back of weak demand and slowing production, according to survey data published on Monday [July 3, 2023].”

    “Education debt in the US topped $1.75 trillion in 2022 — the second largest form of consumer debt after home mortgages.”

    “Eviction filings soar over 50% above pre-pandemic levels in some cities as rents increase.”

    “The number of homeless people counted on streets and in shelters around the U.S. has broadly risen this year, according to a Wall Street Journal review of data from around the nation.”

    “The median monthly payment listed on applications for home purchase loans in May [2023] rose to $2,165, up 14.1% from a year ago [2022] and a 2.5% increase from April [2023], the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday. The average rate on a 30-year home loan is still more than double what it was two years ago.”

    “Corporate bankruptcies and defaults are surging. The number of bankruptcy filings in the U.S. this year has also sharply risen, to levels not seen since 2010.”

    “CBO says U.S. deficits set to skyrocket in the years ahead.”

    “US Leading Economic Indicators Tumble For 14th Straight Month, Signals Weaker Activity Ahead.”

    “The labor force participation rate for people age 16 and older was 62.6 percent in May 2023. That was 0.7 percentage point below its February 2020 level, before the COVID-19 pandemic began.”

    “Real [College] Faculty Wages Decline for Third Straight Year.”

    “The Number Of Americans Filing For First-Time Jobless Benefits Hits Highest Since Oct 2021.”

    “More than 3 out of 5 employees have experienced burnout in the past year, according to the results of a recent survey.”

    “1 in 5 employees are ‘loud quitting.’ Here’s why it’s worse than ‘quiet quitting’.”

    “Ford conducts engineering layoffs in U.S. and Canada.”

    “US National Debt Hits $32 Trillion, up $572 billion since Debt Ceiling Suspended.”

    “Extreme wealth gap is widening in Silicon Valley, new report finds.”

    “In the fourth quarter of 2022, 68.2 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned three percent of the total wealth.”

    “Car insurance rates soar by as much as FORTY percent.”

    “The typical cost of renting a car in the U.S. has increased 48% since May 2019, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In other words, a car that cost $100 per day four years ago would now cost $148 per day.”

    “While they’re down from their peak during the pandemic, used car prices are still about 40% higher than before COVID, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Plus, pretty much everything about owning a used car is a lot more expensive than it used to be.”

    “Fentanyl Responsible For 80% Of Overdose Deaths Under 24 In US.”

    *****

    Is this what a healthy resilient economy looks like? Why in 2023 are the basic needs of millions going unmet in a society that has an overabundance of wealth?

    Taken together, these recent statistics show that Americans are doing worse over time. They are not experiencing “economic good times.” They are not “getting ahead.” Life is getting harder and harsher. Living and working standards continue to decline steadily, with no end in sight. The so-called “resilient” U.S. economy is leaving millions behind. Endless disinformation and handwringing about a “possible recession” is designed to divert attention from a continually failing economy.

    The neoliberal state is clearly in no mood to reverse direction and create an economy that meets the needs of all. It is dedicated to painstakingly establishing and fortifying arrangements that further increase economic and political inequality. The financial oligarchy has no solutions to any of the problems confronting the social and natural environment, just more tragedies for the people.

    People feel stuck with the outdated political set-up that is currently in place. It is not responsive to their concerns and demands. It is not working for them and is increasingly seen as irrelevant, obsolete, and in urgent need of renewal. The existing institutions, arrangements, and relations have become dysfunctional and burdensome for everyone concerned. There is no mechanism in place at this time that advances the interests of the people, other than the organizations that people themselves create to advance their own interests.

    It is up to people themselves to rely on their own thinking and action to move society forward. Begging the politicians of the rich for years for a few crumbs here and there is a non-starter.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter Schools Fail And Close Every Week

    Nonstop disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are amazing and successful is belied by the failure and closure of charter schools every week.

    Not a week goes by that we do not hear of yet another charter school failing, closing, and abandoning hundreds of parents, teachers, students, and principals. Below are many examples.

    These closures are often sudden and abrupt, which is why parents, teachers, students, and principals always say they are shocked by the closure announcement. They didn’t see it coming, they often say. They always feel blind-sided and like they have to scramble desperately to find a new school.

    Interestingly, most of this news comes from a media that is typically charter-friendly. A media more critical of charter schools and more in tune with scholarly and professional research on charter schools would make the public aware of far more problems, failures, and closures in the charter school sector.

    Some of the charter schools that close have been around for only a few years while others have been around for more than 10 years. Overall, about 5,000 charter schools have closed over the past 30 years. That is a high number in both relative and absolute terms. Currently, there are fewer than 7,800 privately-operated charter schools in the country.

    Most charter school students are low-income minority youth. Charter schools are generally more segregated than public schools and tend to have fewer nurses and fewer experienced teachers than public schools. Many do not offer meals or transportation, and all are governed by unelected private persons. Like private businesses, many charter schools also spend a large amount of money on advertising. In addition, quite a few charter schools are owned-operated by private for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs).

    The top four reasons privately-operated charter schools close nationwide every week include financial malfeasance, mismanagement, poor academic performance, and low enrollment. Scandal, fraud, nepotism, and corruption, it should also be recalled, are widespread and entrenched in the charter school sector. Conflicts of interest are rampant and transparency is negligible.

    It is also important to appreciate that the high charter school failure-closure rate is not an expression of “accountability at work” but rather a failed bankrupt project altogether—“a scam” in colloquial terms. Charter school operators want people to believe that endless churn, instability, and turnover in the charter school sector is somehow a good healthy thing—a sign of success and virtue. We are to believe that weekly closures and severe disruptions and upheaval are how charter schools “live up to their promise” of providing hope and an outstanding education and future.

    But who thinks running a school poorly, often for years, and leaving thousands of parents, teachers, students, and principals high and dry every week represents success, greatness, and an amazing model to emulate? Is this what “accountability” looks like? Why is such a thing tolerated for even one second?

    In reality, charter schools are imbued with the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free-market.” There is no security, stability, or accountability in this dog-eat-dog setup where everyone is compelled to fend-for-themselves in their consumerist quest for a “good” education offered by a private operator focused on profit. Only the so-called “fittest” individuals survive in this competition of all against all. The commodification of education really means “you are on your own out there in the twenty-first century, good luck.” Anything can happen. Nothing is guaranteed. There will be many different losers—the “invisible hand” at work.

    To be sure, charter schools have long over-promised and under-delivered, hence the long-standing chasm between charter school rhetoric and charter school realities. Charter schools were never the silver bullet that promoters claimed they were. Such disinformation is designed to fool the gullible.

    Neoliberals and privatizers do not understand or accept that human responsibilities cannot be commodified. They reject the conclusion that education is a right, not a business. They approach education and life from a narrow business-centric perspective. They think “costs,” “efficiency,” and “results” are the end-all and be-all. They don’t see that students are not widgets, machines, robots, or “products.” They think that students are part of some assembly line and that they can be developed, quantified, and processed like business products. In this technicist and instrumentalist view, students and life are approached along behaviorist lines linked to reward-and-punishment structures that accrue to “winners” and “losers.” It is no accident that parents and students are often referred to as customers and consumers by charter school promoters and owners.

    Below is a short list of charter schools that have closed recently, leaving thousands of parents, teachers, students, and principals out in the cold again—all in the name of “accountability.”

    Unexpected and quick charter school closures speak to a high level of instability and mismanagement in the charter school sector. This is not “accountability at work,” it is failure on a broad scale.

    Charter School Closures

    According to a June 15, 2023, article at WIS News 10 in Columbia, South Carolina, Midlands Arts Conservatory Charter School “is set to close its doors for good on June 30 [2023] and both parents and students say the news of the closure is a shock.”

    A June 10, 2023, article at NBC Bay Area – KNTV reports that Perseverance Preparatory Charter School in San Jose “appears to be closing permanently.” The school operated for less than five years.

    The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on June 9, 2023, that, “Next Door Foundation plans to close its kindergarten charter school at the end of next school year.” Enrollment in the school, which opened in 1997, has declined.

    On May 23, 2023, The Denver Post reported that:

    A charter elementary school centering Black students won’t open as planned in Denver this fall. 5280 Freedom School did not enroll enough students for next school year, and the Denver school board isn’t considering giving the charter school more time.

    Less than two months earlier [March 30, 2023], the following headline appeared in Native News Online: “Indigenous Charter School in Denver Will Close at End of School Year.” Low enrollment was given as the reason for the closure. Here it should be noted that many charter schools do not have long waiting lists, as charter school promoters like to often assert. Many charter schools fail to meet even low enrollment targets. There are many parents and students not clamoring to enter charter schools.

    Over the years, dozens of other charter schools have failed and closed in Colorado. For instance, a March 16, 2023, article in The Coloradoan, stated that “31 Colorado charter schools closed in the last decade.” The article points out that:

    Essentially, for every four charter schools that open each year in Colorado, one closes. That volatility can create added social and emotional strain to students and families tasked with finding new community supports and educational opportunities upon a school’s closure.

    Here again we see the antisocial consequences of the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market” at work. Parents, students, teachers, and principals have no control over their affairs in the charter school sector; “free market” carnage rules. A charter school may be here one day, and gone the next, just like a shoe store at the mall.

    On May 19, 2023, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that:

    The state’s charter school authority voted unanimously Friday to accept Girls Empowerment Middle School’s decision to close. The Las Vegas school will be shuttered after the school year ends — the last day was Friday — because of financial issues spurred by chronically low enrollment.

    On May 4, 2023, Caroline Beck of the Indianapolis Star reported that “one third of Indy charter schools close.” That is a very high number.

    Also on May 4, 2023, an article on the WCNC news site (North Carolina) reported that:

    The North Carolina State Board of Education voted Thursday [May 4, 2023] to officially revoke the charter of Eastside STREAM Academy in east Charlotte. [The school] has just two months until it has to close its doors to students. Its charter expires on June 30th.

    Reasons for not renewing the school’s charter are the typical reasons given for closing many charter schools across the country. They include failing grades, staff turnover, and fiscal mismanagement.

    The Jewish Telegraphic Agency revealed on May 5, 2023 that the decade-old Harlem Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Manhattan, New York will shutter at the end of the school year. Low enrollment was only one factor in the closure decision.

    Live 5 WCSC reported on April 24, 2023, that:

    A charter school in North Charleston [Gates School] will close its doors after this school year following a history of violations and instances of noncompliance, according to the Charter Institute at Erskine.

    On April 12, 2023, Alaska Public Media reported that:

    Last week the Anchorage School Board voted to revoke the charter of Family Partnership Charter School…. For years, the district tried to help the school fix longstanding dysfunction on its policy committee. Family Partnership Charter School is the oldest and largest charter school in Anchorage. It opened in 1997 and is one of two charter schools within the district that also serves as a homeschool program.

    A March 22, 2023, headline from the Waco Tribune-Herald (Texas) reads: “Waco Charter School parents, staff tell board they were blindsided by closure plan.” Here again is the theme of sudden closure and complete shock, pointing again to the high level of mismanagement and instability in the charter school sector. Waco Charter School was closed at the end of this school year due to low enrollment and financial problems.

    On March 20, 2023, The Empire Center in the state of New York announced that:

    Buffalo Collegiate, a charter school serving grades 4 to 8 since Fall 2018, announced this month that officials will be shutting them down in June for failing to meet student performance criteria outlined in the state’s charter school regulations.

    Many other charter schools in Buffalo, New York have had a poor academic track record for years but are allowed to continue to operate.

    Meanwhile, in Rochester, New York, about 80 miles east of Buffalo, we learn from the charter school-friendly Democrat & Chronicle (March 10, 2023) that, “Three years after receiving a last-second reprieve from closure, Rochester’s Urban Choice Charter School is again likely to be shut down by the state Board of Regents.” The Democrat & Chronicle informs us that:

    According to the state’s most recent site visit in November 2022, the school was meeting only three of its 10 benchmarks. Student performance on standardized tests now lags behind RCSD in most areas; teacher turnover is excessive, key leadership positions are unfilled; and the school has failed to follow through on some of the promises it made to secure earlier charter extensions.

    Over the years, dozens of charter schools have failed and closed across New York state.

    According to a February 15, 2023, article in The Kansas City Star, the Missouri Charter Public School Commission voted 6-1 to revoke the charter of Genesis Charter School due to years of poor academic performance. One month earlier, also in Missouri and for the same reason, “La Salle Charter Schools, Inc. announced it will be voluntarily giving up its charter school status and closing the middle school effective June 30, 2023.”

    GoErie reported on February 7, 2023, that, “The Erie School Board on Jan. 18 [2023] voted to force the closing of Erie Rise due to poor student test scores. Erie Rise must close by June 30, according to the board’s resolution.” Erie Rise Leadership Academy Charter School opened in 2011 (more than 10 years ago).

    In December 2022, CBS News Sacramento reported that:

    A school shuttered its doors with no warning. Parents of Placer Academy Charter [in Rocklin, California] say the recent announcement came out of nowhere.

    Going back a little further, a 2018 report from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that, “Florida charter school closures average 20 per year, report shows.” The real number is likely higher.

    According to the U.S. Department of Education, between 2010-11 and 2019-20, a nine year period, 2,047 charter schools closed in the U.S.

    Referencing a recent report on the largest federal grant program for charter schools, EducationWeek reported in October 2022 that, “Of the 6,000 [charter] schools that received [federal] funding for the program from fiscal year 2006 through 2020, 14 percent either never opened or closed, according to the report.”

    A 2020 report from the Network for Public Education documents the closure of a large number of charter schools between 1999-2017. Peter Greene from Forbes offers this summary of report findings:

    Within the first three years, 18% of charters had closed, with many of those closures occurring within the first year. By the end of five years, 25% of charters had closed. By the ten year mark, 40% of charters had closed.

    Such closures are disruptive to everyone concerned. The report notes that about one million students were displaced by charter school closures between 1999-2017.

    According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), between 1998-99 and 2019-20, a 21-year period, 694 charter schools opened and closed the same year.

    Across the country, dozens of charter school petitions are denied every year by public school boards who understand the perils of charter schools and charter school expansion. Fortunately, opposition to charter schools grows steadily and methodically each year. No doubt, charter school promoters will intensify disinformation in 2024 to justify the unjustifiable.

    Privatization, a key pillar of the neoliberal agenda launched in the early 1970s, is a method by which major owners of capital restructure the state to funnel more public resources of all kinds to private interests under the banner of high ideals. While privatization enriches a handful of people it does not actually solve any problems confronting the natural and social environment. If anything, it multiplies problems. So-called public-private “partnerships” and various other pay-the-rich schemes are constantly being set up in different sectors in the name of solving problems confronting people and the economy. The net result is more economic and political inequality with each passing year. No real social progress is actually made.

    Privatized education arrangements like charter schools, vouchers, or so-called “Education Savings Accounts” have only increased problems at all levels for everyone. The same can be said about education privatization schemes abroad, both at the secondary and post-secondary levels. With privatization, educational and intellectual missions are being replaced rapidly by mindless branding, intense digitization, endless slogans, aggressive advertising, diluted curricula, lower standards, and overnight credentials. It is all part of the destruction of the human factor and the social fabric of society.

    Education is a right and rights cannot be commodified. Education is not a business or “cost” issue. Education cannot be reduced to “efficiency,” “results,” and quantification. The right to education must be guaranteed in practice in a complex modern society. It cannot be left to the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free-market.” Experience shows daily that this does not work.

    Supplementary Note On Virtual Charter Schools

    A June 12, 2023, article in The Hechinger Report indicates that nationally:

    The worst [academic] results were posted by online charter schools, also known as virtual schools, which enroll six percent of the nation’s 3.7 million charter school students. Students at these schools learned the equivalent of 58 fewer days in reading and 124 fewer days in math than their public school peers. That’s like missing one third of the school year in reading and two thirds of the school year in math.

    Many virtual charter schools have been rocked by salacious scandals over the years and have been fined heavily and/or shut down. [1] Many more will be shuttered in the years ahead.

    1. See Cyber Charters in at Least 5 States Face Closure. What’s Going On?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter Schools Are Quintessentially and Irreversibly Private Schools by Design

    Despite endless disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are public schools, they differ profoundly—legally, organizationally, fiscally, and philosophically—from public schools. They are not the same. The dissimilarities are numerous by design. Calling them “public” 50 times a day does not spontaneously make charter schools public. Nor does receiving public funds automatically make charter schools public under U.S. law. In the U.S. legal system, several other criteria must be met before an entity can be called public proper.1

    Unlike public schools, charter schools are governed by unelected private persons, cannot levy taxes, frequently cherry-pick students, are mostly union-free, spend millions on advertising, and regularly hire uncertified teachers.2 Currently, charter school laws in some states and the District of Columbia explicitly permit charter schools to not require any of their teachers to be certified, while other states allow charter schools extensive wiggle room in this regard. Charter school teachers, moreover, are treated as “at will” employees, meaning that they can be fired at any time for any reason. Likewise, charter school teachers are generally not considered public employees, which is why they do not have the same constitutional protections as their public school counterparts. Charter school teachers also generally work longer days and longer years for less money than public school teachers. Many charter school teachers also lack the retirement plans and benefits available to public school teachers. For these and other reasons, the turnover rate of charter school teachers (and students and principals) remains very high, thereby undermining collegiality, stability, and continuity, which in turn damages education.

    Another important difference between public schools and charter schools is that charter schools are often owned-operated by large private corporations. Such businesses are notorious for gaming the legal system to maximize profit as fast as possible (e.g., through shady real estate deals and self-serving business contracts). Conflicts of interest are pervasive.

    Importantly, as deregulated schools, charter schools are exempt from most laws, rules, statutes, policies, and regulations upheld by public schools. This is why they are considered “independent” or “autonomous” schools. Charter schools are not beholden to the authority of the public school district they are located in. They are typically authorized by charter school authorizers comprised of unelected private persons and they have to pay these entities large sums of money every year.

    In addition, non-profit and for-profit charter schools often dodge open-meeting laws, evade audits, and do not provide the range of services and programs offered in public schools. Many charter schools across the country, for example, do not provide meals or transportation. Charter schools typically have fewer nurses than public schools as well. And when it comes to students, charter schools frequently rely on discredited behaviorist (Skinnerian) practices. Such reward-and-punishment behavioral conditioning practices extend beyond infamous “no excuses” charter schools that have come under fire for years. These practices are directed mainly at low-income minority students.

    All of this is possible because charter school promoters openly embrace the ideologies of the “free market,” competition, individualism, and consumerism. They routinely and casually refer to parents and students as customers and consumers, not humans or citizens that have rights that belong to them by virtue of being humans and citizens. This survival-of-the-fittest setup compels parents and students to fend for themselves in their quest for a good education. Subjecting parents and youth to the law of the jungle is seen as a healthy thing. In this way, parents and students are guaranteed nothing. Thus, every week thousands of teachers, students, and parents are abandoned by charter schools that fail and close (often abruptly).

    This marketization and commodification of education necessarily brings to the charter school sector the same chaos, anarchy, and violence that imbues a “free market” economy. Among other things, such a setup escalates and normalizes widespread fraud, nepotism, and corruption in the charter school sector. It is no surprise that news of arrests of charter school employees appears weekly, sometimes daily, in headlines across the country.

    It is worth noting as well that, over the years, courts at many levels and in many jurisdictions have ruled that charter schools, legally speaking, are not public schools; they are not state actors; they are not political subdivisions of the state; they are not state agencies; they are not governmental entities. This is why they do not follow the same laws followed by public schools and cannot levy taxes. Charter schools are private entities established by private citizens. Their control and supervision are not vested in a public authority. They also receive millions of dollars from Wall Street every year. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent agency of the federal government, has also ruled that charter schools are not public schools. The NLRB was established in 1935 and protects the rights of workers in the private sector.

    The main reason charter schools are called “public” under the law is to “justify” siphoning billions of dollars a year from constantly-demonized public schools to enrich narrow private interests under the facade of high ideals. This is self-serving to the extreme. It is no surprise that many billionaires and millionaires have promoted, owned, and used charter schools for decades. Even sports celebrities and movie stars own and promote charter schools.

    Many realize that the charter school realities and conditions mentioned above violate public education, the public interest, the economy, and the national interest, yet they believe that charter schools can be responsive and susceptible to pro-social reforms. They think that charter schools can be changed for the better—if we just try hard enough. They harbor the illusion that charter schools can be reined in and made to act more responsibly and ethically.

    The stubborn notion that charter schools can be improved by regulating them or by changing charter school laws stems from not taking experience seriously and from an aversion to theory and analysis, from a failure to sufficiently theorize the actual relations among the rich, the state, and the law. The class nature of the state remains undertheorized and analytically-challenged. Profundity is missing. “Bad” policy is not cognized deeply as the class policy that it is. Policy-making is seen instead as something neutral or a matter of technical expertise. Consequently, a no-class outlook prevails. It is not enough to simply recognize that charter schools are organized and promoted by major owners of capital; deeper analysis is needed. A robust political economy of charter schools needs to be developed to help open the path forward.

    Those who fail to theorize charter schools as a form of savage class war assume that the many problems plaguing charter schools are largely or merely a result of fixable “bad” ideas or “bad” policies emanating from misguided or unenlightened individuals and groups who are presumed to be unaffected by class interests. Such a notion operates anti-consciously. According to this no-class outlook, if only these individuals and groups could just be brought to see how bad things are with charter schools, if only they would seriously consider the vast evidence against charter schools, if only they could be properly persuaded of the ills of charter schools, then “better” ideas and policies could prevail. “Good” policy could then replace “bad” policy and everything would be better. Again, the fundamental relationship between politics and economics is highly undertheorized in this approach to charter schools.

    The fact of the matter is that despite being around for over 30 years, problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector, as well as the difficulties these problems have caused for public schools and the public interest, have not abated in any meaningful way. They have only multiplied. So far, no significant lasting pro-social changes in charter school regulations or laws have taken place. Charter schools keep proliferating and wreaking havoc. Scandal and controversy are ever-present. Those who believe that regulations and laws can be passed to restrain charter schools believe that a charter school can be something other than a charter school. Charter schools can supposedly be more like public schools, more accountable, more transparent, less profit oriented, less reckless, less unstable, and less corrupt.

    Such forces do not recognize the need new for completely new arrangements imbued with a public authority worthy of the name. They do not see existing political arrangements as irrelevant and obsolete. They overlook or trivialize the need for thorough-going change that favors the general interests of society. Because the antagonism between the neoliberal state and modern requirements is not properly grasped, they believe meaningful pro-social changes can be established through legislatures beholden to the rich. They think that the existing capital-centered political setup can somehow lend itself to ending serious problems caused by charter schools. This usually takes the form of begging or “pressuring” unaccountable politicians for years just for a few crumbs and changes—an exhausting and humiliating process that leaves many burnt out and cynical.

    It should be recalled that the first charter school law was established in Minnesota in 1991 and that the neoliberal period began in the U.S. in the early 1970s, well before Ronald Reagan became president in 1980. Charter schools, in other words, emerged firmly in the neoliberal period.

    Charter schools have always been a top-down scheme organized by the rich and their political representatives; they have never been a grass-roots phenomenon. It is not the case that charter schools once upon a time started out as a progressive, promising, benign, grass-roots phenomenon but were hijacked by major owners of capital along the way, causing them to become the crisis-prone schools that they are today; they were always a top-down coup of public schools. It is no accident that more than 95% of “innovative” charter schools are not started, owned, or operated mainly by teachers—or that 90% of charter schools have no teacher unions.

    In this sense, charter schools are one of many pay-the-rich schemes hatched by the rich and their political representatives under the gloss of high ideals in the context of a continually failing economy. They are a form of state-organized corruption to further enrich major owners of capital in a crisis-ridden economy. The inescapable law of the falling rate of profit constantly coerces major owners of capital to devise new schemes and arrangements to funnel more of the social product created by workers into private hands. This law endemic to capitalism operates with a vengeance and it is why privatization is proceeding rapidly in all sectors and spheres at home and abroad. Major owners of capital are relentlessly targeting every public service and enterprise on every continent.

    Obviously, the rich are not going to undermine or eliminate parasitic economic arrangements that help them maximize profits under difficult economic conditions, no matter how damaging this is to the social and natural environment. Their class position does not make them open to reason, logic, evidence, and persuasion. They are not interested in modern arrangements that serve the general interests of society. Objectively, their class will overrides their personal will. Their personal will is subordinated to their class will. Hence the rapid non-stop commodification of education through a variety of “school-choice” schemes over the past few decades. To be sure, privatization is not the result of “bad” ideas or “bad” policies emanating from confused but otherwise “smart” people; it is a direct response to the inescapable law of the falling rate of profit intrinsic to the capitalist economic system.

    It is better, healthier, and more effective for parents, students, teachers, education advocates, women, and workers to unite together to end the flow of all public funds and resources to charter schools than to try to “fix them.” This can be done through non-stop collective action with analysis. It can be achieved by making a clean break from the old way of thinking and doing things and by recognizing that the rich can be defeated when people unite and speak up in their own name.

    No one is under any obligation to tolerate any arrangements that violate the public interest, harm the economy, and undermine the national interest. Public funds, facilities, services, and resources belong only to the public, not narrow private interests masquerading as “saviors” of low-income minority youth.

    Minor legislative “wins” or crumbs here and there are not lending themselves to the kind of affirmation of rights being demanded by the people. The existing authority is only becoming more callous and violent with each passing day, which is why a new independent politics with a new aim is needed. People’s energies are better spent on this than begging and “pressuring” politicians for years for what rightfully belongs to them. A good example of how neoliberal politicians put people in a humiliating position and betray them is the case of charter schools in New York state. Several months ago it looked like politicians in both chambers of the New York state legislature were being responsive to public demands to not raise the limit on the number of charter schools allowed in New York City. But, in the end, neoliberal forces prevailed and a “compromise” (a sellout of the people) was reached to allow more than a dozen additional charter schools to operate in the city. This will further harm public schools while enriching wealthy individuals. People should take these lessons seriously and not view such things as an “acceptable compromise” or “tolerable partial win.” Clearly, a handful of neoliberals are still able to impose their anti-social will on the majority. Where is democracy?

    In this regard, an important front in the fight against school privatization is public school boards. In recent years, to their credit, hundreds of public school boards across the country have rejected charter school petition after charter school petition. (Most of these petitions, incidentally, are poorly-written, poorly-formulated, and full of basic writing mistakes.) Public schools and the boards that govern them are not naïve and understand the dangers that charter schools pose to public schools and the public interest. Parents, students, teachers, education advocates, women, and workers can join forces with these boards to further strengthen efforts to say no to charter schools and yes to public education. This starts with consciously tracking the efforts of public school boards opposing charter schools and connecting with them to forge relationships that promote a pro-social agenda that restricts and reverses the anti-social offensive of the rich. This is a two-way street: members of public school boards should also actively seek and forge relationships with all forces defending the public interest. Such unity can become formidable.

    In a broader and more general sense, it is important for people from all walks of life to engage in uninterrupted individual and collective investigation and discussion of privatization and its tragic effects on the general interests of society. Ignoring or dismissing such activity will only allow privatization to continue to take a heavy toll on everyone. It will make problems worse. In this regard, teachers, teacher educators, principals, superintendents, higher education workers, and others need to actively put investigation and discussion of privatization on the agenda. Privatization should not be relegated to a secondary issue or a backburner topic. There is a reason why the rich and their political and media representatives work so hard to promote disinformation and block analysis, coherence, investigation, and unity.

    Today about 3.7 million youth attend approximately 7,500 charter schools across the country. By contrast, about 45 million students attend the nation’s 100,000 public schools which originated in the U.S. 180 years ago.

    ENDNOTES

    1 See Charter Schools Are Not State Actors for a discussion of the many differences between public and private. It is also important to appreciate that, while the state has always been capital-centered, it is becoming more capital-centered over time, especially in the neoliberal period which started in the early 1970s. Neoliberal restructuring of the state has made the state even less public over the past 50 years.

    2 Extensive up-to-date evidence for all facts and statements in this article can be found in my articles at Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • North Carolina Strives To Extend and Increase Low-Performing Virtual Charter Schools

    Brick-and-mortar charter schools are notorious for being low-performing schools, even though they often cherry-pick their students to get the “best test results.” Poor academic performance is one of the three main reasons charter schools, which are privately-operated, close every week, leaving many parents, students, and teachers high and dry. Mismanagement and financial malfeasance are the other two key reasons charter schools close every few days. All three usually occur together. Not surprisingly, such chaos and anarchy leave a bad taste in the mouths of many.

    But virtual charter schools, also known as cyber charter schools, perform even worse than their brick-and-mortar charter school counterparts (see below). Indeed, virtual charter schools across the country have consistently abysmal academic results. They have developed quite the name for this disreputable profile. But some in North Carolina want to expand this failed neoliberal education model.

    House Bill 149, which was recently passed by the full House of the North Carolina legislature:

    would authorize charter schools to provide remote instruction to students when approved to include a remote charter academy. HB 149 would also provide a one-year extension to the expiring virtual charter school pilot and provide enrollment growth and funding in the same manner as other charter schools for the remainder of the pilot.

    This is odd because:

    The state’s two virtual charters have been low-performing since they began in 2015. Some lawmakers in a House education committee questioned why a bill under consideration would allow it to continue as a pilot for another year.

    Indeed, the state’s two cyber charter schools “have consistently been designated by the state as low-performing schools” (emphasis added). Representative Julie von Haefen stated, “I really don’t understand why we are continuing to extend this pilot program. Since 2016, these schools have received D ratings and have not met growth standards. I really don’t understand that. Can you explain that?”

    All of this makes even less sense when considering that, overall, seventy percent of North Carolina’s charter schools earned a “C” or lower recently. Nationally, 5,000 charter schools have failed and closed over the past 31 years—a very high number considering that there are only about 7,500 charter schools in the U.S. in 2023.

    House Bill 149 now goes to the Senate, where it may not pass. If it does pass, HB 149 would go into effect in the 2023-2024 school year. The legislative history and status of the bill can be found here.

    Besides being poor-performing schools, virtual charter schools are also typically even more scandalous and corrupt than brick-and-mortar charter schools. A long list of such scandals (along with the chronically-weak academic performance of cyber charter schools) can be found by searching the Diane Ravitch blog and many other sites.

    The move from brick-and-mortar charter schools to more virtual charter schools in recent years is a textbook example of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. It is a way of going from bad to worse, which is why many owners and operators of brick-and-mortar charter schools have expressed strong displeasure with the “virtual charter school folks.” The “virtual charter school folks” are giving a tarnished and problem-filled sector even more trouble, controversy, and scandal.

    It is important to remember that charter schools are “free market” schools that see parents and students as customers, consumers, and shoppers. Parents and students are not viewed as humans and citizens who have a right to a world-class education guaranteed in practice by a government that rests on real public power. In the chaotic world of charter schools, everyone has to fend for themselves like an animal as they compete against others for a “good education.” The “free market,” the law of the jungle, and social Darwinism are all at play here, along with a big dose of the ideology of individualism. “Buyer Beware” is the only protection parents and students have in this outmoded setup, and even then they are regularly betrayed. Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to charter schools.

    North Carolina has had a charter school law since 1996. Currently, more than 130,000 students are enrolled in 204 deregulated charter schools in North Carolina. The state currently funnels nearly one billion dollars from public schools to these outsourced schools operated by unelected private persons.

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  • No More Charter Schools in New York State

    Since 1998 charter schools in New York state have deprived under-funded public schools of billions of dollars and greatly enriched the private interests that operate these segregated schools.

    Not surprisingly, poor academic performance, regular school closings, corruption, scandal, and controversy have been the norm in the crisis-prone charter school sector in New York State for the past 25 years. It has been the norm nationwide for 32 years.

    As expected, promoters of these outsourced schools governed by unelected private persons remain relentless in their efforts to expand and multiply charter schools. There is just too much profit at stake for neoliberal forces to abandon school privatization.

    Like her predecessor, Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, supports funneling public school funds to more deregulated charter schools. When she presented her budget at the State Capitol in Albany on Wednesday, February 1, 2023, Hochul announced that she will eliminate the limit on the number of charter schools allowed to open in New York City.

    This means that, “An estimated 100 additional charters could be up for grabs citywide as a result of the proposal, though Hochul would keep a statewide cap at 460 operators. Roughly 275 charter schools currently operate in NYC.” Approximately 360 charter schools are currently open and operating statewide.

    Charter school promoters in New York City and their media representatives like the New York Post and even the New York Times, have been hankering for years from more charter schools in the City. They have been relentless in their quest to seize as much public funds and property as possible. They continually use their enormous wealth, power, and privilege to influence key decision-makers at all levels of government to fulfill their narrow aims. They do not care about the public interest and hide behind the veneer of high ideals to conceal their self-serving interests.

    Not surprisingly dozens of legislators and many public school advocates have come out in opposition to such privatization. The public does not benefit from raising the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to operate in New York City, especially since there is evidence that enrollment numbers and enrollment targets are actually declining in New York City charter schools.

    The public increasingly sees these oversold schools as nothing more than pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “the last best hope for low-income minority kids.” In reality, charter schools close every week across the country, leaving many parents, students, and teachers out in the cold. So much for “free market” education.

    Education in a modern society must not be commodified. It must not be commercialized and handed over to private interests intent on maximizing profit. Education is not a business. The profit motive has no place in modern education. Cashing in on kids is not a good model for education.

    Education in a modern society based on mass industrial production is a collective human responsibility, without which society could not move forward. Such a massive and critical enterprise cannot be left to chance, it cannot be left to the law of the jungle or a survival-of-the fittest ethos. The “invisible hand” is not pro-social; it ensures winners and losers. Such outmoded arrangements only ensure greater chaos, anarchy, and violence in education—something the public does not need and the economy does not benefit from. Indeed, with even more charter schools in New York City problems will only multiply for all schools, including charter schools themselves. Competition lowers quality for everyone, not the other way around.

    All should unite in opposition to more charter schools in New York State (especially New York City) and defend the right to education. Public school funds belong to public schools, not schools that claim to be public but are in fact privatized and marketized schools that strive to maximize profit at the expense of kids.

    More charter schools in New York City and beyond will not benefit education, society, the economy, or the national interest in any way. Privatization of vital social programs injures society while concentrating more public wealth in fewer private hands, increasing instability, and lowering quality.

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  • Low Enrollment Plagues Many Charter Schools

    The mainstream media has long made it seem like parents from coast to coast are frantically clamoring to get their kids into a “limited” number of charter schools. And because there is supposedly not enough space in these charter schools, students are put on a waiting list to get into the school.

    This neoliberal disinformation is meant to reinforce the prejudice that public schools are “dreadful,” that they must be escaped at all costs, that only charter schools can save the day, and that the number of charter schools in the country should increase immediately to accommodate more kids.

    The neoliberal “waiting list” disinformation also pressures parents and others to ignore the fact that charter schools close every week, are mired in scandal every day, and have fewer experienced teachers and fewer nurses than public schools. Many charter schools, moreover, do not provide transportation for students or offer the range of programs found in most public schools. It is no surprise that these schools governed by unelected private persons have high student, teacher, and principal turnover rates (see here and here).

    The National Center for Education Policy has produced work showing that national waitlist numbers at charter schools are greatly exaggerated, unreliable, and self-serving. Additional factual information about inflated waitlists and problematic enrollment practices in charter schools can be found at the Diane Ravitch Blog, which is visited millions of times a year.

    The fact is that many charter schools struggle to meet their enrollment goals, exposing the long-standing chasm between reality and media disinformation about the popularity of these outsourced schools. Many charter schools have no waiting lists at all.

    Some examples:

    WWLP News in Massachusetts reported on January 19, 2023 that The Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Chicopee, Massachusetts will be closing in summer 2023 due to low enrollment and poor financial conditions.

    On January 12, 2023, the Denver Post reported that, “The Denver school board hasn’t voted to close a charter school since 2011, though more than a dozen [charter schools] have surrendered their charters voluntarily over the past decade, often because of low enrollment.”

    A November 17, 2022 article in Chalkbeat reports that, “After months of controversy surrounding Urban Prep Academy, the Illinois board of education ended the charter school’s agreement for its downtown campus Thursday, citing enrollment declines.”

    According to a September 24, 2022 article in the Tallahassee Democrat (Florida), “Red Hills Academy cited low enrollment and processing issues as reasons for shuttering just weeks after its grand opening. The last day of school will be Sept. 30 [2022].” Indeed, “The school needed [only] 90 students to pay expenses but only had 30 enrolled.”

    On October 11, 2022, the Times Record of Maine informed the public that the Maine Charter School Commission denied renewal of the contract for Harpswell Coastal Academy, “citing low enrollment numbers, high chronic absenteeism rates and an unstable financial structure, among other concerns that have persisted over several years.”

    On August 24, 2022, the Charleston Gazette-Mail [West Virginia] carried the following headline: “WV Online Charter Schools Far Below Enrollment Projections.”

    A January 4, 2022 article in The Lens states that:

    IDEA Oscar Dunn charter school, which opened in New Orleans [Louisiana] less than three years ago, will close at the end of the 2021-2022 school year in May amid declining student enrollment citywide, according to an announcement from the NOLA Public Schools district.

    The school is the second NOLA Public Schools district charter school this week that officials have said will close due to low enrollment. On Monday, FirstLine Schools announced it would close Live Oak Academy. Both announcements come weeks after a study showed the city’s schools enroll about 47,000 students but have roughly 3,000 open seats.

    Nearly all schools in New Orleans are privately-operated charter schools, leaving parents and kids with few real schooling choices.

    On May 25, 2021, KUTV2 News in Utah reported that:

    Beyond the Books has discovered that the number of students signing up at Utah charters schools has decreased for the first time in almost a decade. In addition some charter schools are facing re-enrollment issues. A review of retention rates at Utah’s 130 charter schools reveals that in the most recent year, 25% of the schools have seen their ability to keep students enrolled have dropped to concerning levels.

    The Ithaca Journal [New York] reported on December 30, 2019 that, “During a charter schools committee meeting, the SUNY Board of Trustees voted to place New Roots Charter School on probation because of fiscal mismanagement, low enrollment, and the admission of students outside the acceptable grade range.”

    On April 19, 2018 the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that two charter schools, DuBois High School of Leadership and Public Policy and the DuBois High School of Arts and Technology, will close due to low enrollment and other problems often found in charter schools. The schools were run by Willie Herenton, the former Memphis mayor and Memphis City Schools superintendent.

    A June 2, 2016 piece from Idaho Ed News lists three different charter schools that closed due to low enrollment.

    Many other examples can be given. Experience shows and research confirms that education and society do not need “innovative” charter schools, let alone more “innovative” charter schools. Besides the long-standing problems listed above, such unaccountable schools increase segregation and harm public schools and the public interest. The academic, management, and fiscal track record of charter schools, especially cyber charter schools, is very poor on the whole.1

    Not only do serious problems persist in the privatized charter school sector decade after decade, many are actually increasing and becoming more scandalous. The public cannot afford to have billions of dollars squandered every day on pay-the-rich schemes like charter schools. This money rightly belongs to public schools and should stay in public hands instead of being funneled to narrow private interests under the banner of high ideals.

    1. Factual descriptive information on the various problems in the charter school sector can found by searching for “Shawgi Tell” at Dissident Voice.
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  • Another Charter School Abandons Parents, Students, and Teachers

    Charter schools close every week, leaving many parents, students, and teachers out in the cold. Even worse, these “free market” schools governed by unelected private persons often close with no warning to anyone, leaving everyone blindsided.

    Charter schools typically close for poor academic performance, corruption, or mismanagement, and it is common for all three to occur simultaneously.

    The average person often wonders how such a thing is possible and allowed to happen in the first place. How can there be so many outsourced schools that open and close regularly? Why is such chaos and anarchy permitted? Who thinks this is positive and healthy?

    The latest charter school to close abruptly and leave everyone stunned is Placer Academy Charter School in Rocklin, California. No one saw the closure coming. The disturbing announcement from the school came out of nowhere. “The abrupt closure plans leave the families of more than 200 students wondering where to turn on such short notice,” reports KCRA Channel 3. Echoing the sentiments of other parents who were stunned by the surprise announcement, one parent, Wendy Jenkins, said, “I could not believe it was real and I started to cry. We just kept reading it [the sudden closure notice] and reading it over – hoping we weren’t reading what we were seeing … the school was closing, and we were only going to have four days to find another fit.”

    In the coming weeks and months, more charter schools will fail and close across the country, leaving even more parents, students, and teachers feeling violated. This pattern has not changed in over 30 years.

    Nationally, a lengthy 2020 report from the Network for Public Education (NPE), “Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999 – 2017,” showed that a staggering number of charter schools closed just a few years after they opened, displacing more than a million students. The real numbers are higher. Indeed, 5,000 charter schools have closed since their inception 31 years ago. That is an astounding number given that there are only 7,500 charter schools in existence today. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 235 charter schools closed just in the 2019-20 academic year. On average that is more than four charter school closures per week. A textbook example of “free market carnage.”

    Most of the students cast off by these segregated schools will return to their public schools, which accepts all students at all times and usually has more nurses, more experienced teachers, better employee retirement plans, stronger programs, and more resources than deregulated charter schools. Even in their chronically-underfunded condition, heavily-vilified public schools generally offer more than charter schools.

    So far, the neoliberal narrative that “public-schools-are-failing-and-evil-and-you-need-to-get-your-kid-into-a-privately-run-charter-school-immediately” has resulted mainly in greater profits for charter school owners, while lowering the level of education and culture in society. By funneling public wealth into the hands of narrow private interests, charter schools have also harmed the economy and undermined a modern nation-building project.

    People reject the idea that the only choices available to them are public schools methodically set up to fail by neoliberals, or privately-run deregulated charter schools created by the same neoliberals in order to get richer under the banner of high ideals. The public rejects this false dichotomy and condemns neoliberals for their destructive actions.

    All should unite to oppose the commodification of education and to defend the right to education so that every child has free and easy access to world-class, publicly-governed public schools.

    The post Another Charter School Abandons Parents, Students, and Teachers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • New Hampshire: 8 Out Of 10 Failing High Schools Are Charter Schools

    Low-performing charter schools in the U.S. are nothing new, they are everywhere. Recently, for example, 25% of charter schools in Duval County, Florida received a D or F, while 70% of North Carolina’s 200+ charter schools received a C or lower. In addition, more than 50% of the 65 charter schools in New Orleans are D and F schools. This has been a common pattern across the country for decades. These numbers are especially significant given the discriminatory enrollment practices found in many charter schools.

    Recently, a New Hampshire newspaper reported that 8 out of the 10 lowest-performing high schools in the state are charter schools. These are deregulated, deunionized, segregated, low-transparency schools governed by unelected private persons. They are often sold as schools that will save kids that could not be saved by their “dreadful” public schools. Clearly, though, leaving public schools set up to fail by neoliberals only to enroll in outsourced contract schools set up by the same neoliberals is not benefitting education and society. Both the public schools set up to fail by neoliberals and the charter schools created by neoliberals are leaving millions of youth behind. Private interests are the only ones gaining from such an antisocial set-up. It is imperative to keep neoliberals and privatizers out of education and other spheres of life.

    New Hampshire passed its charter school legislation in 1995 and currently has about 4,500 students enrolled in fewer than 40 charter schools operated by unelected private persons. The schools operate by siphoning millions of dollars a year from under-funded public schools. New Hampshire, moreover, allows about 50% of charter school teachers to teach without certification. The state places no limit on the number of charter schools allowed in the state, which means more charter schools will further deplete public funds from public schools. In addition, New Hampshire has no sanctions in place for charter school authorizers should they fail to carry out their responsibilities. And like charter schools in other states, charter schools in New Hampshire are deregulated and exempt from many public standards, rules, and laws upheld by public schools. They are also allowed to enter into arrangements with for-profit entities.

    The post New Hampshire: 8 Out Of 10 Failing High Schools Are Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Outlaw Charter Schools: Can A Charter School Not Be A Charter School?

    The Online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “outlaw” as:

    • to remove from legal jurisdiction or enforcement
    • to deprive of the benefit and protection of law
    • a lawless person or a fugitive from the law
    • an animal (such as a horse) that is wild and unmanageable

    Over the years much has been written about the chronic absence of accountability, oversight, transparency, rules, and regulations for charter schools. The record shows that these deunionized, deregulated, outsourced, oversold schools run by unelected private persons on the basis of “free market” ideology routinely operate with impunity. The failure rate of these segregated schools is staggering.

    Many have wondered for decades why, in practice, charter schools do not uphold even weak rules and laws here and there. Why do they evade or superficially uphold many federal laws that are supposed to apply to them? Why are accountability and transparency so hard to come by in the crisis-prone charter school sector? After 31 years, how are charter school operators frequently able to dodge many basic standards and requirements of modern life, institutions, and organizations? How can charter schools be so anarchic and unmanageable decades after they first appeared?

    Given this long-standing chaos, it is no surprise that charter schools, which barely make up seven percent of all schools in the country, are constantly mired in scandal, corruption, and fraud. Indeed, an arrest of a charter school employee is made nearly every week in the charter school sector. The news is regularly filled with sensational announcements of different crimes committed by charter school owners, operators, and employees.

    Charter schools also regularly exclude different types of students and have fewer nurses than public schools. Many do not even require teachers to be certified or licensed to teach. In addition, teachers in public schools are generally paid more and tend to have better retirement plans than charter school teachers. Not surprisingly, the teacher turnover rate in charter schools is very high. So is the student and principal turnover rate. None of this helps continuity, stability, and collegiality.

    On top of this, extensive information about widespread poor academic performance in cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools is now available in many places. Poor academic performance is one of several reasons charter schools close every week, leaving many minority families feeling violated. Financial malfeasance and mismanagement are the two other most common reasons charter schools close regularly.

    The main reason why charter schools are such anarchic and unmanageable schools is that they are set up under the law to be that way. The nation’s 7,500 charter schools are deregulated schools by design. They are purposely exempt from most public laws, rules, regulations, and standards upheld by public schools.

    Charter schools are “free market” schools and do not operate like public schools. This is why they differ from public schools in legal, philosophical, and organizational ways. It is why, unlike public schools, charter schools treat parents and students as customers and consumers, not citizens and humans with definite rights. This “autonomy” and entire set-up are deliberate and intentional. This rules-free arrangement is not a fluke, some annoying oversight, or a silly mistake. This “autonomy” is the “independence” that these “innovative” schools run by unelected private persons need in order to “do as they please” under the banner of high ideals.

    To be clear, the absence of meaningful supervision, regulation, and accountability is a built-in feature of charter schools, a salient feature of charter schools, not a bug or mishap. It is intrinsic to the charter school model and not the result of shaky thinking, poor implementation, or “unintentional outcomes.” Contrary to what charter school advocates like to claim, accountability and transparency are not at the core of charter schools. Clarity and conviction on this issue are critical.

    Charter schools are not set up to be regulated, accountable, transparent, and stable in the sense of what people normally understand these terms to mean.

    “Free market” accountability is not really accountability. Chaos, anarchy, and violence are the main features of the “free market.” The fact is that there can be no justice in a fend-for-yourself dog-eat-dog world. Survival-of-the-fittest is brutal and guarantees winners and losers. Equilibrium, stability, and security are rare in an economic set-up based on competition and profit maximization. Every day, we hear financial pundits use terms like “uncertainty,” “volatility,” and “instability” to correctly describe the “free market.” Conditions are so chaotic and anarchic in the “free market” that one of the most common refrains made by such pundits is, “well, of course, at the end of the day you can’t really predict what the markets will do; anything can happen.” This is true, but is it any way for modern humans to live today? Why should anyone live in a state of constant insecurity, instability, chaos, and anxiety centuries after the scientific and technical revolution made it possible to easily meet the needs of all several times over? This includes providing a free world-class public education under public control—free of narrow private interests—to everyone.

    Trying to regulate or oversee something that is by design not really meant to have meaningful supervision and regulation would mean radically changing the laws and practices surrounding charter schools. It would mean doing the opposite of what we have today. It would entail making charter schools something they are not.

    But can a charter school not be a charter school?

    Can a charter school suddenly stop being privatized and become public like a public school? Can it become its opposite? Can it stop being a performance-based contract school? Can a charter school even be called a charter school if it acquires all the features of a public school? Can it become a state actor like a regular public school? Can it be governed by elected officials and have the power to levy taxes like public schools? Can charter schools be audited as normally, frequently, and effortlessly as public schools? Can charter schools allow teachers in their schools to be unionized even though about 90% are currently not unionized? Can charter schools stop treating teachers as “at-will” employees? Can a charter school become an entity that affirms the civil rights and other rights of students in practice? Can neoliberal governments eradicate the powerful private interests that own, operate, and promote charter schools? Can capital-centered governments end the commodification of education? Do the rich have any incentive to terminate unaccountable and unmanageable schools run by unelected private persons? Can the rich abandon the profit motive?

    Charter schools differ profoundly from public schools by design, and these differences appear at many levels and in many forms.1 One of the original neoliberal justifications given for charter schools is that they could come into existence once public school districts, which have been around for more than 150 years, are deprived of what charter school advocate Ted Kolderie called their “exclusive franchise to own and operate public schools.” Once this historic pre-condition for privatization happened, Kolderie reasoned, a new and different “system” of schools—outsourced schools—owned and operated by unelected private persons and large corporations could come into being.

    It is no accident that charter schools emerged firmly in the context of the neoliberal era that was launched at home and abroad in the late 1970s. Neoliberalism is at its core a major assault on the public interest and human rights. It further marginalizes the polity and ensures that the rich get richer even faster, thereby intensifying political and economic inequality.

    The fact that the number of charter schools continues to steadily increase nationwide does not mean that there is any justification for their existence, it just means that neoliberals and their entourage are able to impose their narrow private will on the public will. It means that the public has not yet developed sufficient resistance to stop school privatization. Nonetheless, the justification for charter schools remains as weak today as it did when the charter school idea was first hatched by neoliberal forces more than 35 years ago. Charter schools did not originate with grass-roots forces, which is why they violate the public interest, undermine public education, and harm the economy and national interest.

    Just as all the campaign finance reform laws in the world have not changed the corrupting influence of (massive amounts of) money in elections and just as inequality is guaranteed under capitalism, it is impossible for a charter school to not be a charter school. The rich are not going to eliminate arrangements that they have intentionally and methodically established for their benefit. They will always seek new sources of profit, and for the past 40 years the public sector has been a main target of major owners of capital.

    It is wishful thinking to believe that a charter school can be something other than a charter school. Such an orientation blocks deeper thinking and deeper changes that are needed. The fact is that small or piecemeal changes to charter schools in different states have not slowed the expansion of charter schools and the myriad problems that accompany them. Problems continue to multiply in the charter school sector. The news is filled every day with reports of illegal and unethical activities in privately-operated charter schools. In this way, charter schools express the replacement of a government of laws with a government of police powers, which is a coercive non-democratic form of governance which rejects modern public standards, principles, laws, and rules. Police powers permeate U.S. political institutions and operate arbitrarily and with impunity.

    As they have for the last 31 years, charter schools will continue to undermine public schools by siphoning billions of dollars a year from them. They will also continue to perform poorly, engage in outlaw activities, and close every week, leaving thousands of black and brown families feeling abandoned and angry. So much for a superior alternative to “dreadful” public schools—the same “dreadful” public schools that have been methodically set up to fail by neoliberals and privatizers for years. The general neoliberal playbook strategy here goes like this: starve public schools of funds year after year. Then impose tons of high-stakes standardized tests on them to “show” that they are “failing.” Then humiliate and degrade them repeatedly in order to generate antisocial public opinion against them. And finally, punish and privatize them, only to replace them with many failing charter schools that enrich a handful of people at the expense of low-income minority students.

    What is needed today is a robust movement based on the principle that education is a right, not a commodity, not a business, not a consumer good, and not something that should be left to chance and the “free market” in a modern society. To treat parents and students as consumers and to make them fend-for-themselves in order to get a good education is inconsistent with modern demands, requirements, and possibilities.

    If charter schools wish to exist, that is fine so long as they receive zero public funds, services, facilities, and resources because these belong legitimately and entirely to public schools. A school does not become public just because it is called public 50 times a day. Nor does it become public just because it receives public funds. Being public requires and means more. Private interests have no valid claim to public funds, services, facilities, and resources. The producers of wealth in society do not want their wealth handed over to non-public entities, especially unaccountable and lawless non-public entities plagued by corruption, fraud, and scandal. Public funds, services, facilities, and resources—and public authority—must remain in public hands at all times.

    1. For extensive background facts and analysis about dozens of different aspects of the charter school sector, search for “Shawgi Tell” here.
    The post Outlaw Charter Schools: Can A Charter School Not Be A Charter School? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Seventy Percent of North Carolina’s Charter Schools Earned a “C” or Lower

    Privately-operated charter schools in the United States have a long record of failure. They have been over-promising and under-delivering for decades. Over the years, many people, especially low-income minority parents living in urban settings, have been led to believe that outsourced schools operated by unelected private persons or large for-profit corporations are vastly superior to the “dreadful” public schools they currently attend—public schools which, for decades, have been methodically starved of funds, over-tested, vilified, punished, and set up to fail so as to be privatized by neoliberals obsessed with maximizing profit as fast as possible. Neoliberals have never stopped trying to conceal their direct role in setting up public schools to fail so as to be privatized. But No Matter What the Charter School Movement Says, Parents Like Their Public Schools (October 5, 2022).

    Some of the most recent data on charter school performance shows that 70% of charter schools in North Carolina earned a “C” or lower. Specifically:

    65 – earned a C

    59 – earned a D

    19 – earned an F

    TOTAL: 143

    This new information is from the state’s school accountability data from 2020-21 and is provided by NC Policy Watch.

    NC Policy Watch also points out that 76 privately-operated charter schools (38%) in North Carolina “did not meet academic growth goals.” In addition, there are 35 “low-performing charter schools that are considered continually low-performing.”

    Many charter schools in North Carolina and the rest of the country will continue to fail and close in the coming years. Indeed, thousands of charter schools have failed and closed over the past 31 years, leaving many low-income minority families feeling violated. The three most common reasons charter schools close every week are financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance.

    Unlike neoliberals and privatizers, the public wants to stop the flow of all public funds and resources to all charter schools because they fail frequently, are constantly mired in corruption, violate the public interest, and undermine public schools. School privatization also harms the economy and the national interest.

    Approximately 3.4 million students are enrolled in about 7,500 privately-operated charter schools across the country. Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont are the only states with no charter school legislation. The nation’s first charter school law was passed in Minnesota in 1991. North Carolina has had a charter school law since 1996. Currently, more than 130,000 students are enrolled in 204 deregulated charter schools in North Carolina. The state currently funnels nearly one billion dollars from public schools to these outsourced schools operated by unelected private persons.

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  • “Free-Market” Education Is Ineffective and Discredited

    Education and other public services and social programs have been under attack by major owners of capital and “free market” ideologues for several decades. To be sure, the privatization of all spheres and sectors continues at a brisk rate at home and abroad. Public-private “partnerships” and other pay-the-rich schemes carried out under the veneer of high ideals are multiplying rapidly and intensifying problems everywhere. Few countries are unaffected.

    Charter schools and vouchers are the two main forms of privatization in the sphere of American education. Both have wreaked havoc on public education and the public interest for decades. Together they have lowered the level of culture and education, misled parents and the public, greatly enriched a handful of people along the way, and damaged the economy. These privatized education arrangements have not served the national interest in any way.

    Extensive information and analysis of school privatization in its various forms can be found in many places, including at the Network for Public Education, Tultican, In The Public Interest, Common Dreams, and Truthout. Hundreds of scholarly peer-reviewed articles and books also expose many serious problems with school privatization.

    The main theory behind the privatization and deregulation of public education is “free-market” theory, which maintains that treating education as a commodity, as a business, as an exchange phenomenon in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone fends-for-themselves, is the best of all worlds and the most effective, civilized, and fair way to save children, the economy, society, and the nation.

    “Free-market” theory openly promotes a survival-of-the-fittest ethos for schools, families, and individuals, which ends up consolidating inequality and reinforcing a system of winners and losers. In practice, “school choice” leaves many children and families behind. In this connection, it is important to appreciate the segregationist origins of “school choice”.

    Such a dog-eat-dog system is anachronistic and negates arrangements based on the affirmation of basic human rights that belong to all by virtue of being human. In the “free market” you may end up in a great school or you may not, which is often the case. It is on you alone to find a school that serves the needs of your children, and to do so in an environment that is increasingly complex and confusing. And “buyer beware” because when your school closes, often without warning, there is no way to secure redress. You have to live and die by the “free market.” Nothing is guaranteed.

    Indeed, privately-operated charter schools close every week, leaving many low-income black and brown families feeling violated. A recent example of this disaster comes from Philadelphia (August 26, 2022) where a news headline reads: Families left scrambling after 2 Philadelphia charter schools announce closure days before start of school. Many Philly families say that they are shocked and at a loss for what to do. Another recent example (September 24, 2022) comes from Florida: ‘Devastated’: Weeks after opening, Red Hills Academy charter school set to close. Financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance are the three most common reasons privately-operated charter schools close every week.

    Such upheavals and chaos are common in the crisis-prone charter school sector. They are a salient feature, not just a bug, of charter school arrangements. In some cases parents receive only a short cold email from charter school operators informing them that their charter school is closing abruptly—and at the worst possible time. It is an irresponsible approach to education in a modern society. And with no sense of irony, “free market” ideologues present such “churn” and disorder as a good and normal thing, as the way things are supposed to be.

    Charter schools now have a 31-year record of failure, corruption, fraud, controversy, scandal, and closure. So do vouchers. Poor accountability and low transparency are hallmarks of the crisis-prone charter school sector. However, none of this has stopped charter school promoters from working tirelessly to oversell and prettify charter schools. Charter schools have become notorious for over-promising and under-delivering. Intense advertising and marketing are central to this business-centric drive. The nation’s 100,000 public schools, on the other hand, spend nothing on advertising and marketing because they are not businesses or promoters of consumerism, competition, and the “law of the jungle.” They do not view students and parents as customers shopping for a school. Education is not seen as a commodity or as something provided to society by private interests obsessed with maximizing profit as fast as possible.

    “Free-market” theory does not recognize education as a modern human social responsibility. It does not view education as a collective responsibility in the 21st century. It does not consider education to be a basic human right that government must guarantee in practice. It does not accept that public schools in a society based on mass industrial production need to be universal, well-organized, world-class, fully-funded, integrated, locally-controlled by elected individuals accountable to the public, and available for free in every neighborhood.

    Education in a complex society such as ours cannot be left to chance and a fend-for-yourself outlook. Such an orientation is at odds with contemporary conditions and requirements. The “law of the jungle” is not fit for human beings. For centuries, humans have needed and wanted a society fit for all, not a society for “the fittest.”

    If private schools wish to exist—and thousands do in America—that is perfectly fine. They simply should not have access to any public funds, assets, facilities, services, or resources because these belong legitimately and wholly to the public alone and no one else. Only schools that are public in the proper sense of the word should receive public funds. Calling charter schools “public” 50 times a day does not automatically make charter schools public. Over the years courts in many jurisdictions have even ruled that charter schools are not public schools. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not state agencies. There is ultimately no justification for funneling public wealth to deregulated charter schools run by unelected private persons. The private sector has no valid or legitimate claim to public funds and resources produced by working people.

    Public and private are antonyms and should not be mixed up. They are different categories with distinct characteristics. The public sphere and the private domain have different features and embrace different aims, roles, and agendas, which is why they cannot be reconciled. They are also governed by different laws. The rich and their representatives continually blur the critical distinction between these different realms for self-serving reasons. For example, if they can get away with calling privately-operated deregulated charter schools “public schools,” then they can lay false claim to public funds and resources, which is really nothing more than private parasitic expropriation of public property under the banner of high ideals. Such self-serving claims make the rich richer while wrecking public education and the public interest.

    According to “free market” theory, anything other than “free-market” arrangements leads to “special interests,” “politics,” “inefficiency,” “economic distortions,” “government tyranny,” and more. Government is typically the bogeyman in “free market” theory. Government is automatically and permanently evil in “free market” theory, which is ironic because government today actively imposes the neoliberal outlook and agenda of the rich on everyone and everything, leading to greater inequalities and tragedies at all levels. Like the welfare state, the neoliberal state ensures that the rich keep getting much richer. This is all consistent with the theory of private property expounded by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. They argued that government’s main role is to protect private property rights, which means, among other things, prioritizing individualism over the general interests of society. To be sure, states and governments intervene regularly in the “free market” to privilege big business. The rich seem to have no issues or concerns when government guarantees them even more benefits denied to others. The rich, in reality, do not like to live and die by the “free market.” They want the state and government to guarantee them profit at all times, regardless of how damaging this is to the natural and social environment.

    Private property, it should be recalled, means that only one individual can use said property. All others are excluded from use of said property; the legal individual owner has the exclusive right to use it as he or she sees fit and no one else is allowed to benefit from this property. Private property is about exclusion.1

    Further, any notion of consciously planning an economy to secure stability, sustainability, and growth for all is rashly rejected as irrational by “free market” ideologues. They maintain that it is absurd and impossible to plan for the needs of all humans in a deliberate and conscious way that ensures that all parts of the economy operate in a harmonious pro-social manner. “Things are too complex or too big to be controlled or planned” say “free market” ideologues. In this way, uncertainty, chaos, instability, individualism, consumerism, and a fend-for-yourself lifestyle are normalized.

    According to “free market” ideologues, if everything were just left to the “free market” we would supposedly have the best of all worlds where “the best and brightest,” “the winners,” and “the most meritorious” would rise to the top, lead, and make everything better for everyone. Talent, ability, and initiative would be properly rewarded, according to “free market” theory. All the chips would land fairly and correctly in their proper place if everyone just played by the rules of “free market” theory. “Free market” ideologues claim that everything would be high quality if we just upheld “free market” ideas.

    This ahistorical and apolitical approach ignores 50 things, including the unequal distribution and control of economic and political power in a class-divided society, that is, who is already-advantaged and who is already-disadvantaged. It ignores inherited wealth, unequal access to information, differing levels of literacy, uneven cultural capital, the exploitation of workers by owners of capital, and much more. The game, as they say, is already rigged, which is why “might makes right” and “winner takes all” prevail in the “free market.” After all, since “not everyone can be excellent” in the “free market,” then not everyone can be “a winner.” Only the “fittest survive” in this obsolete set-up. Many have to fail. Put differently, competition in the “free market” is already heavily pre-conditioned by economic and other considerations.

    Mountain States Policy Center

    The newest entity to enter the “free market education” foray is a “nonprofit” group called the Mountain States Policy Center. According to Idaho Ed News, the Mountain States Policy Center:

    advertises itself as a nonpartisan research group. Its goal is to promote the free market, individual liberty and limited government in Washington, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.

    We are also told that, “Education is one of the group’s top concerns.” Indeed, “school choice” is the group’s “top education priority,” which means more school privatization (e.g., charter schools and vouchers).

    The group is led by committed long-standing “free market” ideologues and claims to be “above” politics and rhetoric, even though it is heavily involved in both. Chris Cargill is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Mountain States Policy Center. He “spent the last 13 years with the Washington Policy Center, a similar free-market think tank headquartered in Seattle.”

    In an ideological sleight of hand, the Mountain States Policy Center explicitly equates the “free market’ with “the people.” This is a particularly dark form of disinformation because the “free market” and “the people” are not the same. They are different categories with different qualities. The “free market” is the way commodities are exchanged in a society based on individualism, commodity production, exchange relations, and private property. It is a set-up based on profit-maximization, not one based on meeting social needs. This is why there are six vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. The people, on the other hand, refers to the modern polity made up of citizens with equal rights and duties. There is no necessary or automatic connection between the “free market” and “the people.”

    People have lived and worked in many periods that did not have a “free market.” Entrepreneurialism, for instance, did not exist in most economic formations; it is specific to capitalism and serves as a euphemism for “rugged individualism,” fend-for-yourself, and survival-of-the-fittest. Promoters of entrepreneurialism also try to equate it with “innovation.” It should also be noted that the concept of “the people” did not exist in periods prior to the rise of capitalism. Under slavery and feudalism many humans were not even part of “the people.”

    The “free market,” it should be stressed, rests on instability, uncertainty, chaos, anarchy, competition, consumerism, possessive individualism, and private property. It fosters turmoil (“creative destruction”) and blocks the rise of a self-reliant, diverse, and balanced economy whose parts work together in harmony to meet the needs of all. Humans, however, do not need or want instability, uncertainty, and insecurity in the 21st century. People in a modern society based on mass industrial production need and want a society that ensures stability, peace, security, and prosperity for all on a planned, conscious, sustainable basis. Constantly lurching from one economic crisis to another is inhumane and avoidable.

    The aim of conflating the “free market” with “the people” is designed to make it seem like the “free market” is somehow pro-social and human-centered when, in fact, it stresses possessive individualism and denies the existence of society and the social relationship between individuals. “Free market” theory does not see individuals as social beings but rather as self-interested, disconnected, isolated (“independent”) beings that just want to be left alone while they “make their way” in this dog-eat-dog world that perpetuates many inequalities and tragedies. The “free market” essentially ignores social responsibility and lionizes individualism and individual responsibility. It has no dialectical conception of the relationship between individuals and society.

    The Mountain States Policy Center also creates a false dichotomy between government and “the people.” This is done in an attempt to de-link “the people” from the government, even though no civilized society can exist without government. Such disinformation is meant to foster the idea that government is not and cannot be an arrangement that actually represents and serves people. Indeed, government is seen as a big nuisance. “People” for “free market” ideologues really means capitalists, entrepreneurs, business people, stakeholders, and consumers. It does not mean humans and citizens with rights that belong to them by virtue of their being and which must be upheld by a modern government. “Free market” ideologues never distinguish between a human-centered government versus a capital-centered government. They do not recognize that a government that upholds a public authority worthy of the name differs from a government that puts the narrow interests of big business in first place all the time.

    The neoliberal character of the Mountain States Policy Center comes out again in this statement: “We believe that parents should have the right to use the dollars that they put into the public school system to educate their children as best as they see fit.” This is one of many versions of the worn-out neoliberal disinformation to funnel public money into private hands. The statement combines “parents” and “choice” in a way that makes it seem like the Mountain States Policy Center is simply defending some sort of benign choice and rights, when they are really promoting consumerism, individualism, a fend-for-yourself mentality, and the commodification of education. It also ignores the fact that public school funds do not belong to parents or students, per se. Public school funds are not “portable” and free for any individual to use as they wish whenever and wherever they want. This is not the premise, purpose, and function of public school money in the U.S.

    It is worth recalling that charter means contract, that contracts are part of private law, and that charter schools are contract schools. Contracts are the quintessential market category; they make markets ‘work’. Contracts are the expression of exchange relations in a society based on commodity production and the social division of labor and private property underlying such an economy. Individualism, competition, utilitarianism, and consumerism are the companion ideologies of such an outdated set-up. The link between private property and charter schools cannot be overlooked, especially because such a connection negates the oft-repeated irrational claim that charter schools are public schools. In practice, the concept and practice of charter schools forsakes public control and benefit. This is why charter schools are not, in fact, open to all students and do cherry-pick their students using many different methods.

    Further, like private businesses, charter schools treat teachers as “at-will” employees, which means that they can be hired and fired at any time for any reason. In addition, many states allow charter school teachers to teach without a license or certificate. This is on top of the fact that charter school teachers, on average, are paid less, are less experienced, and work longer days and years than their public school counterparts.

    Moreover, widespread fraud and corruption are perhaps the most striking features of cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools. Not a day goes by where there is not some sort of scandal, crime, or controversy in the charter school sector. Arrests, indictments, and incarceration of charter school employees are commonplace.

    Charter school owners and operators are also known for manipulating student waiting list numbers to create the illusion that most, or all, charter schools have long student waiting lists, which is supposed to “prove” and signal to the public that charter schools are popular and a superior alternative to the public schools that educate 90% of America’s youth. Apparently, parents and students are clamoring to escape “dreadful” public schools as fast as possible, just to get into a privately-operated, deregulated, segregated charter school governed by unelected private persons focused on the bottom line. In reality, countless charter schools manipulate their waiting lists and many cannot meet their own enrollment targets. This is besides the never-ending problem of high student (and teacher and principal) turnover rates in charter schools. Every week, many students are pushed out of charter schools in one way or another and dumped back into the “dreadful” public schools that accept all students at all times. But, as researcher Jeff Bryant notes, No Matter What the Charter School Movement Says, Parents Like Their Public Schools (October 5, 2022).

    The list of problems plaguing the charter school sector, along with the damage that this sector is doing to education, society, the economy, and the national interest is lengthy, damning, and indicting.

    Today, a robust and growing body of unassailable evidence documents many serious problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector. This has had the effect of steadily and methodically strengthening the ideological, theoretical, educational, and political battle against neoliberal educational ideas, policies, and arrangements.

    After two generations of failure and scandal, privatizers and neoliberals continue to push aggressively for more school privatization in order to transfer as much public wealth away from the public and into the hands of narrow private interests seeking new sources of profit in an economy that is tapped out and steadily collapsing.

    Working people, students, parents, educators, public education advocates, and others have an objective interest in ending privatization in all its forms and defending the public interest. Neoliberals, privatizers, and “free market” ideologues determined to further wreck public education, society, the economy, and the national interest under the banner of high ideals can and must be stopped.

    1. Private property and personal property are not the same.
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  • The Rich And Their Media Offer No Solutions To Economic Problems

    The political and media representatives of the rich continue to promote maximum confusion on the economy. No coherent perspective on the economy is permitted under the existing political order. Everyone is expected to go along with what the rich and their allies repeat about the economy. Everyone has to use the same terms, the same framework, and the same outdated outlook when approaching the economy. Alternative vantage points are not tolerated.

    False choices, bad options, and mixed messages abound. Week after week, one news source claims that everything is great while another says that the economic forecast looks gloomy for the next decade. Economic concepts like inflation, interest rates, costs, prices, and unemployment are rendered in the most tortured manner over and over again, with different representatives of the rich constantly making unscientific and confusing claims about what is “the real problem” and how to “get us back on track.”

    Anticonsciousness has produced a stubborn refusal on the part of the superfluous political and economic elite to provide a concrete and lucid description, explanation, and evaluation of what is actually unfolding, leaving people disinformed and marginalized. This tiny ruling elite is plagued with old ideas and concepts about the economy. It has no interest in consciously investigating phenomena and reaching warranted conclusions.

    This August 21, 2022 headline from The Register-Herald from West Virginia is one of endless examples of the mainstream media failing to empower people:  “U.S. economy flashes signals of hope and concern in mixed data.” Like so many news items, this article leaves people riding the fence and unable to decipher real developments in the economy and society. This is usually done in the name of “balance,” which is really an attempt to conceal a multifaceted reality that can be grasped only when investigated consciously and objectively. One is left as powerless at the end of the article as when they started the article. Half-truths, incorrect information, hedging and waffling here and there—such common tactics leave people with no bearings or direction. It is not a serious approach.

    Another confused source, The Nation, carries this headline: “Looming recession in 2023” (September 7, 2022). The article relies on capital-centered discourse with all its limitations. It provides no integrated coherent view on what is happening in the economy or why. It ignores the fact that the long depression started 12 years ago and that most economies have been running on gas fumes since then, if not before then. The “economic slowdown” started many years ago and will continue for years to come. Years later there is still no meaningful recovery and resilience in most countries, just worse living and working conditions for the majority year after year. Living and working standards are not rising in the U.S. and elsewhere. Endless chatter by the elite and their representatives about “recession” serves mainly to confuse and distract people. It seeks to embroil them in debates that do not serve their interests.

    Conflating different concepts and trends, this September 1, 2022 headline from Bloomberg News, “Strong Economy Is Bad News for Fed’s Inflation Fight,” also leaves readers with no coherence about the economy. What “strong economy”? Why is a so-called “strong economy” a bad thing? And what about the fact that the Fed ran out of ammunition long ago and is only exacerbating things?

    Other bizarre news headlines look like this one from the New York Times: “America’s Dueling Realities on a Key Question: Is the Economy Good or Bad?” (September 13, 2022). The presentation of the economy to the public in this irrational manner can be found everywhere today. Objectivity of consideration is absent and everything is reduced to what a handful of “registered voters” think. Everything is reduced to subjective interpretations, as if the economy does not exist independent of the will of individuals. On top of all this, the article openly admits that economists and journalists are bad at predicting economic phenomena. In other words, they are not scientific.

    Many other examples of media disinformation on the economy can be given. Desperate attempts to find something positive in a dying and decaying economy are not going anywhere any time soon. Such efforts continue because the ruling elite are terrified of more people recognizing the illegitimacy, bankruptcy, and dysfunction of current arrangements and uniting with others to usher in a fresh new alternative.

    Research and experience show that most Americans are very worried about the state of the economy. 1 Millions feel insecure. Everyone knows we have a bad economy, whether you call it a recession or not. High prices are everywhere and interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world are only creating more problems. Today many people have to work two full-time jobs just to survive. Millions live pay-check to pay-check, including many who make six figures. On top of all this, price-gouging, bankruptcies, evictions, hunger, homelessness, inequality, debt, anxiety, and crime are increasing. The fact is that “Rising costs force millions of Americans to choose between paying health care and utility bills” (August 31, 2022).

    Yet Jerome Powell, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, recently promised “more pain” for millions. More agony and unemployment, we are told, is the way forward.

    Why? How is this a responsible and acceptable approach in 2022? Why should there be more suffering for everyone centuries after the scientific and technical revolution made it possible to meet the needs of all several times over? Why more pain for everyone when objectively there is an overabundance of wealth in society produced by workers? Is the public to believe that the approach embraced by economic “leaders” is the only viable approach to the problems confronting the economy, society, and humanity? And whose economy are we talking about? There is nothing bright or human-centered about the approach, outlook, and agenda of the rich and their representatives, which is why they have not solved any major problems in decades.

    It is clear that what the rich mean by “economy” bears no resemblance to what an economy actually is: the relations people enter into with each other in the course of reproducing themselves and society. For the rich, the economy is anything that makes rich people richer, including war, price-gouging, wage cuts, stock buy-backs, aggressive advertising, and wild speculation on the stock market. These are not things the producers of wealth in society support. Working people are interested in using socially-produced wealth to advance society, not narrow private interests.

    The ruling elite and their representatives view the economy in the most narrow and distorted way. They do not see the economy as an integrated whole whose many parts are run by millions of working people that produce all the wealth of society. Major owners of capital look at the world from their own narrow private interests and protect their “own turf” as they compete intensely with other owners of capital to maximize their profit, regardless of how damaging this might be to the natural and social environment. They do not care about how the economy as a whole operates. They do not look at the parts in relation to the whole or strive to ensure the proper extended reproduction of society. Chaos, anarchy, and violence prevail in this outdated set-up in which greed is cynically normalized as a virtue.

    From a capital-centered perspective, workers are not seen as the source of value. Their labor-time is not recognized as the source of new value. Workers are viewed instead as a derogatory cost of production, a liability, a loss, a burden, a nuisance, a negative consequence; something to be suffered or grudgingly tolerated. In reality, though, it is owners of capital, those who “legally” seize the surplus value produced by workers, that are a burden and liability to society. They are a historically-exhausted force that drags society backward. They are a block to progress.

    In this fractured context it is also troubling that humans and citizens are constantly reduced to consumers, and consumerism is given as that which defines the modern human personality. Buying and subordinating oneself to objects, things, and commodities is given as the core of the modern individual—a phenomenon further exacerbated by social media.

    Capitalist ideology turns reality upside down. It mixes up who exploits who. It conceals the irreconcilable antagonistic interests between workers and the financial oligarchy. It hides the fact that wage-slavery is the main mode of  profit maximization for owners of capital. It obscures severe contradictions between workers and the rich.

    People can expect no clarity or guidance from the rich and their media, which is why they must rely on their own conscious acts of finding out and undertake their own efforts to disseminate information, analysis, and perspective.

    There is no reason for today’s economies to be as chaotic, anarchic, and fragmented as they are. They must be brought under conscious human control and organized to advance the general interests of society, not a tiny ruling elite that uses its power to get richer while disinforming and marginalizing people.

    1. See the 12-part series titled “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind“.
    The post The Rich And Their Media Offer No Solutions To Economic Problems first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part 12

    Contradicting experience and research, various mainstream media sources continue to perpetuate the illusion that we have a “solid economy,” that “the fundamentals are sound,” that “things are not that bad,” and that “we can be optimistic” about the economy. In lock-step with the mainstream media, political and economic leaders at the highest levels are also uttering irrational and self-serving things about the economy.

    But everyone can see and feel in direct and concrete ways that conditions at all levels are rapidly worsening every week. Every person has experienced the dramatic rise in just food and fuel costs alone. Further, wages and salaries are not keeping up with inflation, and debt, inequality, and insecurity are growing everywhere. All spheres are affected.

    No amount of anti-consciousness can conquer the harsh reality of today’s conditions of life. What is forcefully unfolding cannot be concealed by disinformation or propaganda. Living and working standards continue to fall everywhere while detached world leaders engage in diversionary charades and false debates about the meaning of this or that economic data or this or that trend so as to prevent people from fighting for their rights.

    Below is part 12, the final part, of the series titled “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind. Like the previous 11 parts, it provides dozens of new and updated facts (65) that further confirm that economic and social conditions continue to decline rapidly worldwide while the rich get even richer. Taken together, all 12 parts contain a total of 430 statistics from dozens of different sources covering April 2022—August 2022. Future articles will continue to document the destructive effects of the neoliberal antisocial offensive and point the way forward. There is an alternative to the obsolete status quo. No one is under any obligation to tolerate inhuman conditions. Links to the previous 11 parts can be found at the end of this article.

    *****

    U.S. Conditions

    “Public perception of the economy is the lowest since 2008.”

    “Food prices rise fastest rate since 1970s.”

    “Egg prices in US jump 47% as food inflation hits highs not seen since 1979.”

    “US natural gas prices spike to 14-year high.”

    “Up 43% over last decade, water rates rising faster than other household utility bills.”

    “More Americans are going hungry, and it costs more to feed them.”

    “98 Million in US skipped treatment or cut back on essentials to pay for healthcare this year.”

    “Workers are picking up extra jobs just to pay for gas and food. Prices are rising faster than wages, and more Americans than ever are working two full-time jobs simultaneously.”

    “‘I can’t even afford groceries.’ HALF of U.S. food banks report growing numbers of households needing handouts — Biden’s plan to end hunger by 2030 comes unstuck as prices of eggs, butter and other basics soar. More than 38 million people in the U.S. do not get enough food to live an active, healthy life, the Department of Agriculture says.”

    “Around half of older Americans can’t afford essential expenses: report.”

    “As many as 125,000 active-duty service members and their families experience food insecurity in the United States.”

    “The value of the federal minimum wage is at its lowest point in 66 years.”

    “54 billion for Ukraine while in the U.S. millions suffer in poverty.”

    “Two-thirds of low-wage firms that cut worker pay in 2021 spent billions on stock buybacks.”

    “Jobless claims at 8-month high as layoffs edge higher.”

    “Layoffs are in the works at half of companies, PwC survey shows.”

    “Walmart lays off corporate employees [about 200] after slashing forecast.”

    “Peloton to slash 780 jobs and hike prices in push to turn profit.”

    “Amazon’s 100,000 job cuts reflect industry-wide adjustments to economic uncertainty.”

    “Small business owner confidence hits new low, survey says.”

    “Over $540M Liquidated as Bitcoin, Ethereum Plummet.”

    A June 2022 report from The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found that, “The average gap between CEO and median worker pay in our sample jumped to 670-to1, up from 604-to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios above 1,000-to-1.” IPS examined compensation at 300 corporations.

    “The labor force participation—the proportion of the population over the age of 16 in work or seeking work—is continuing to fall. It was 62.1 percent in July [2022], down from 62.4 percent in March [2022]. Before the onset of the pandemic, it was 63.4 percent.”

    “Americans loaded up on $40 billion more in debt in June [2022], Fed says.”

    “Credit-card debt is soaring. Accounts for about $890 billion of Americans’ staggering $16 trillion in household debt.”

    “Data shows number of low-income audits could triple as IRS grows.”

    “”We’re Witnessing A Housing Recession”: Existing Home Sales Crater 20% In July As Affordability Collapses.”

    “Rising housing costs have made housing largely inaccessible and unaffordable to most Americans, but have acutely impacted communities of color and low- to moderate-income families over the past several decades.”

    “Buying a home in America is now the LEAST affordable it’s been in 33 years as average mortgage payments rose to $1,944 in June compared to $1,297 in January due to higher rates and record home prices.”

    “Homebuyer Competition Falls to Lowest Level Since Early Months of Pandemic.”

    “Americans born between 1981 and 1996, the most educated and most diverse generation in U.S. history, were once considered harbingers of economic progress and promise. But now, even well into their careers, most of them lag behind the financial and familial strides of previous generations.”

    Nearly 75% of New York City (NYC) schools will experience big funding cuts in the coming weeks (Fall 2022). The NYC school system is the largest public school system in the country with about 1.1 million students and roughly 80,000 teachers.

    “When kids go back to school this fall, pandemic-era free lunch will be gone. Debt incurred by US families who can’t pay lunch fees runs up $262 million a year.”

    “‘Never seen it this bad’: America faces catastrophic teacher shortage.”

    “A spate of horrific attacks in New York has people fearful of returning to work.”

    “Starbucks must rehire 7 Memphis employees who supported a union, a judge says.”

    International Conditions

    “Low growth, high inflation: World faces increasingly challenging global environment.”

    “There is a global debt crisis coming – and it won’t stop at Sri Lanka.”

    “Growing recessionary trends in major economies.”

    “IMF warns of ‘gloomy outlook’ for global economy, slashing growth estimates.”

    “‘Grotesque greed’: UN chief Guterres slams oil and gas companies.”

    “Shipping firm Maersk, a barometer for global trade, warns of weak demand and warehouses filling up.”

    “The U.S. was the worst-performing of the major Group of Seven economies in the second quarter, the latest data show.”

    “A winter energy reckoning looms for the west.”

    “Railway workers in France go on strike [July 2022] demanding higher wages.”

    “UK economy shrinks in 2nd quarter [2022], sharpening recession fear.”

    “UK inflation rate rises to 40-year high of 10.1%.”

    “UK is facing Dickens-style poverty, ex-PM warns.”

    “Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths gripping Britain is only tip of the iceberg.”

    “Millions will join breadline in recession-hit UK, NIESR warn.”

    “UK energy bills to hit £4,200 in January [2023].”

    “Bank of England launches biggest interest rate hike in 27 years, predicts lengthy recession.”

    “Germany must cut gas use by 20% to avoid winter rationing, regulator says.”

    “Norway’s central bank hikes rates by 50 basis points in bid to tackle surging inflation.”

    “Turkey shocks markets with rate cut despite inflation near 80%.”

    “Saudi Aramco profit surges 90% in second quarter amid energy price boom.”

    “Tunisia: Unemployed graduates demand the Authority finds solution to their unemployment.”

    “Zambia is a desperately hungry poor country.”

    “More than 1,200 people are detained indefinitely in Australia with no criminal conviction.”

    “New Zealand’s central bank raised interest rates on 17 August – a seventh hike in row. And it signaled that further increases will follow.”

    “Japan wants young people to drink more alcohol.”

    “Soaring unemployment in Myanmar follows junta rollback of labor rights.”

    “Argentina hikes rate to 69.5% as inflation surges to 30-year high.”

    “Bank of Mexico raises interest rates to record 8.5 percent.”

    “Chile economy on brink of recession amid rampant inflation.”

    *****

    Collectively, the statistics in this 12-part series portray a deteriorating situation worldwide. People can’t seem to catch a break. The top-down assault on their rights is relentless and will continue next year and the year after. The ruling elite are unable and unwilling to solve any problems but they have many plans for arrangements that keep the majority of people marginalized and disempowered. New laws and acts like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), for example, will funnel billions of dollars to the rich, but do very little to improve living and working standards for ordinary people. The IRA will not solve inflation. And previous top-down fiscal and monetary policies, far from solving any problems, have only exacerbated already-high levels of income, wealth, and political inequality. They have not improved conditions.

    Relying on the rich and their politicians will not advance the interests of working people and the general interests of society one iota. It will not give rise to a human-centered economy. It will not bring about security, stability, prosperity, and peace for all. Only the people themselves have an objective interest in opening the path of progress to society and must rely on themselves to do so. Constantly begging the politicians of the rich for a few crumbs here and there is the old way of doing things. It doesn’t work. It is time to build a new world where the people occupy center-stage and conduct all the affairs of society on a conscious human basis.

    Part one (April 10, 2022); Part two (April 25, 2022); Part three (May 10, 2022); Part four (May 16, 2022); Part five (May 22, 2022); Part six (May 30, 2022); Part seven (June 6, 2022); Part eight (June 13, 2022); Part nine (June 17, 2022); Part ten (June 27, 2022); Part eleven (July 10, 2022).

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Poor Quality Charter School Applications Are Common

    One of the main reasons many charter school applications are rejected repeatedly by public school boards across the country is because they are poorly-written and low quality in many ways.

    Such applications are often full of spelling mistakes, overly-ambitious claims, vague details, incomplete responses, many blank boxes, incorrect information, and more. The application is supposed to be a serious, rigorous, and thorough business and education plan to educate hundreds of youth for years in a stable, safe, and clean environment with highly qualified professionals and excellent programs.

    What makes all this bizarre is that charter school promoters and operators are either rich and well-connected or have rich and well-connected backers. As such, they can easily hire skilled people to professionally complete such applications but it appears that they frequently do not take such steps. This is all besides the fact that there is no justification for the existence of privately-operated charter schools in the first place and that public funds and facilities belong to public schools, not narrow private interests that promote and operate segregated charter schools governed by unelected private persons.

    In this context it is also important to recall the low levels of accountability and transparency that have defined most charter schools for decades and how this plays into the unprofessional approach taken by many trying to start a deregulated charter school that siphons funds from public schools. It is no surprise that privately-operated charter schools fail and close every week.

    Below are three different examples of the types of comments public school board officials typically make when they receive a low quality charter school application. The first example comes from Kentucky (2019):

    “The applicant lacked specificity and provided unfinished planning in multiple areas that leave significant question as to whether or not the school will be able to launch successfully for a proposed August 2020 start date,” Superintendent Kelly Middleton told the Board of Education, according to a press release. “The applicant does not provide data to support the complexities of the population to be served and relies on generalized notions of what the applicant believes should be good for all children.”

    The second example comes from California (2021):

    Dismissing it as poorly planned and financially rickety, the Napa Valley Unified School District board unanimously vetoed a petition to open the Mayacamas Charter Middle School starting in August 2022…. Myriad objections to Mayacamas budget and education plan, which surfaced in an evaluation by district staff released Nov. 22, were readily supported by all seven NVUSD trustees, who alleged that the would-be school’s chief advocates refused even a person-to-person interview to respond to district leaders’ objections. (emphasis added)

    The third example comes from Colorado (2021):

    The [Woodland Park RE-2] school board was also concerned that the Merit Academy [Charter School] had no facility in mind to start school in fall of this year. The board said that the school district would have to vet the facility to ensure that it could provide for the educational needs of the students. The resolution also pointed out that the Merit Academy did not have a plan for a facility after year one. The school board also had more problems with the Merit Academy’s planning. They said that the charter school representatives did not present a detailed operational plan to properly educate students. The board was also concerned that offering grades K-10 was too broad of a spectrum of learning, and that the school didn’t outline how they would properly cater to every grade level.

    Endless other examples from across the country could be provided. The same shoddy pattern appears coast to coast year after year. Countless charter school applications simply do not meet many basic standards and requirements. As such, charter school promoters and operators have worked tirelessly to restructure state arrangements along more neoliberal lines so as to get their school applications approved with far less vetting and screening. These new arrangements usually take the form of a “commission” or “board” comprised of appointed individuals who have a charter-friendly outlook and can override the rejections and denials of publicly elected school board officials.

    In the coming months and years more public school boards will continue to reject charter school applications.

    The post Poor Quality Charter School Applications Are Common first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • West Virginia: New Charter Schools Slated To Degrade Education

    Five new privately-operated charter schools are expected to open in West Virginia in the coming weeks. Three will be brick-and-mortar charter schools and two will be statewide virtual charter schools. More privately-operated charter schools will be permitted to open after July 2023.

    As in other states and territories, privately-operated charter schools in West Virginia will be riddled with corruption and will undermine public schools and the public interest. These “innovative” and “flexible” “schools of choice” will funnel millions of public dollars from public schools into private hands, foster more segregation, dodge accountability, thwart unions, increase competition, intensify a consumerist approach to education, and lower the quality of teaching. More West Virginia families will be subjected to a fend-for-yourself ethos when it comes to securing an education for their children, which is bound to happen when education is commodified and treated as a business.

    Further, in a major departure from long-standing public school arrangements in the U.S., practically any private person will be able to start a deregulated charter school in West Virginia. In addition, while privately-operated charter schools are ostensibly tuition-free and open to all, “attending one [in West Virginia] may be challenging for students who don’t have transportation or internet access (for virtual charter schools).” This is on top of the fact that privately-operated charter schools are notorious for selective enrollment practices despite being called “public” schools. It is important to remember that privatized education has never paved the way for education for all. Private by definition means exclusive, not inclusive.

    The people of West Virginia can expect anarchy and chaos to increase in the sphere of education very soon. The dismantling of public education through privatization is a major violation of the right to education and will do nothing to advance the educational needs of all. Charter schools mainly enrich a handful of major owners of capital and create redundancies in the sphere of education. More privatization means more retrogression.

    For a searchable archive of thousands of news articles exposing a broad range of crimes and corruption in the crisis-prone charter school sector, see here.

    The post West Virginia: New Charter Schools Slated To Degrade Education first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Privately-Operated Charter Schools Continue to Fail and Close

    Roughly 150-200 privately-operated “innovative” charter schools close every year across America, leaving thousands of minority families high and dry. This trend has persisted for at least 30 years. Indeed, to date about 5,000 charter schools have closed since 1991. This is a huge number given the fact that there are only about 7,500 charter schools in existence today.

    The reasons for such closures are numerous but typically involve some sort of fraud, corruption, dysfunction, mismanagement, or malfeasance. Thus, for example:

    An administrative law judge Friday [July 29, 2022] upheld a decision by the Osceola County School Board [in Florida] to terminate a contract with a charter school [American Classical Charter Academy], citing issues such as a large number of uncertified teachers and not properly providing exceptional-student education services.

    This example is by no means unique in the troubled charter school sector. The problem of poor special education services is a particularly sharp one in most charter schools because, unlike public schools, charter schools operate like private businesses that strive to “cut costs” by avoiding high-need students. In practice, charter schools are not open to all students, which is why they are more segregated than public schools. Privatized education has never paved the way for all students to have an education. Privately-operated charter schools are also notorious for high teacher turnover rates, mainly due to poor working conditions, including poor pay (see here and here). Such high turnover rates undermine collegiality, continuity, collaboration, and learning.

    For extensive information and analysis on widespread corruption, waste, fraud, and dysfunction in the deregulated charter school sector, see the Network for Public Education.

    The post Privately-Operated Charter Schools Continue to Fail and Close first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Florida: Poor Charter School Performance Persists

    Charter school promoters and operators have long believed that scores on unsound high-stakes standardized tests produced by large for-profit corporations are useful and meaningful measures of teaching and learning. They rarely say anything critical about these tests that have been rejected for years by millions of teachers, parents, students, and education advocates across the country.

    And while charter school promoters and operators never miss an opportunity to boast about high test scores at privately-operated charter schools that routinely cherry-pick their students, the fact is that many privately-operated charter schools perform poorly every year (see here and here). Not surprisingly, charter school promoters do not like to hear about or advertise poor test scores in thousands of charter schools, or the covert and overt strategies that privately-operated charter schools use to increase scores on these corporate tests, including providing financial incentives to charter school employees to “get scores up.”

    The latest data on poor charter school performance comes from Florida, where a large number of privately-operated charter schools have been performing poorly for years.

    According to WJCT News,

    Almost a third of Duval’s [Florida] charter schools got a D or F rating in the latest round of school grades — triple the rate of non-charter public schools. Overall, Duval charters made up nearly half of the lowest-performing schools in the district, versus just 14% in the last round of grades, in 2019 before the pandemic. (emphasis added)

    Equally worrisome is the fact that while poor-performing public schools are subject to harsh neoliberal sanctions, failing charter schools are allowed by the state to continue to operate without the same sanctions as long as they “have a plan” to improve. In practice this means failing charter schools have nine lives, which goes against the “free market” ideology embraced by charter school promoters that says failing charter schools should be shut down so that they can be reopened by another “edupreneur.”

    In addition to thousands of “innovative” privately-operated charter schools performing poorly every year, about 150-200 close every year as well, leaving large numbers of poor and low-income minorities out in the cold. Financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance are the top three reasons privately-operated charter schools close every week.

    Approximately 342,000 students are enrolled in nearly 700 charter schools in Florida. For information and analysis on closures, corruption, and waste in Florida’s troubled charter school sector, search here and here.

    The post Florida: Poor Charter School Performance Persists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part Eleven

    Below is part 11 of the series called “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind. It contains 50 new and updated statistics from multiple sources. New dismal records continue to be set and the long depression that started many years ago continues to intensify. Part 12, the last part, will appear in a few weeks. Facts, discussion, and analysis on the economic and social decline unfolding worldwide will still be provided in future articles on the economy under different applicable titles. Links to all previous ten parts of this series can be found below.

    *****

    U.S. Conditions

    “Biden drops to just 32 percent approval in new Civiqs Poll.”

    “Inflation and the Fed plan to cut wages: A depression Is coming.”

    “83% of Americans cut back on spending as economy careens towards crisis, poll finds.”

    “Americans tap pandemic savings to cope with inflation.”

    “U.S. labor market starts to cool as weekly jobless claims rise, layoffs surge. Announced job cuts jump 57% to 32,517 in June [2022].”

    “Stocks slide to close worst first half in 52 years.”

    “Investments in U.S. tech start-ups plunged 23 percent over the last three months, to $62.3 billion, the steepest fall since 2019, according to figures released on Thursday by PitchBook, which tracks young companies.”

    “U.S. power companies face supply-chain crisis this summer.”

    “New vehicle sales in June 2022 plunged 25% from June 2019, back to 1970s levels, on inventory shortages.”

    “Average car payments now above $700/month, highest price tag on record.”

    “Housing bubble getting ready to pop: pending sales plunge in June [2022], inventory jumps, price reductions spike amid holy-moly mortgage rates.”

    “‘Peak inflation is not here yet’: Rents continue to rise, putting pressure on would-be homebuyers.”

    “Manhattan apartment sales fall 30% in June [2022], but prices remain high.”

    “WA [State of Washington] gasoline sales drop, lifestyles change amid soaring prices.”

    “Report: WV [West Virginia] had highest food insecurity in nation through first half of June [2022].”

    “Texans face skyrocketing home energy bills as the state exports more natural gas than ever.”

    “Inflation is making homelessness worse. Rising prices and soaring rents are taking their toll across the country.”

    “Sacramento State [California] researchers document startling jump in homelessness in county.”

    “Red flag: Consumers are using Buy Now, Pay Later to cover everyday expenses.”

    “State cuts continue to unravel basic support for unemployed workers.”

    “Confidence in U.S. institutions Down; average at new low.”

    “Highland Park Fourth of July [2022] parade shooting was nation’s 309th this year.”

     “Panic at July Fourth [2022] celebrations as crowds mistake fireworks for gunfire.”

     “Just 7% of U.S. adults have good cardiometabolic health.”

     International Conditions

    “One child pushed into severe malnutrition every minute: Unicef.”

    “Oxfam condemns G7 for ‘leaving millions to starve’.”

    “Global hunger figures rose to as many as 828M in 2021: UN.”

    “Historic cascade of defaults is coming for emerging markets.”

    “Charting the global economy: Factories slow down from US to Asia.”

    “Euro slides to 20-year low against the dollar as recession fears build.”

    “Inflation in Eurozone hits record 8.6% as Ukraine war continues.”

    “Sri Lanka energy minister warns petrol stocks about to run dry.”

    “Sri Lankans turn to bicycles as economic crisis worsens.”

    “The world’s third-largest economy [Japan] is facing a looming energy crisis.”

    “Indonesia’s annual inflation rate quickened to 4.35% in June 2022 from 3.55% in May, above market consensus of 4.17% and breaching the central bank’s target range of 2 to 4%.”

    “Millions of Yemenis to go hungry as UN forced to slash food aid.”

    “Egypt’s external debt increased by 8.5 percent in three months.”

    “Over 33,000 British Columbia [Canada] government workers vote for strike action, as contracts for 400,000 public sector workers expire.”

    “Australia risks recession and housing downturn after third rate hike.”

    “UK: Supermarkets put security tags on cheese blocks as stores tackle shoplifting amid soaring food costs.”

    “UK: Debt held by over-55s up 40% in five years.”

    “British Airways to cancel 10,300 more flights.”

    “Norway strikes threaten to cut off gas supplies to UK within days.”

    “The consumer confidence index in Denmark fell to a new record low of -24.8 in June 2022 from -22.4 in the previous month, with four out of the five indicators declining.”

    “Germany posts first monthly trade deficit in 30 years.”

    “France records highest inflation rate for decades.”

    “Dutch farmers block entrances to supermarket warehouses.”

    “State of emergency declared In Italy’s drought-stricken North.”

    “Italy’s liabilities towards other euro zone central banks jumped to a new record high in June [2022], central bank data showed on Thursday.”

    “Core inflation rate in Spain, which excludes volatile items such as unprocessed food and energy products, rose to 4.9 percent in May of 2022, the highest since October of 1995, from 4.4 percent in April.”

    *****

    Worldwide there is no letup in the intensification of the destruction and violence produced by the outdated political and economic system of the rich. Inhumane conditions are flourishing globally under a system which has long benefitted elitist rule. Capital-centered fiscal and monetary policies have solved nothing; they have not prevented recurring crises.

    There is a growing sense among people that no matter what the rich and their representatives in different spheres do they just make things worse and have no real sustainable human-centered solutions. The inefficacy of existing liberal institutions of governance is becoming more glaring to more people. Various media outlets are even openly discussing how and why “representative democracy” is seen by many as a farce at this stage of history. People are blocked from establishing arrangements that favor them and they want mechanisms and institutions that effectively and rapidly affirm their rights. They do not want the life sucked out of them fighting for years just for a few crumbs while fundamental problems worsen. Constantly begging the cartel parties of the rich for some crumbs is exhausting, humiliating, and unsatisfactory.

    The only way out of recurring crises and endless tragedies is by ending the rule of capital and establishing the rule of working people. Experience shows daily that an economic system dominated by competing owners of capital striving to maximize profit as fast as possible is a disaster for the social and natural environment. Rule by the financial oligarchy must be replaced by rule of the working class if human rights are to be guaranteed in practice. An integrated socialized economic system built and operated by working people but divided up amongst competing owners of capital to do with as they wish will only guarantee more crises and tragedies.

    At this stage of history and social development what is needed is an economic system based on the broad aim of using socially-produced wealth to advance the general interests of society. Such a society will empower people to take charge of the affairs of society and prohibit private interests from accessing public funds and assets.

    Part one (April 10, 2022); Part two (April 25, 2022); Part three (May 10, 2022); Part four (May 16, 2022); Part five (May 22, 2022); Part six (May 30, 2022); Part seven (June 6, 2022); Part eight (June 13, 2022); Part nine (June 17, 2022); Part ten (June 27, 2022).

    The post “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part Eleven first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part Ten

    The top-down assault on living and working standards continues unabated worldwide. This is coupled with the growing pressure on everyone to fend-for-themselves like animals, which is engendering greater insecurity and instability with each passing month. Even worse, no meaningful and lasting relief is on the way, only more suffering. Major corporations, however, are having a field day.

    To add insult to injury, the ruling elite are becoming more irrational and putting forward the destruction of the economy as the way out of the crisis, while also openly admitting that they have no idea what to do. They publicly say things like “we are doing a controlled demolition of the economy” and that “we will likely have a hard landing,” referring to the 50 bubbles deflating in the stock market, which has already lost trillions in real and paper wealth in recent months. Who thinks destroying a massive complex economy that millions built, operate, and rely on is the way forward? Why is more devastation and waste the only option?

    Below are 50 facts, some new and some updated, that continue to paint a grim picture of the past, present, and future. New disturbing records continue to be set. Links to all previous nine parts in this series can be found at the end of this article. Together they provide hundreds of facts from numerous sources.

    *****

    U.S. Conditions

    “Nearly half of all Maine tenants cannot afford rent, new study says.”

    “The average transaction price (ATP) of new vehicles sold by dealers to retail customers in June [2022] hit a new breath-taking record high of $45,844, up by 14.5% from a year ago, and beating the prior record set in May, according to estimates by J.D. Power.”

    “US consumer sentiment hit a new record low in June [2022] amid growing concerns about inflation.”

    “Interest costs on national debt are up 30% this fiscal year and could increase more.”

    “US oil reserves running low – Bloomberg.”

    “The price of diesel went above $5.50 a gallon in the beginning of May [2022], and has stayed there ever since, a 70% increase from just a year ago.”

    “The U.S. could soon experience a severe shortage of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), impacting U.S. drivers already hit with soaring fuel prices. DEF is a solution made up of urea and de-ionized water that is needed for almost everything that runs on diesel.”

    “The retail industry is facing a potential wave of bankruptcies.”

    “Stock market’s fall has wiped out $3 trillion in retirement savings this year.”

    “Well over half of people surveyed expect their standard of living to decline in retirement.”

    “44% of workers are worried about a layoff or job loss, CNBC’s All-America Workforce Survey found. Some 84% are concerned about a recession.”

    “Netflix cuts 300 employees in new round of layoffs.”

    “Tesla is laying off workers who only just started and withdrawing employment offers as Elon Musk’s job cuts begin.”

    “United Airlines will cut 12% of Newark flights in effort to tame delays.”

    “Starbucks used ‘array of illegal tactics’ against unionizing workers, labor regulators say.”

    “Roughly 1 in 4 American expatriates is ‘seriously considering’ or ‘planning’ to renounce their U.S. citizenship, according to a survey from Greenback Expat Tax Services.”

    “Elon Musk says Tesla’s car factories are ‘gigantic money furnaces’.”

    “Minnesota State colleges, universities raise tuition 3.5% for nearly all students.”

    “27 of America’s top 30 universities are raising tuition and fees for the next academic year.”

    “Why health-care costs are rising in the U.S. more than anywhere else.”

    “For Native Americans, justice is still far out of reach.”

    “Since 2010, at least 15 big U.S. cities registered more than 1,000 killings of homeless, official statistics reveal.”

    “Almost half of the people serving life without parole are 50 years old or more and one in four is at least 60 years old.”

    International Conditions

    “We face a global economic crisis. And no one knows what to do about it.”

    “Fight against inflation raises spectre of global recession.”

    “Food insecurity and hunger have doubled since 2019, according to experts. The threat of famine is faced by nearly fifty million people around the world. Levels of less severe hunger have doubled since 2019.”

    “The world’s bubbliest housing markets are flashing warning signs.”

    “Metal prices are headed for the worst quarter since the financial crisis.”

    “Airports around the world battle long lines, canceled flights.”

    “Europe’s travel woes deepen as strikes add to scrapped flights.”

    “Sri Lankan prime minister: Island’s economy ‘has collapsed’.”

    “According to ACORN Canada nearly one in two Canadians are living paycheck-to-paycheck making them vulnerable to predatory banking practices.”

    “Majority of C-Suite Execs thinking of quitting, 40% overwhelmed at work: Deloitte Survey.”

    “Cazoo to cut 750 jobs in UK and across Europe amid recession fears.”

    “UK economy ‘running on empty’ as recession signals mount – PMI.”

    “UK retail sales fall in May [2022].”

    “UK pushed 100,000 people into poverty by lifting pension age.”

    “7 out of 10 people in the UK want government action on soaring executive pay.”

    “French energy giants urge consumers to cut energy use.”

    “France sees nuclear energy output plummet at the worst possible moment.”

    “Belgian workers march against cost-of-living crisis.”

    “Food basket [in Iceland] increased nearly 17% in last seven months.”

    “Australian central bank aims at real wage cuts for years.”

    “German business climate drops more than expected.”

    “Germany looks at potential rationing of natural gas after Russia cuts supply.”

    “New poll reveals 51% of Dutch consider Israel an apartheid state.”

    “Residents across Israel move into tents to protest steep housing costs.”

    “Cost of food in Kenya increased 12.40 percent in May of 2022 over the same month in the previous year.”

    “Inflation inducing extreme poverty [in Zimbabwe].”

    “More poverty and misery ahead for most Argentines as food prices soar.”

    *****

    While people want a human-centered alternative to the misery and anarchy that has been worsening for many years, they do not trust the politicians in the cartel parties of the rich (democrats and republicans) to bring about such an alternative. People have been dissatisfied with the political representatives of the rich for decades. A new report (June 2022) from the Pew Research Center (PRC), “Americans’ Views of Government: Decades of Distrust, Enduring Support for Its Role,” shows that “65% say most political candidates run for office ‘to serve their own personal interests’.” The report stresses that:

    Americans remain deeply distrustful of and dissatisfied with their government. Just 20% say they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time – a sentiment that has changed very little since former President George W. Bush’s second term in office. (emphasis added)

    This inevitable distrust and dissatisfaction has grown more over the past 30 months and will increase in the coming years. Imperialists are not interested in sharing power and wealth. They are not interested in the dignity and humanity of all. On the contrary, all their actions and policies further degrade the social and natural environment. It cannot be otherwise in the final and highest stage of capitalism. Parasitism, reaction, and decay increase in this retrogressive period and take a heavy toll on the social and natural environment.

    The majority clearly have little to be satisfied about when it comes to the direction of the economy and society. They want to know how and why we are in the abysmal mess we are in today and why it is so impossible for the rich and their political representatives to solve even small problems. Why is there no stability and security centuries after the scientific and technical revolution empowered humankind to easily meet the needs of all many times over?

    Experience has also taught people that constantly begging politicians to do the most basic simple things has left millions exhausted, disillusioned, and humiliated. People do not want to fight for years just to secure minor changes that favor them. It is clear that voting once every four years for the lesser of two evils has not stopped economic, social, cultural, political, and educational decline. It has not empowered people to become the decision-makers in society. It has not given people a real voice. It is no surprise that about 100 million eligible voters boycott the presidential election every four years because they feel so disillusioned, ignored, devalued, and marginalized by an obsolete political set-up that has long served a privileged minority. The situation is not much better in the rest of the Anglo-American world.

    The fact that the financial oligarchy is a historically superfluous force that is a huge drag on society means that only working people and their allies can usher in a new human-centered alternative. Relying on old structures, frameworks, and arrangements stopped working long ago. Those things do not work anymore because they are not taking people where they need to go. The necessity for new thinking, a new outlook, a new politics, new leadership, and new arrangements is sharper than ever.

    Concrete, sustained, collective action with analysis is needed to move forward. A government that upholds a public authority worthy of the name must come into being so as to affirm the public interest. Such a government will provide human rights with a guarantee in practice. It will not privilege narrow private interests or use disinformation to deprive people of an outlook and politics that advances their interests.

    There is an alternative to the barbarism of the current conditions engendered by the rich and their outmoded system. New forms of ownership, new social relations, and a new human personality are necessary and possible. History is forcing such ideas, thinking, and topics on human consciousness.

    Part one (April 10, 2022); Part two (April 25, 2022); Part three (May 10, 2022); Part four (May 16, 2022); Part five (May 22, 2022); Part six (May 30, 2022); Part seven (June 6, 2022); Part eight (June 13, 2022); Part nine (June 17, 2022).

    The post “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind: Part Ten first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pennsylvania: Charter School Money Heist

    For some time now, public school superintendents in Pennsylvania, as well as the governor of that state and many others, have been striving to restrict the charter school money grab that has been allowed to run amok in that state for years.

    Cyber charter schools in particular, notorious for consistently abysmal academic results and for being even more corrupt than brick-and-mortar charter schools, have come under fire because they receive large sums of public funds that are vastly disproportionate to their needs, functions, and claims. Overhead costs in cyber charter schools, it should be noted, are much lower than overhead costs in brick-and-mortar public schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools, but the flawed funding system essentially treats cyber charter schools like brick-and-mortar schools. Virtual charter schools also provide fewer services and resources than brick-and-mortar public schools, which can be especially problematic for students with special needs. All of this is beside the fact that charter schools have no legitimate claim to public money in the first place because they are not public entities in the proper sense of the word. Charter schools are privatized deregulated schools run by unelected private persons. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not agencies of the state and differ from public schools in profound ways. Charter school promoters, moreover, openly espouse “free market” ideology.

    At a recent press conference addressing the siphoning of large sums of public funds from public schools to privately-operated charter schools, Christopher Dormer, superintendent of the Norristown school district, said that, “today is an attack on a law that is broken, with skewed formulas that have resulted in drastic overpayments to charters, with little or no oversight on how those tax dollars are being spent” (emphasis added). Dormer added:

    I’ll tell you, it does not cost $14,000 per year to educate a child in a fully virtual environment’, referring to what Norristown pays per student attending cyber charters. In contrast, he said, it costs the district $5,500 to educate a student fully online.

    In the Perkiomen Valley school district:

    costs for sending students to charters have grown by more than 55% since 2015, said Superintendent Barbara Russell. ‘That takes money away from the students attending in our school district’, Russell said. While the district has its own virtual learning programs, the money it must pay for students to attend cyber charter schools where the accountability looks very different … raises lots of questions’. (emphasis added)

    Virtual charter schools in Pennsylvania also exploit the public by self-servingly reclassifying many students as “special education” students just to seize more public funds from public schools that are chronically under-funded. For example:

    Bill Harner, the Quakertown Community School District superintendent, said one-third of students in his district who enroll in cyber charters are classified by their new schools as having a disability. “Why are they being reclassified? Because it’s a cash cow,” Harner said. “It’s a terrible waste of taxpayer dollars.”

    Larry Feinberg, a veteran school board member and director of the Keystone Center for Charter Change, points out that the existing charter school funding system means “fewer resources to pay for things like math coaches, reading coaches, nurses, counselors” in public schools. “The impact is palpable, and it’s real.”

    Charter school funding arrangements (in Pennsylvania and elsewhere) are so dysfunctional that they also often force higher property taxes on communities where they exist. Equally worrisome, charter schools also impose huge “stranded costs” on public schools, which are “expenses that school districts can’t recoup when students leave for a charter, because they can’t evenly reduce teachers or building expenses, for instance.”

    It thus comes as no surprise that:

    More than 430 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts have passed a resolution calling for charter funding changes, according to the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

    Many other examples of antisocial funding arrangements can be given. The issue though is not to determine a “more fair” way to funnel public money to privately-operated charter schools, but rather to discuss and analyze in a serious manner why these outsourced deregulated schools exist in the first place and how to untether them from public funds, assets, facilities, and resources that legitimately belong only to public schools.

    Within this, what also needs to be discussed is the neoliberal “starve it—test it—punish it—privatize it” (STPP) formula, whereby thousands of public schools in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have been deliberately set up by neoliberals to fail and close in an unconscionable manner so as to make way for thousands of poor-performing charter schools constantly mired in scandal and controversy.

    Two other key points are worth considering. First, like private businesses, cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania collectively spend millions of public dollars every year on marketing and advertising instead of spending this public money directly in the classroom. Secondly, why do charter schools need to advertise at all if so many parents supposedly want to enroll their kids in them and there are said to be long waiting lists to get into them? The neoliberal narrative about school-choice has never computed.

    Not surprisingly, while superintendents and public interest advocates in Pennsylvania are seeking broad reforms to the current defective school funding set-up, advocates of privately-operated charter schools are fighting tooth and nail for every single public cent they can seize. They have little sympathy for public schools and their students.

    To be sure, major problems caused by funneling public funds to privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools is a national problem and not unique to Pennsylvania. For more than 30 years, public schools in America have been undermined by these crisis-prone contract schools run by unelected private persons.

    “Free market” schools do not advance people, society, or the economy; they mainly enrich a handful of individuals and groups. The commodification of education in a modern society based on mass industrial production is profoundly counterproductive.

    See here for a detailed article on the unbreakable connection between government and charter school millionaires and lobbyists. Preventing charter schools from privately expropriating public property is doable and necessary. No one has to settle for such theft of public wealth by narrow private interests.

    There are 179 charter schools in Pennsylvania. Cyber charter schools serve the entire state.

    The post Pennsylvania: Charter School Money Heist first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.