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Author: Shawgi Tell

  • Idaho’s Segregated Charter Schools

    The crisis-prone charter school sector has been highly segregated for three decades. No amount of charter school disinformation has been able to conceal this harsh reality.

    Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are notorious for selective enrollment practices even though they are said to be “public” schools “open to all.” Many have been investigated for discriminatory enrollment practices. Indeed, numerous charter schools oppose efforts to diversify their student body. This cherry-picking of students is also how numerous charter schools secure students that score well on educationally unsound tests produced by large corporations. Such a set-up allows privately-operated charter schools to claim they are “high-performing” while simultaneously demonizing and scapegoating public schools.

    On August 5, 2021, Idaho Ed News reported that Idaho’s charter schools “underserve the state’s minority and poor populations.” As in other states with charter schools, Idaho’s charter schools also underserve English Language Learners and students with special needs.

    Idaho’s charter schools also come up short in other critical areas. For example, “At least 12 charters haven’t provided federal free- and reduced-price meals in recent years. Others have opted out of busing services, making it harder for kids who can’t get to school on their own to enroll.” The refusal to provide transportation to a school that is supposedly “public” and “open to all” is common in many charter schools across the country.

    It is also worth noting that “Idaho charters also consistently rank among the state’s lowest performing schools”

    About 23,000 students are currently enrolled in 62 charter schools in Idaho.  These privately-operated schools run by unelected individuals deprive public schools of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The state does not cap the number of charters that operate within its borders. Idaho established its charter school law in 1996.

    The post Idaho’s Segregated Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter School Promoters Loathe Public Authority and Intensify Lawlessness, Threats, and Bully Tactics

    In recent years, and especially in the past 2-3 years, more public school boards across the country have taken resolute action to reject more charter school applications and not renew the contracts of existing privately-operated charter schools. These democratic decisions are usually taken for valid reasons such as:

    • the charter school application is poorly-written
    • the planning of the charter school is not well-thought-out
    • the charter school provides a redundant service
    • the charter school is beset by chronically poor academic performance
    • the charter school engages in financial malfeasance or mismanagement

    Research and experience also show that charter schools intensify segregation, close frequently, are governed by unelected individuals, have high teacher and student turnover rates, employ fewer nurses than public schools, often fail to provide transportation, pay teachers less than their public school peers, treat teachers as “at-will” employees, hire more inexperienced teachers than public schools, operate non-transparently, oppose unions, and deprive public schools of large sums of public money that belong to public schools, causing great harm to these public schools and their mostly minority students. In addition, many charter schools spend lots of money on advertising (just like a private business), frequently over-pay administrators, often have inflated student wait lists, and are constantly mired in corruption, scandal, and controversy. Charter school promoters also believe individualism, consumerism, competition, and the “free market” are advanced humane ways to organize education; they view education as a commodity, not a modern social responsibility. Although recurring economic crises discredited “free market” ideology long ago, charter school promoters believe the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market” will improve schools and society.

    But since the profits seized by the owners of capital behind charter schools are so huge, charter school promoters have decided that they will bully their way to charter school expansion; they will brook no opposition; they will have their way no matter how damaging it is to the public interest, society, and the economy.

    Thus, recently in various cities charter school promoters have turned to the courts, legislatures, governors, “commissions,” “review boards,” and other means to say to public school boards: “we don’t care how much you oppose and reject charter schools or how valid your reasons are, we are going to get our way no matter what. We will impose our will on you and multiply charter schools whether you like it or not. And there is nothing you can do about it. We will override any decisions we don’t like and operate with impunity.” The entities mentioned above all tend to have a neoliberal orientation and outlook that favors school privatization; they frequently operate in ways that violate the public interest. The point is that charter school promoters are in no mood to respect decisions made by entities comprised of publicly elected individuals, especially when these forms of elected governance are at the local level. Charter school promoters are, in other words, increasingly going over the heads of public school boards and getting their way.

    While charter school promoters have always used economic, political, and cultural capital to enforce their privatization agenda, there is an escalation in the threats and bully tactics they are using to impose their dictate, mainly because public opposition to charter schools keeps growing. In this way, public authority is being rapidly abolished and replaced with rule by decree. Democracy is being further eroded. A situation is being created where it is not even possible to oppose privately-operated segregated charter schools that harm education and the economy. Even if a public school board decides with good reason to reject a charter school application or revoke a charter school’s contract, the public school board can be forced by the rich and their representatives to promptly reverse its democratic decision, as happened recently in Hillsborough, Florida. In other cases, when a public school board rejects a charter school application for compelling reasons, the law is set-up in some states so that the charter school applicant can appeal the decision to an entity that is comprised of unelected individuals and not accountable to the public. Such entities usually approve the charter school application, thereby overriding the democratic will of the public school board.

    In these and other ways, charter school promoters are lowering the level of education, corroding democracy, and becoming more belligerent and tyrannical. And it is all being done with impunity. Anything pro-social, democratic, and public is anathema to charter school promoters—the same people who claim to embrace “freedom,” “choice,” “civil rights,” and “progress.”

    Defenders of public education and the public interest must continue to describe, expose, and analyze endless problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector and disseminate this information broadly. They can and must organize various actions, including discussions, teach-ins, petitions, resolutions, social media campaigns, and much more to turn the tide against school privatization and its devastating effects on education, the economy, society, and the national interest. The public will can triumph over the will of the rich and their political representatives. The wealthy elite are not invincible or interested in opening the path of progress to society.

    Public education in a modern society based on mass industrial production can only move forward in a pro-social way when it is free of the influence of private interests. Placing a modern social responsibility in the hands of competing owners of capital preoccupied with cashing in on kids, is a recipe for not only damaging education but also undermining the healthy balanced development of a modern economy and society; it is a form of nation-wrecking that people are under no obligation to tolerate.

    The post Charter School Promoters Loathe Public Authority and Intensify Lawlessness, Threats, and Bully Tactics first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Charter School Promoters Defend Antisocial Culture of Maximum Profit

    About 3.3 million students are currently enrolled in roughly 7,400 privately-operated charter schools across 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Five states remain opposed to these outsourced schools that appeared in the U.S. 30 years ago.

    Today, thousands of segregated charter schools run by unelected individuals are either openly operated as for-profit schools or managed, directed, or overseen by one or more for-profit entities and businesses. In Michigan and Florida, for example, charter schools openly run for profit are the majority of charter schools in the state.

    Major owners of capital have been behind charter schools for three decades and the original architects of charter schools approached charter schools from a capital-centered perspective. Charter schools have always been a textbook top-down neoliberal project from the very beginning; they have never been a grass-roots phenomenon.

    But even so-called non-profit charter schools engage in many for-profit activities as well. In practice, the distinction between non-profit and for-profit is a distinction without a difference; non-profits can and do make profits and they can and do often distribute profits in questionable and unethical ways. Some believe that the classification “non-profit” may actually be more nefarious than the “for-profit” classification. On the one hand, “non-profit” sounds more benign and less crass than “for-profit,” and on the other hand it conceals the many connections non-profit corporations have with various private interests preoccupied with maximizing profit. This is also where the idea that privately-operated charter schools are fundamentally pay-the-rich schemes comes from.

    In this connection, since 1994 the Federal Government has funneled millions of public dollars to privately-operated segregated charter schools every year through the bi-partisan Federal Charter Schools Program (CSP)—all while thousands of public schools across the country have gone under-funded. Even though charter schools have no legitimate claim to public funds, over the course of 25 years more than $5 billion has been funneled away from public schools and into charter schools through this federal program. Like many other federal programs, the public is generally unaware of this program and has never had any meaningful say in its creation, operation, and development.

    In FY 2020, the CSP received an annual appropriation of $440 million for the second consecutive year, the highest-ever funding level in the program’s long history.

    But with growing backlash against charter schools and more demands for funding cuts to the CSP, the House Appropriations Committee in Congress is taking note and proposing at least some small superficial changes. Thus, recently, in the course of preparing budget resolutions for the coming fiscal year the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a small cut of $40 million for the next fiscal cycle, reducing CSP funding from $440 million a year to $400 million a year. In the scheme of things this is a miniscule amount.

    Upon hearing about the proposed small funding cut charter school promoters (e.g., the billionaire-backed National Alliance for Public Charter Schools) wasted no time expressing their pious outrage, cynically calling the cut “particularly egregious.”

    Much of this public money goes to fund for-profit charter schools and the U.S. House of Representatives wants to restrict the flow of public funds to for-profit charter schools, especially after the publication of numerous reports over the past 2-3 years exposing extensive fraud, waste, and corruption in the program and the crisis-prone charter school sector itself. Some of these reports are available through the Network for Public Education. The National Education Policy Center has also exposed endless problems in the troubled charter school sector. The point of the budget bill is to prohibit any funds going to “a charter school that contracts with a for-profit entity to operate, oversee or manage the activities of the school.” Currently, thousands of unaccountable and segregated charter schools governed by unelected officials are run, managed, or overseen by low-quality, for-profit companies rife with conflicts of interests. Many believe it is immoral to make profits off kids and human social responsibilities like education.

    Charter school promoters are cynically claiming that Congress somehow hates kids because they do not want public money to enrich owners of capital. Charter school promoters want the public to believe that a minuscule cut of $40 million that they have no legitimate claim to in the first place is going to cause the sky to fall and cause grave damage to the profits of capitalist firms that manage charter schools. They have even claimed that such a small cut will end the ability of privately-operated charter schools to engage in any kind of contracting with outside entities and therefore public schools should also be prevented from contracting with any outside contractors. This is false. The House bill does not say anything like that.

    It should also be recalled that charter schools are already awash in tens of billions of dollars a year that they have siphoned from public schools attended by millions of minority students. Charter schools also receive millions of dollars every year from venture philanthropists and, because they are private entities, charter schools were, unlike public schools, able to seize billions of public dollars from PPP funds from the CARES Act. Charter school promoters are always trying to pressure the public to believe that they are financially beleaguered and always victims while trying to be saviors.

    While it is unlikely that Congress will represent the public will and eventually cut a miniscule $40 million from the CSP program, charter school promoters are terrified that the door is opening more widely to the idea of rejecting charter schools and the idea that charter schools have no valid claim to public funds.

    Charter school promoters believe they are winning the ideological war raging around charter schools and school privatization. But the facts show every day that privatization exacerbates many problems and solves nothing in terms of the public interest. Privatization in every sector harms democracy, quality, and accountability. Privatization enriches a handful of people while taking money out of the economy and increasing costs, inefficiency, and corruption.

    The coming months and years will grow more difficult for charter school promoters and the troubled charter school sector. The war is far from over. Things will become more heated. Opposition to charter schools is growing in a steady methodical way, gaining momentum in an organic and substantive way that leaves people with a real conviction in the necessity to oppose charter schools and defend public education and the public interest. This battle is only going to intensify. Through many twists and turns, the old is slowly dying and decaying while the fresh and new is gradually arising. It is no longer a matter of if the public will eventually prevail, but when the public will prevail against major owners of capital.

    The post Charter School Promoters Defend Antisocial Culture of Maximum Profit first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • President Biden’s Farcical Antimonopoly Executive Order

    Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation—tweet from President Joe Biden, July 9, 2021

    Capitalism is exploitation, period. Lol—a twitter response to Biden’s tweet, July 9, 2021

    Not a day goes by in which major owners of capital and their political representatives do not promote illusions and disinformation about the obsolete capitalist economic system. The ruling elite and their entourage rejected economic science and embraced irrationalism, incoherence, and dogmatism more than a century ago. They are unable and unwilling to offer any useful analysis of economic realities. Nothing they put forward helps advance public understanding of the economy. The mainstream news, for example, is saturated with endless mind-numbing nonsensical economic headlines. It is no accident that mainstream economics has long been called the dismal science.

    The internal core logic and intrinsic operation of capital ensures greater poverty, inequality, and monopoly over time. This is the inherent nature of capital. It is how capital moves and develops. These catastrophes are not the result of external forces, extenuating circumstances, or “bad people” making “bad decisions.” They are not the outcome of ill-conceived policies made by self-serving, immoral, or uninformed people. These worsening problems did not arise because something is wrong with the intentions of some individuals who make antisocial decisions. Such notions are facile.

    While individuals have consciousness, autonomy, self-determination, and agency, many phenomena (e.g., laws of economic development) operate objectively outside the will of individuals; they do not depend on the will of individuals. The laws of motion governing economic phenomena can be known, controlled, and directed, but not extinguished; they have to be consciously mastered, harnessed, and directed in a way that meets the needs of all.

    Capital is first and foremost an unequal social relationship, not a person or a thing. This unequal social relationship is relentlessly reproduced in today’s society, preventing the healthy balanced extended reproduction of society. On the one side of this unequal social relationship are the majority who own nothing but their labor power and on the other side are a tiny handful who own the means of production and live off the labor of others.

    Major owners of capital are the personification of capital, the embodiment of capital. This critical theoretical insight helps us avoid the rabbit hole of personal intentions and personal will, and allows us instead to objectively locate greed, insecurity, inequality, poverty, unemployment, endless debt, and other tragedies in the intrinsic built-in nature, logic, and movement of capital itself.

    One of these is the inexorable tendency of competition to lead to monopoly under capitalism. Competition means winners and losers. By definition, not everyone can win when competing. Competition means rivalry for supremacy. Thousands compete in the Olympics, for example, but only a select few (“winners”) go home with a gold medal.1 It is no accident that the economy, media, and politics are heavily monopolized by a handful of billionaires while billions of people who actually produce the wealth in society and run society remain marginalized and disempowered.

    This brutal reality cannot be reversed or overcome with the utterance of a few platitudes, the passage of some policies, or the creation of some agencies that claim to be able to fix the outdated economic system, especially when all of the above come from billionaires themselves.

    On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.

    The order is about 7,000 words long and full of anticonscious statements. Disinformation pervades the entire order.

    The opening paragraph begins with the following disinformation:

    By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to promote the interests of American workers, businesses, and consumers, it is hereby ordered….

    Here, “American workers, businesses, and consumers” are casually misequated and no mention is made of citizens or humans. The implication is that consumerism is normal, healthy, and desirable, and that workers and big business somehow have the same aims, world outlook, and interests. This conceals the fact that owners of capital and workers have antagonistic irreconcilable interests and that people exist as humans and citizens, not just utilitarian consumers and shoppers in a taken-for-granted system based on chaos, anarchy, and violence.

    Disinformation is further escalated in the next paragraph:

    A fair, open, and competitive marketplace has long been a cornerstone of the American economy, while excessive market concentration threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers.

    “Market concentration” has been the norm for generations. Monopolies, cartels, and oligopolies have been around since the late 1800s. Mergers and acquisitions have been taking place non-stop for decades. The so-called “free market” largely disappeared long ago. Objectively, there can be no fairness in a system rooted in wage-slavery and empire-building. Wage-slavery is the precondition for the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. It is not a recipe for prosperity and security for all. This is also why inequality, tyranny, violence, and surveillance have been growing over the years. Moreover, what “threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers” is the ongoing political and economic exclusion of people from control over the economy and their lives by the financial oligarchy. There can be no liberty, accountability, and welfare when most people are deprived of real decision-making power and major owners of capital make all the decisions. Problems would not constantly worsen if people had control over their lives. The “best allocation of resources” cannot be made when the economy is carved up, fractured, and controlled by competing owners of capital.

    Although recurring economic crises for well over a century have repeatedly discredited “free market” ideology, the 7,000-word executive order is saturated with the language of “choice,” “competition,” and “consumers.” This is the same worn-out language used by privatizers of all hues at home and abroad.

    Further, while the executive order gives many examples of “economic consolidation” in numerous sectors, the government is not interested in creating a self-reliant vibrant diverse economy that meets the needs of all. It is not committed to reversing “the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony.” Numerous antitrust laws have not stopped either. Big mergers and acquisitions have been going on for years. Rather, the executive order is an attempt to restructure economic and political arrangements among different factions of the wealthy elite; it reflects a new stage or form of inter-capitalist rivalry for even greater domination of the economy by fewer owners of capital. In other words, moving forward, the economy will remain monopolized by a few monopolies. Wealth is only going to become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years ahead. Mountains of data from hundreds of sources document growing wealth and income inequality every year.

    The bulk of the executive order is filled with endless directives, strategies, rules, and suggestions for how to curb “unfair practices” and promote “fairness” and “competition.” But these all ring hollow given concrete realities and past experience.

    Today, governments at all levels have been taken over by global private monopoly interests and have become instruments of decisions made on a supranational basis. There is a fine-tuned revolving door between officials from government and the private sector; they have become synonymous for all essential purposes. The same people who run major corporations also serve in high-level government positions where they advance the narrow interests of the private sector and then they leave government and return to their high-level corporate positions. There is a reason why the majority of members of Congress are millionaires. The Executive Branch in the United States, especially the President’s Office, is a major tool for the expression of the will of the most powerful monopolies. This is why billions of dollars are spent every few years to select the President of the country.

    A modern economy must be controlled and directed by workers themselves. Only such an economy can provide for the needs of all and avoid endless economic distortions. Uneven economic development, “unfair” arrangements, “market concentration,” monopolies, oligopolies, and recurring crises cannot be avoided so long as those who actually produce the social product have no control over the social product. Workers have first claim to the wealth they produce and have the right to decide how, where, and when that wealth is used. Major owners of capital are historically superfluous and a big block to progress. They are not needed for a healthy vibrant self-reliant economy that meets the needs of all.

    1. Under capitalism the ideology of competition also falsely assumes scarcity because if nothing was scare then there would be no need for competition.
    The post President Biden’s Farcical Antimonopoly Executive Order first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter Schools: Oversight and Accountability Versus Validity and Legitimacy

    One view of change when it comes to charter schools is that charter schools are awful for various reasons, especially when it comes to funding arrangements, and that what is needed is better oversight, regulation, and accountability of privately-operated charter schools so that they stop “bilking the system” and stop harming public schools that educate the majority of students.

    More accountability and oversight are certainly better than no accountability and oversight, but the charter school sector has operated with neither for 30 years.

    The key question is: do charter schools have any valid or legitimate claim to public funds, resources, and facilities in the first place? With or without oversight, should charter schools be receiving a single public penny at all? What right do charter schools have to public wealth produced by workers?

    The only way to settle these questions is to deeply appreciate the critical difference between public and private and then ascertain whether charter schools are public schools or not. It is well-known, for example, that simply declaring something is public 50 times a day does not automatically and spontaneously make it public.

    The public/private question has been answered by a long list of charter school investigators: charter schools are not public schools, they are not even run by elected individuals and cannot levy taxes like public schools. Charter schools differ from public schools in many critical ways and function like privatized, marketized, corporatized entities. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not political subdivisions of the state; many operate openly as for-profit schools and many more are “managed” by for-profit corporations. Charter schools and public schools differ on organizational, legal, philosophical, and operational grounds. They are simply not the same. Thus, for example, charter schools are heavily driven by “free market” ideology. Charter school promoters see education as a commodity, not a social responsibility, and they treat parents and students as consumers and shoppers, not humans and citizens with rights that must be guaranteed in practice by government. A fend-for-yourself ethos pervades the crisis-prone charter school sector. It is no surprise that more than 3,000 charter schools have closed in just three decades. Chaos, anarchy, instability, and corruption are rampant in the highly segregated charter school sector.

    If deregulated charter schools wish to exist, they can exist, but they must not have access to any public funds, resources, and facilities that legitimately belong to public schools. They have no valid claim to public wealth. At no time should a private entity be able to seize public resources that belong to the public sector. Such a setup distorts the economy and undermines education. Accountability and oversight will not fix that.

    The millionaires and billionaires behind charter schools are not interested in accountability, transparency, or oversight; they are determined to engage in more neoliberal restructuring of the state so as to maximize profit as fast as possible in the context of a continually failing economy. Charter schools are pay-the-rich schemes that have nothing to do with improving schools or achievement. They are promoted under the veneer of high ideals but cannot be prettified. Charter schools are a form of state-organized corruption to pay the rich. If the tens of billions of public dollars and public facilities seized annually from public schools by charter schools were returned to public schools then students, teachers, and society would be much better off.

    The post Charter Schools: Oversight and Accountability Versus Validity and Legitimacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Democrats Long-time Supporters of Charter Schools

    There is a rapidly-growing body of scholarly and popular literature exposing, analyzing, and rejecting charter schools. While the analytical rigor and overall quality of this expanding content is steadily improving, it remains riddled with conceptual, ideological, and theoretical shortcomings that undermine the public interest.

    One of the most stubborn themes in this regard is the notion, espoused frequently by many charter school critics, that charter schools are promoted mainly by conservatives, republicans, right-wingers, or libertarians. The implication is that democrats, lefties, or progressives are not really major promoters of charter schools and that the real problem is conservatives, republicans, etc.

    Prominent democrats who have supported or continue to support these privately-operated contract schools run by unelected individuals include the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of California Gavin Newsom, President Joe Biden, and former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton also supports charter schools. Even so-called “more lefty” democrats like senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have not really come out and resolutely opposed charter schools. Corey Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, and a long list of other democrats also fall into this retrogressive camp. And for their part, Democratic candidates in New York City’s 2021 mayoral race are openly and proudly boasting about their warm embrace of crisis-prone charter schools. It is as if voluminous research and extensive experience exposing endless problems with deregulated charter schools do not even exist; both are instantly wiped out by anti-consciousness.

    If one were to examine the record of the country’s 50 governors, 50 state legislatures, all members of Congress, and the mayors of many cities, they would easily find a very large number of democrats who support charter schools or do not put up any serious opposition to them. This pleases the millionaires and billionaires behind charter schools.

    Segregated, unaccountable, deunionized charter schools with high teacher turnover rates have always had bipartisan support; they have never been only a republican, conservative, or right-wing phenomenon. Other destructive policies like high-stakes standardized tests and various teacher evaluation systems have also had reliable support from a large number of democrats coast to coast. Democrats at all levels of government have also long supported cuts to education funding and healthcare funding while voting for funding for various wars and imperialist aggression. To be sure, over the decades numerous democrats at all levels of government have supported many different antisocial ideas, policies, and arrangements.

    It should be recalled that charter schools are segregated, plagued by corruption, run by unelected individuals, largely deunionized, and unaccountable. Hardly a week goes by without news of someone being arrested in the charter school sector, which represents barely seven percent of all schools. Charter schools also spend lots of money on advertising, act like private entities, dodge transparency, violate open meeting laws, and have more inexperienced teachers and fewer nurses than public schools. They have been known to greatly inflate their student waitlists as well. Hundreds of charter schools close every year for financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or poor academic performance. Many charter schools do not even offer transportation for students, siphon enormous sums of money from under-funded public schools, over-test students, and routinely engage in discriminatory enrollment practices as well. Other problems could be cited.

    It is critical to make a clean break from the unaccountable cartel party system of government and come to terms with the demise of liberalism and liberal institutions. Neither can open the path of progress to society. The outdated two parties of the rich have no prosocial solutions and refuse to modernize politics so as to empower the people to be sovereign decision-makers who decide the aim and direction of education and all the other affairs of society. People are under no obligation to “work with” an anachronistic setup that perpetuates the privilege of narrow private interests. People do not want to spend all their time humiliatingly begging politicians to serve the public interest.

    Thinking, analyzing, and acting independently and speaking up in our own name is necessary at this time. All the old arrangements are obsolete and cannot open a path forward. The existing liberal democratic political institutions are blocking social progress. In this sense, it is an exciting time to think “outside the box,” to think independently, to think anew, and give rise to a new politics and outlook that rejects the historically superfluous rich and their political representatives. It can be done. In the hands of the people, power can be wielded quickly and decisively to accomplish great things that should have been attained long ago.

    The post Democrats Long-time Supporters of Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New Jersey State Supreme Court Opposes Public Interest, Endorses Segregated Charter Schools

    Consistent with an antisocial neoliberal outlook, the New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled on June 22, 2021 that seven segregated charter schools in Newark can continue to expand. While the court made some perfunctory statements suggesting that it was critical of the well-documented harm caused by privately-operated charter schools, everyone knows that this is a win for major owners of capital and a loss for public schools and the public interest. No one believes city and state officials will take any serious action to reverse the increased segregation caused by privately-operated charter schools run by unelected individuals. A pro-social human-centered decision would have said no to charter school expansion, upheld the public interest, and defended public schools. The public does not need more deregulated charter schools, which is why opposition to these non-transparent contract schools keeps growing.

    It is well-known that charter schools hurt the public interest by depriving public schools of funds, increasing segregation, being non-transparent, fostering corruption, and delivering poor academic results.

    Currently, privately-operated charter schools in Newark siphon more than $260 million a year from the Newark Public School District. That is a huge loss which results in cuts to many valuable programs and services serving thousands of poor and low-income minority families. This assault on minority families comes, ironically, at a time when the nation is affirming Juneteenth.

    The New Jersey Supreme Court ruling reflects a continuing trend in which courts across the country are increasingly upholding a neoliberal outlook in their decisions. Courts across the country continue to impose capital-centered interests on society while dismissing human-centered interests. When it comes to cases like these, the courts clearly favor narrow private interests. To be sure, all the main levers of state power in society are becoming more neoliberal at this time, which spells more danger ahead for the public interest.

    It is worth noting that most New Jersey charter schools are deunionized and, like private businesses, they were able to double-dip into Federal CARES Funding. Public schools were not.

    Equally troubling, over the years 20 New Jersey charter schools have had their charters revoked, 10 have “voluntarily surrendered their charter,” and nearly 20 more have not had their charters renewed.  That is a lot of failure and disappointment in a short period of time. Is this what successful education “innovation” looks like? Who supports schools that open and close frequently? These deregulated schools run by unelected officials have left thousands of minority families high and dry while making a handful of people richer. How does this combat racism and inequality?

    Pro-social forces are determined to keep opposing the privatization of public schools. Society does not need more rich individuals, charter school corporations, and non-educators destroying public schools and undermining the common good. Public schools must remain under public control at all times and not be outsourced to those who want to cash in on kids.

    According to the New Jersey Department of Education, as of May 2019 there were about 52,000 students enrolled in 88 charter schools in New Jersey. More than 90% of the 36,000+ students who attend the Newark Public School District are minorities. The city’s poverty rate currently exceeds 27%.

    The post New Jersey State Supreme Court Opposes Public Interest, Endorses Segregated Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Neoliberal State Restructuring: Charter School Promoters Bypass Elected Governance and Impose Rule By Decree

    While democracy has always been limited and restricted in societies based on the “free market” and private ownership, one of the main things detested by the pro-privatization fanatics behind segregated charter schools operated by unelected individuals are the long-standing duly-elected school boards that govern America’s 100,000 public schools. Publicly-elected school boards are a huge thorn in the side of the millionaires and billionaires behind deregulated charter schools.

    Currently, many public school boards in America can exercise a certain degree of power and authority when it comes to approving or terminating a charter school’s contract. Indeed, many public school boards are increasingly saying no to more charter school applications and renewals given the big problems plaguing the charter school sector and the harmful effects charter schools have on public schools, the economy, society, and the national interest. It is clear that 30 years after they appeared in America, many are not on board with privately-operated charter schools that siphon enormous sums of money from public schools and generate poor results at many levels.

    In Texas, Iowa, and elsewhere charter school promoters are working tirelessly with neoliberal state officials and legislators to bypass the elected boards that run public schools in order to replace them with entities that are answerable only to them. These entities are designed to circumvent the public authority enshrined in public school boards and typically consist of appointed individuals not accountable to the public. They usually take the form of “commissions,” “control boards,” “emergency financial managers,” “outside monitors,” or some reconfiguration of an existing government agency that significantly changes who decides what. In practice, these new entities give charter school corporations and non-educators more authority than the public, which makes it much easier to impose more charter schools on everyone.

    To be sure, these supra-public entities more directly represent capital-centered interests and exclude public authority. Their power is set up to supersede the power of any public official or entity. The rich do not want individuals accountable to the public blocking the creation of new charter schools. This neoliberal strategy is not new but there is an escalation in efforts by the rich to reconfigure state power so as to impose privatization faster and with fewer “democratic obstacles.” To be clear, these top-down heavy-handed neoliberal entities are favored by charter school promoters because they (1) override public opinion, elected bodies, and democratic deliberations, (2) further concentrate power in the hands of charter school promoters, and (3) impose antisocial decisions on the polity with impunity. Objectively, they are a form of tyranny.

    Charter school promoters know that there is stiff non-stop opposition to privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. For this reason, they see rule by decree carried out by executive bodies unaccountable to the public as a pragmatic neoliberal mechanism to override persistent democratic objections to dismantling public education and privatizing schools. Decades of disinformation from charter school promoters has not succeeded in eliminating human social consciousness. From coast to coast, the problems with charter schools are being exposed more rapidly and thoroughly. Major owners of capital know that they cannot impose their narrow private interests on the public without some sort of coercive mechanism to do so.

    More privatization necessarily requires less democracy. This applies to every sector of society and all levels of government. Privatization is wreaking havoc at home and abroad. And the antisocial “Great Reset” agenda of the international financial oligarchy promises even more privatization worldwide. Capital-centered interests and human-centered interests are antagonistic and cannot be harmonized. No one should believe that working people and owners of capital have the same interests. Objectively, major owners of capital and the public have opposing interests that cannot be reconciled. This point cannot be overstated.

    In this context, human-centered interests must figure out how to oppose and overcome these and other neoliberal assaults on the public interest and public power. It is not acceptable for a handful of historically superfluous millionaires and billionaires to eliminate public right and impose their narrow will on everyone. Who thinks this is a good idea in the 21st century? The public has no interest in funding pay-the-rich schemes like privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. A modern nation based on mass industrial production needs a large, organized, universal, public, free, world-class, integrated, fully-funded school system that serves everyone and is free of all private influences. There is no legitimate reason for any private actor, organization, or entity to have any access to public funds, resources, programs, and facilities that rightly belong to the public. The distinction between public and private should never be blurred.

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  • Exceptionally Weak Oversight of Virtual Charter Schools is Standard

    While accountability, oversight, and transparency have long been weak in brick-and-mortar charter schools, all three are even weaker when it comes to virtual charter schools, also known as cyber charter schools.1

    This is troubling in and of itself but also because virtual charter schools are notorious for particularly low graduation rates, abysmal academic performance, and widespread fraud and corruption. The news is regularly filled with stories about scandals plaguing virtual charter schools, even more so than the typical scandals and fraud plaguing brick-and-mortar charter schools. And just like brick-and-mortar charter schools, virtual charter schools also under-enroll English Language Learners and students with disabilities. The latest findings on these and other problematic aspects of virtual charter schools are available here.

    According to the Education Commission of the States (January 2020), at least 25 states with charter school laws do not provide additional oversight specific to virtual charter schools . This issue has come up sharply in recent weeks in Pennsylvania, where public demands for greater scrutiny of virtual charter schools have grown louder and become commonplace. Forty-five states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam currently have laws enabling the creation of charter schools, which means that more than half the states with charter school laws eschew much-needed oversight and supervision of cyber charter schools. The long-standing absence of accountability and transparency in the charter school sector is a built-in feature of state charter school laws and not some unfortunate omission or something legislators innocently forgot to enshrine in law.

    It should also be recalled that the entities that “oversee” charter schools (charter school authorizers) are usually not public in the proper sense of the word, which means that there is little real accountability to the public, which is problematic given the billions of dollars siphoned each year by virtual charter schools from public schools. Members of many charter school authorizers across the country are appointed, not elected, individuals.

    In this context many parents often find out the hard way that virtual charter schools are not the fit for their kids that they thought they would be.

    The privatizers and neoliberals behind charter schools are determined to enforce an antisocial aim for education. They have no interest in a pro-social education system that serves nation-building. Privatizers and neoliberals willfully ignore the fact that people do not want or need education arrangements that are unaccountable, segregated, mired in corruption, and a major source of profit for narrow private interests.

    1. Unlike public schools, all charter schools in the U.S. are governed by unelected individuals.
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  • Public Money Used to Increase Segregated Charter Schools

    It is well-documented that charter schools intensify segregation on the basis of ability, language, race, and socioeconomic status. Charter school demographics frequently do not reflect the demographics of public schools in their communities. This is because privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools routinely engage in selective enrollment practices even though they are “schools of choice” ostensibly “open to all.” Families may “choose” a charter school but the charter school ultimately decides who is admitted, who stays, and who doesn’t. Public schools, on the other hand, accept all students at all times. They are also more accountable and transparent than privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools.

    The latest report on federally-funded segregation in the charter school sector comes from the award-winning veteran educator Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education (NPE). Carol has produced several well-researched reports in the past couple of years on extensive fraud, waste, and abuse in the crisis-prone charter school sector. She has focused mainly on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) which annually funnels hundreds of millions of public dollars to charter schools operated by unelected individuals. The program is authorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act.

    Despite many attempts, the federal government has largely ignored multiple public demands to end this state-organized corruption to pay the rich. This is despite the fact that president Joe Biden promised to ban for-profit charter schools and support efforts to bring more accountability to charters. Instead, the Biden administration has stuck to spending $440 million on the Charter Schools Program this year, which is a default win for privately-operated charter schools. Since 1994 the federal government has funneled about $4 billion in public funds to these segregated contract schools through the Charter School Program. Through her previous work, Carol showed that millions of dollars were sent to many charter schools that either never opened or operated only for a few years and then closed, leaving many families high and dry.

    In her latest investigation, Carol shows how public money from the federal Charter Schools Program is being used in North Carolina to strengthen segregation through the mechanism of charter schools. These are alternatively known as “white-flight academies.” Among other things, Carol notes that the justification for the use of many grant monies from the federal Charter Schools Program is often weak and makes no sense. Many disturbing details and cases can be found here. For example, 11 charter schools in North Carolina that received CSP funds “have significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located.” So much for the worn-out assertion by charter school advocates that charter schools are about the civil rights of minority students.

    Sadly, there is no shortage of such examples in many cities across the country. It is not easy to find charter schools that are diverse and integrated. In Rochester, New York, for example, the Genesee Community Charter School is not only known for being predominantly white and wealthy, but also for resisting any attempts to diversify and integrate. The New York State Board of Regents has repeatedly criticized the privately-operated charter school for maintaining a student body that is much wealthier and whiter than the Rochester City School District. The same can be said about the notorious Success Academies charter school chain in New York City. Many of these charter schools, it should also be noted, rely heavily on anachronistic Skinnerian behaviorist practices to enforce student obedience.

    Another troubling twist in the evolution of privately-operated charter schools is the growing use by religious organizations, churches, Catholic schools, and private schools of the charter school mechanism to further segregate communities. This is another expression of the accelerated neoliberal restructuring of state arrangements by powerful private interests to seize public funds in the context of a continually failing economy. In the neoliberal period, public authority is increasingly being usurped to serve privileged private interests in the sphere of education. Private entities of various kinds are eager to fund their operations through the seizure of public funds that belong to the public sector. This parasitic appropriation of public funds by non-transparent and non-diverse private or religious entities usually goes hand in hand with offering fewer services and programs as well (e.g., transportation services and food programs). And more often than not, to make-up for “cost reductions,” parents are pressured or required to donate time and/or money to these private entities.

    Privatized education arrangements are rarely about serving all students, let alone equally. More than anything else, such arrangements reflect and fortify the stratification found in society. They reinforce various inequalities. They do not reduce exclusion and segregation. They are the opposite of unitary public school systems that have emerged around the world to educate all students as part of a modern nation-building project.

    Modern societies based on mass industrial production cannot survive without large, public, free, universal, school systems. Modern societies should not reduce a social necessity and public good like education to a commodity or treat parents and students as consumers who fend-for-themselves in an increasingly chaotic and anarchic education marketplace. A system of winners and losers ensures inequality and belongs in the past.

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  • 30th Anniversary of Charter Schools: Three Decades of Neoliberal Wrecking

    June 4, 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the first charter school law in the United States. Privately-operated charter schools are now legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont have no laws enabling the creation of charter schools.

    About 3.3 million youth are currently enrolled in roughly 7,400 charter schools across the country. By comparison, about 50 million students are enrolled in 100,000 public schools in the U.S. The U.S. public education system has been around for more than 150 years and educates 90% of the nation’s youth.

    While charter schools, also known as contract schools, have grown rapidly over the last three decades, so have the endless serious problems associated with them, including the closure of more than 3,000 charter schools, usually for reasons such as financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or poor academic performance. Scandal, corruption, and controversy have been the main fellow-travelers of these segregated and outsourced schools operated by unelected individuals.

    From the perspective of major owners of capital and their representatives, there is much to celebrate about the 30th anniversary of charter schools, namely the neoliberal restructuring of the state to undermine the American public education system in order to funnel tens of billions of public dollars from public schools into their private hands. Not surprisingly, the rise of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools has been a disaster for public schools, the public interest, society, the economy, and the national interest. The only thing “innovative” about charter schools is their ability to develop new forms of transferring public funds to narrow private interests under the banner of high ideals. Charter schools have always been pay-the-rich schemes that take socially-produced wealth out of the economy and leave the public worse off. As “private-public-partnerships” they represent another form of state-organized corruption to pay the rich. This has been the norm since 1991. Charter schools never started out as a humble, virtuous, organic, pro-social, benign, grass-roots “experiment.” Charter schools are a textbook example of neoliberal arrangements in the sphere of education. Their different forms, shapes, profiles, locations, and sizes do not change their neoliberal essence.

    The public should not forget that charter schools are not public schools and that many, if not most, are not really “tuition-free” or “open to all kids.” It is well-known that charter schools choose parents and students, not the other way around. Charter schools routinely cherry-pick students and engage in discriminatory enrollment practices. It is also the case that many charter school authorizers are not really public in the proper sense of the word either. It is also worth noting that deregulated charter schools are created by private citizens.

    Charter schools have not closed the “opportunity gap” or the “achievement gap.” Thousands have a poor academic track record. Their “autonomy” and “flexibility” to deliver “results” in the name of “accountability,” “choice,” and “competition” is another way of saying that they do not follow the same public standards that apply to public schools and that they operate with impunity. Coast to coast, the gap between charter school hype and charter school realities remains as wide today as it was 30 years ago. Charter schools are notorious for over-promising and under-delivering.

    Charter schools are segregated, deunionized, unaccountable, non-transparent, deregulated schools that spend lots of money on advertising—just like a private business. They usually over-pay administrators, are run by unelected individuals, and cannot levy taxes. They hire more inexperienced and more uncertified teachers than public schools, generally pay teachers less than their public school counterparts, and also tend to have fewer nurses than public schools. Many charter school teachers are not even part of an employee retirement system.

    Charter schools also tend to offer fewer full-fledged services and programs than public schools. Many do not provide transportation or proper food services and sports programs. On top of all this, hundreds of charter schools open and close every year, ensuring chaos, instability, and anarchy in the sphere of education, which is terrible for teaching, learning, and community.

    Importantly, charter school promoters openly and publicly embrace “free market” ideology even though recurring economic crises have thoroughly discredited such an antisocial ideology. It is generally recognized that there is little that is “free” about the “free market” in a highly monopolized economy with a fine-tuned revolving door between government and rich individuals. With no sense of irony, charter school promoters casually talk about students and parents as consumers and shoppers instead of humans and citizens with basic rights that a modern government is duty-bound to guarantee in practice. Charter school promoters believe that a social Darwinist outlook based on winners and losers—competition—is wonderful for education. They think this is a good healthy thing. They endorse the idea and strategy that “edupreneurs” should use public dollars to run segregated schools governed by unelected individuals. They loathe the American public education system which has produced millions of educated individuals who have built the nation. They have no conception of education as a social responsibility and a human right that must be guaranteed. In the context of a modern socialized economy, charter schools increase social irresponsibility and anarchy in the sphere of education.

    Charter school advocates are also averse to grasping the critical difference between public and private. They prefer to blur this distinction for private financial gain. Charter school advocates believe that if they assert 50 times a day that a charter school is a public school, then this will cause people to not recognize their privatized, marketized, corporatized character. They think that no one can see charter schools for the pay-the-rich schemes that they are.

    There is nothing to celebrate about neoliberal education arrangements called charter schools. They have not solved any problems, just created more. Charter schools cannot be prettified no matter how hard their supporters and promoters try. They are terribly inequitable and do not meet the nation’s needs. Thirty years later all we have is even more controversy and scandal surrounding charter schools. Cyber charter schools and so-called “no-excuses” charter schools are especially scandalous. Is this what a successful “education experiment” looks like? What evidence is there that the next 30 years will be any better?

    Charter schools have changed the American education landscape for the worse, which is why opposition to them is steadily-growing, not diminishing. This is bound to happen as the many problems with charter schools become more exposed and analyzed. The public gains nothing from funneling socially-produced wealth into the hands of narrow private interests concerned with cashing in on kids. Neoliberal arrangements in education are a big step backward, not something to rejoice.

    One of the ironies in this entire saga is that one of the oldest charter schools in Minnesota, home to the first charter school law in the U.S., was recently shut down for the usual litany of serious problems affecting most charter schools. Many charter schools have a short shelf life. Hundreds close every year, leaving many minority families feeling angry and abandoned. Not surprisingly, charter school promoters rarely highlight, let alone openly and honestly discuss, the many grave problems plaguing the crisis-prone charter school sector. They prefer instead to present a Disney-esque portrait of charter schools, something akin to a fairy tale.

    The next 30 years can be much better and much different. We can have a public school system free of the influence of privileged private interests. We can and must have a public school system controlled by a public authority worthy of the name.

    Moving forward, it is critical for defenders of public education and the public interest to keep developing and strengthening the movement against privatization in general and school privatization in particular. This is an exciting time to keep galvanizing more people from all walks of life to keep public funds, resources, and facilities in public hands. History and justice are on our side.

    Capital-centered interests will always oppose human-centered interests. Fortunately, there is a growing recognition that privatizers and neoliberals are historically superfluous and a big burden on society.

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  • New York: Oppose Charter School Cap Increase

    Currently, New York State limits the number of charter schools allowed in the state to 460. In 1998, when the state passed its charter school law, the numerical limit was 100. The law has been amended three times since 1998 to not only increase the number of charter schools allowed in the state but to also further lower the standards of accountability and transparency required of privately-operated charter schools.

    Putting aside the issues of inflated charter school waiting lists, widespread corruption, discriminatory enrollment practices, high teacher turnover rates, and the fact that 50 charter schools have closed in New York State over the past 20 years, this dramatic neoliberal expansion in the number of charter schools allowed in the state has produced serious problems for public schools and charter schools themselves. The biggest problem has been charter schools depriving public schools of billions of dollars in public funds, resources, and facilities while delivering unimpressive results on several levels. It is also worth noting that with black and Hispanic students making up more than 90 percent of the students enrolled in New York City’s charter schools, these schools are some of the most segregated in the country. Such a setup not only undermines public education but also harms the economy, society, and the national interest.

    While nearly 400 charter schools have been authorized to date, about 325 were open in 2020-2021. New York City alone is home to about 265 charter schools. The City reached its charter school limit in March 2019. About 92 open/unused charter school slots remain available outside New York City. There are other statistics pertaining to charter schools in New York State that account for why these numbers don’t always round up evenly (e.g., the number of “conversion” charter schools established in the state over the years), but these are reliable numbers to go by. The main issue is the statewide cap on charter schools and how this is currently affecting New York City in particular.

    Not surprisingly, major owners of capital are once again deploying a pitch fork mentality to bully legislators, leaders, and state and city officials to override the public interest and increase the cap on charter schools allowed in New York City. For neoliberals and privatizers there are few pay-the-rich schemes more profitable than deregulated charter schools run by unelected individuals. Owning and operating more segregated charter schools is critical for owners of capital desperately trying to counteract the law of the falling rate of profit. The neoliberal restructuring of state laws is critical to maximizing profit as fast as possible, regardless of how damaging this is to the natural and social environment. Neoliberals and privatizers want laws changed in order to advance their narrow private interests at the expense of the common good—and all of this ruinous activity is carried out under the veneer of high ideals (e.g., “empowering parents” and offering “choices”).

    While preventing a rise in the number of charter schools allowed in New York State is a good thing, it would be immensely better if no public funds, resources, and buildings found their way into the hands of charter school owners and operators. These public resources are produced by working people and belong to the public, not narrow private interests. Capitalist firms like Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) and Education Management Organizations (EMOs) should not have access to public funds and resources that belong to the public. Ending the flow of public funds, resources, and facilities to the private interests that operate non-profit and for-profit charter schools would greatly benefit public schools, society, the economy, and the national interest.

    The public should remain vigilant about the non-stop effort by pro-privatization fanatics to push for an increase in the number of charter schools allowed in the state and city. No one should be fooled by their grandstanding and twisted logic. Now is the time to declare a moratorium on all new charter schools and to ensure that public funds, resources, and facilities remain in public hands only.

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  • School Privatizers Restructure State of Iowa to Seize Public Funds

    School privatizers and their political representatives are relentless in their efforts to restructure the state along neoliberal lines so as to restrict democracy and funnel more public funds into private hands. Privatization is a main mechanism for enriching major owners of capital, eliminating democratic arrangements, and degrading the public interest in the context of a continually failing economy. Privatization allows neoliberals to temporarily avert the law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism.

    Recently, the Governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed a law that significantly increases the ability of major owners of capital to siphon public funds from public schools by creating more charter schools while also eliminating long-standing democratic arrangements, namely local school control over what happens in local school districts.

    Under the new law, neoliberals seeking to privately appropriate public money can circumvent local public school boards and apply directly to the State Board of Education to start a charter school operated by unelected individuals.

    The public has no say over this or what happens to the taxes they pay.

    The new law no longer requires the approval of privately-operated charter schools by local school districts and sets the stage for even less accountability and transparency from charter school operators. The new law will further deprive Iowa’s public schools of much-needed funds produced by working people.

    Through such top-down actions, the governor and other representatives of the rich refuse to take action to fully-fund and support Iowa’s public schools and have instead decided to make families and students fend-for-themselves when it comes to getting an education. This chaos and anarchy will be unleashed in the name of “choice” and “empowering parents.”

    Currently, there are only two charter schools in Iowa. This number will increase rapidly now that the door has been opened to more effortlessly establishing neoliberal school arrangements. It is much easier for privatizers to get approval from one high-level state authority (e.g., the State Board of Education) than it is from trying to get approval from one of dozens or hundreds of local state authorities like public schools.

    There are 100,000 public schools in the U.S. and they are governed by school boards comprised of publicly elected individuals. School boards are a main form of elected governance that neoliberals and privatizers are desperate to eliminate because “too much democracy” hinders privatization and the elimination of the public interest. Neoliberals and privatizers want the public to believe that the triumph of their capital-centered will over the public will is in the best interest of humanity.

    Far from solving any problems though, privatization intensifies inequality, reduces efficiency, lessens transparency, increases corruption, raises costs, diminishes workers’ voices, lowers the quality of services, takes money out of the economy, and undermines the general interests of society. It is through these antisocial arrangements and methods that owners of capital are able to seize large sums of public wealth to temporarily counteract the law of the falling rate of profit under capitalism.

    It won’t be long before the public begins to hear of the scandals, poor performance, segregation, arrests, fraud, and corruption that invariably accompany charter schools. Speaking up now and planning new forms of action with analysis to advance the public interest are critical. Privatizers and neoliberals are not invincible, they can be defeated. But even when they are defeated people must be vigilant to ensure that privatizers and neoliberals do not succeed in any future attempts to violate the public interest.

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  • Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness

    Charter school promoters have always relied on disinformation and irrationalism to justify the existence of charter schools, but in recent weeks and months it appears that a new, more pernicious, form of self-serving disinformation and irrationalism has reared its head.

    This new disinformation and irrationalism seeks to further debase social consciousness and takes the form of casually and repeatedly declaring the exact and complete opposite of what research and experience confirm. The hope is that just by asserting and declaring something repeatedly, people will spontaneously believe it and abandon any conscious act of investigation.

    Charter school promoters are increasingly desperate to make their pay-the-rich schemes look and sound like they are harmless and exist for the good of humanity. They have to do this because consciousness of the retrogressive character of privately-operated charter schools keeps steadily growing.

    Several forms of this newly concerted strategy of disinformation and irrationalism have emerged.

    The main one, however, has to do with school funding. Common sense, experience, and years of systematic research have shown that non-profit and for-profit charter schools have many deleterious effects on public school finances. When a student leaves a public school and enrolls in a segregated charter school, the public school loses money and often has to cut valuable programs and services. And this usually takes place without a commensurate cut in other expenses due to economies of scale issues. Charter school promoters are now publicly and fraudulently claiming that charter schools actually improve the finances of public schools and that public schools are financially better off when charter schools pop up in their neighborhood.1

    Such twisted logic serves to divert attention away from the obvious fact that public schools always lose money when privately-operated charter schools pop up in their neighborhood. It also conceals the fact that charter schools actually receive billions of public dollars from all levels of government, as well as large donations from private sources, including venture philanthropists. In addition, it obscures the fact that non-profit and for-profit charter schools engage in endless forms of unethical and illegal profiteering while lowering the overall level of education in society. Embezzlement, racketeering, and arrests are commonplace in the crisis-prone charter school sector. Charter school promoters have continually innovated ways to engage in more parasitic private expropriation of social wealth while distorting consciousness about their self-serving actions.

    It is not possible for two education “systems” to compete for the same students and same public funds without winners and losers. This is not a win-win game. There is no non-adversarial scenario here. Competition makes everyone a loser and blocks consciousness of the fact that many programs and needs are basic social responsibilities and human rights that can’t be reduced to an outdated survival-of-the-fittest outlook.

    The “free market” ideology espoused by charter school promoters values individualism, consumerism, and competition, not human rights, stability, and security. Charter school promoters do not believe that public money belongs to the public. Through legislation, they have restructured parts of the state to ensure that public wealth produced by workers leaves public schools and accumulates rapidly in the hands of narrow private interests that run deregulated charter schools that close regularly. The widespread poor academic and financial track record of charter schools, especially virtual charter schools, seems to be an afterthought in this antisocial setup.

    The aim of saying something is the opposite of something is to assault cognition, consciousness, and dignity and, in doing so, undermine opposition to school privatization. Such desperate irrationalism and disinformation seeks to sabotage the social consciousness that is emerging about privately-operated charter schools in particular and the harms of privatization in general.

    Criticism of charter schools is now out in the open and mainstream. People are less fearful about speaking out against charter schools.

    A precious new consciousness is emerging to combat the anticonsciousness promoted by charter school advocates. And in the current context there is reason to believe that this valuable social consciousness will keep growing. The immediate need is to stop charter school expansion and the flow of public funds and resources to privately-operated charter schools.

    1. A quick GoogleNews search produces several recent articles on this theme.
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  • Segregated Unaccountable Charter Schools

    Anyone who has carefully followed charter school news and analysis in recent years knows that privately-operated charter schools are not only segregated but actually increase segregation in the sphere of education. It has become common knowledge that charter schools are notorious for consistently under-enrolling English Language Learners, students with disabilities, homeless students, and other groups of students. Even though they are ostensibly public and “open to all,” most charter schools do not serve all students, let alone equally. Privatized education has never paved the way for all students to have an education.

    But even when non-profit and for-profit charter schools are publicly exposed, cited, and rebuked for discriminatory enrollment practices, they are usually allowed to operate with impunity and to continue to siphon enormous sums of money from public schools that accept all students at all times. Many are frustrated by this persistent lack of accountability by schools that constantly claim to not only be accountable but to be more accountable than the public schools they continually drain large sums of money from. The public does not want to fund schools that frequently cherry pick students. Publicness is about inclusivity, not exclusivity. Public means for the common good, for everyone. To claim that you are a public entity while acting like a private entity is misleading.

    While there is no shortage of charter schools engaged in discriminatory enrollment practices, the most recent example comes from Los Altos, California where the K-8 Bullis Charter School has consistently failed to enroll a diverse student population resembling the make-up of the community. Mountain View Voice reports that, “The Santa Clara County Board of Education voted 6-1 Wednesday [May 5, 2021] to reprimand Bullis Charter School for what it describes as a chronic failure to enroll enough low-income students, Latino students and children with disabilities.” Lopsided enrollment” at Bullis Charter School has been “flagged as a continued challenge” for years. While the “charter school has grown to roughly 1,100 children in recent years, its diversity has not improved.”

    Shali Sirkay, president of the Los Altos School District board said that, “The staggering inequity in their enrollment becomes truly intolerable, and of a magnitude that we cannot ignore…I personally find it inconceivable and irresponsible that an organization receiving public funds can continue practices that have only proven to sustain and exacerbate this exclusivity.”

    Bullis Charter School is said to face the threat of closure in the near future if it does not take concrete action to become more inclusive and diverse. Its current charter expires June 2022.

    One of the persistent challenges in meaningfully reforming privately-operated charter schools is that charter schools were consciously and intentionally conceived and fostered decades ago as an arrangement to circumvent many pubic standards, attributes, and requirements. They were set up to be very different from public schools—organizationally, legally, philosophically, and operationally. They are not state agencies like public schools. Charter schools are privatized education arrangements run by unelected individuals. They may be called “public,” but charter schools are not public in the proper sense of the word. Indeed, charter school promoters go out of their way to insist that charter schools are “free market” schools based on individualism, “choice,” consumerism, and competition. As deregulated schools, charter schools are not required to follow most of the laws, rules, and regulations governing public schools; they have “autonomy” and “flexibility” to do as they please. President Bill Clinton, a big supporter of privately-operated charter schools, once called charter schools “schools with no rules.” Some charter school operators even get defensive when they are pushed to diversify their schools. The notion that charter schools can be something other than charter schools is objectively not in the cards.

    To prevent the endless problems produced by charter schools, all charter school laws would have to be significantly and rapidly revamped. But then this would undercut the underlying logic, aim, and rationale of such laws and their emergence decades ago. This is unlikely to happen.

    The only thing that can significantly and quickly reduce, even reverse, most of the damage incurred by charter schools is ending school privatization and, along with it, the flow of any public funds, resources, and buildings to charter schools. Privately-operated charter schools and all the severe problems they have been giving rise to for decades would disappear if they were deprived of colossal sums of public money, resources, and buildings that legitimately belong only to the public. Without tens of billions of public dollars and other public resources being siphoned by privately-operated charter schools, public schools and the public interest would be advanced.

    Real accountability and a new human-centered direction in education and society begin with ensuring that government does not funnel socially-produced wealth away from the public and into the hands of narrow private interests. A government controlled and directed by neoliberal interests will routinely violate the public interest.

    The post Segregated Unaccountable Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • More Than 1,650 Charter Schools Closed in Seven Years

    According to the U.S. Department of Education, 1,654 charter schools closed between 2010-2011 and 2016-2017.  That is an average of 236 charter school closures per year, which is a big bite out of the total number of charter schools in a short period of time. Today there exist roughly 7,300 charter schools, which is less than 7% of all schools in the U.S. Given the endless problems with transparency and open accurate reporting in the charter school sector it is not unreasonable to assume that the number of charter schools that have closed in this time period is actually larger than what the U.S. Department of Education reports.

    Privately-operated charter schools are notorious for over-promising and under-delivering on many commitments and assurances. The chasm between charter school rhetoric and charter schools reality has always been large. The massive onslaught of disinformation about privately-operated charter schools has created a situation where facts like the closure of thousands of charter schools over the years have been drowned out by never-ending happy news about charter schools. The pressure to not engage in a conscious act of finding out what is really transpiring in the unstable charter school sector has left many at a disadvantage that harms everyone. Only systematic research and analysis can arm a person to see and appreciate this persistent gap between charter school words and charter school deeds.

    For decades the public has been told by charter school promoters and their allies that public schools are lousy and incapable of “saving” students, particularly minority students. The public has been repeatedly told that charter schools are a silver bullet that will deliver a bigger bang for the buck and be more accountable than public schools.

    Instead, corruption, fraud, arrests, poor performance, school closures, shady real estate deals, scandalous headlines, and more have increased alongside the surge in charter schools. More segregated charter schools run by unelected individuals has meant more problems for everyone, including charter schools themselves.

    To be sure, charter schools have failed thousands of minority families, distorted the economy, undermined nation-building, and increased many inequalities. No amount of hullabaloo or hype can conceal these realities.

    Privately-operated charter schools have not reduced poverty, inequality, or structural racism. They have not closed the “achievement gap” or stopped the school-to-prison pipeline. They have siphoned money from public schools and intensified segregation, controversy, de-unionization, secrecy, and competition. Cyber charter schools in particular have taken fraud and scandal to levels not seen in even the most irresponsible large corporations.

    If high scores on punitive, time-consuming, expensive, educationally unsound high-stakes standardized tests produced by big for-profit corporations is the measure of a “good education,” then thousands of charters schools have failed to provide a “good education.” More than 3,000 privately-operated charter schools have closed since 1992.

    No doubt, many more charter schools will fail and close in the coming years, leaving even more minority families abandoned and angry. It does not matter much if the reason for closure is financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or poor academic performance, the result is still the same: the public deprived of billions of dollars and thousands of minority families betrayed and left out in the cold. The same worn-out “failure narrative” used by neoliberals and privatizers to justify a private takeover of America’s public schools applies to charter schools themselves.

    Neoliberal school reform has proven time and again to be a major block to progress in education and, by extension, society, the economy, and the nation.

    Charter schools must be prohibited from accessing any public school funds, resources, and buildings. These belong to the 100,000 public schools that serve the nation, economy, society, and public interest. This precious wealth produced by workers must not find its way into the hands of the non-profit and for-profit corporations that run charter schools.

    This article was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2021 at 8:24am and is filed under Charter Schools, Education.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • More Than 1,650 Charter Schools Closed in Seven Years

    According to the U.S. Department of Education, 1,654 charter schools closed between 2010-2011 and 2016-2017.  That is an average of 236 charter school closures per year, which is a big bite out of the total number of charter schools in a short period of time. Today there exist roughly 7,300 charter schools, which is less than 7% of all schools in the U.S. Given the endless problems with transparency and open accurate reporting in the charter school sector it is not unreasonable to assume that the number of charter schools that have closed in this time period is actually larger than what the U.S. Department of Education reports.

    Privately-operated charter schools are notorious for over-promising and under-delivering on many commitments and assurances. The chasm between charter school rhetoric and charter schools reality has always been large. The massive onslaught of disinformation about privately-operated charter schools has created a situation where facts like the closure of thousands of charter schools over the years have been drowned out by never-ending happy news about charter schools. The pressure to not engage in a conscious act of finding out what is really transpiring in the unstable charter school sector has left many at a disadvantage that harms everyone. Only systematic research and analysis can arm a person to see and appreciate this persistent gap between charter school words and charter school deeds.

    For decades the public has been told by charter school promoters and their allies that public schools are lousy and incapable of “saving” students, particularly minority students. The public has been repeatedly told that charter schools are a silver bullet that will deliver a bigger bang for the buck and be more accountable than public schools.

    Instead, corruption, fraud, arrests, poor performance, school closures, shady real estate deals, scandalous headlines, and more have increased alongside the surge in charter schools. More segregated charter schools run by unelected individuals has meant more problems for everyone, including charter schools themselves.

    To be sure, charter schools have failed thousands of minority families, distorted the economy, undermined nation-building, and increased many inequalities. No amount of hullabaloo or hype can conceal these realities.

    Privately-operated charter schools have not reduced poverty, inequality, or structural racism. They have not closed the “achievement gap” or stopped the school-to-prison pipeline. They have siphoned money from public schools and intensified segregation, controversy, de-unionization, secrecy, and competition. Cyber charter schools in particular have taken fraud and scandal to levels not seen in even the most irresponsible large corporations.

    If high scores on punitive, time-consuming, expensive, educationally unsound high-stakes standardized tests produced by big for-profit corporations is the measure of a “good education,” then thousands of charters schools have failed to provide a “good education.” More than 3,000 privately-operated charter schools have closed since 1992.

    No doubt, many more charter schools will fail and close in the coming years, leaving even more minority families abandoned and angry. It does not matter much if the reason for closure is financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or poor academic performance, the result is still the same: the public deprived of billions of dollars and thousands of minority families betrayed and left out in the cold. The same worn-out “failure narrative” used by neoliberals and privatizers to justify a private takeover of America’s public schools applies to charter schools themselves.

    Neoliberal school reform has proven time and again to be a major block to progress in education and, by extension, society, the economy, and the nation.

    Charter schools must be prohibited from accessing any public school funds, resources, and buildings. These belong to the 100,000 public schools that serve the nation, economy, society, and public interest. This precious wealth produced by workers must not find its way into the hands of the non-profit and for-profit corporations that run charter schools.

    The post More Than 1,650 Charter Schools Closed in Seven Years first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing

    Over the years, as more problems with charter schools have been exposed, analyzed, and critiqued, more people have come to see the need for opposing them and for defending public education and the public interest. Criticism and rejection of these privately-operated schools has become more mainstream in recent years and it is safe to say that opposition to charter schools will keep growing so long as neoliberals and privatizers impose more charter schools on society.

    Public school boards and many different education advocacy groups, along with more legislators, former charter school teachers, many public school teachers, countless teacher educators and teacher education students, teacher unions, and myriad rights and justice groups are just some of the forces that are increasingly speaking out and taking action against charter schools. Many others have also heard of charter schools, and even with little or no investigation, they tend to approach charter schools with some skepticism. The days when charter schools were blindly embraced and investigation was deemed unnecessary are gradually fading. More people are doing their homework and learning about the numerous problems these segregated contract schools create.

    Recent Actions

    In April 2021, the Buffalo Public School Board voted to close two Buffalo charter schools that have been failing for years. There is also a legal push to pass a moratorium on charter schools for the next three years in the city. And in the past year even the New York State legislature has also become a little less supportive of charter schools.

    In recent months and years, many more public school boards across the country have also rejected charter school applications or been less hesitant to close failing or corrupt charter schools. For example, the Leon County School Board in Florida recently denied the application of a proposed new charter school. In 2020, the Lee County School Board shut down a charter school in Fort Myers (Florida). In March 2021, the Philadelphia school board unanimously denied five new charter schools. Also in March of this year, the Escondido Union School District (EUSD) board in California unanimously rejected a five-year renewal for Epiphany Prep Charter School. And in January 2021, the Montgomery County Board of Education in Alabama rejected a charter school application. In late 2019, parents and community members called for closing of a Memphis, Tennessee charter school under investigation. Reasons for rejection or closing a charter school usually include poorly-written and poorly-conceived charter school applications, a long record of mismanagement, and/or years of poor academic performance. Such actions are becoming more commonplace from coast to coast. These examples represent a small fraction of public actions against non-profit and for-profit charter schools.

    In Oklahoma, about 200 public school districts have consciously banded together recently to legally challenge the funneling of public school dollars to privately-operated charter schools.

    In New Jersey there is a new court case challenging the expansion of charter schools in that state. And in Pennsylvania, by a margin of 3-1, hundreds of Propel Charter School staff recently voted to form a union to defend their rights because they are routinely violated by their charter school operator. Late last month, 15 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, and various other officials requesting a significant reduction in funding for the federal Charter School Program (CSP) as well as a commitment to ensuring better oversight of charter schools to minimize chronic waste and fraud.

    Many other examples of opposition to charter schools and their practices could be given.

    It should be noted that charter schools, which are run by unelected individuals and are heavily focused on revenue and profit, have been controversial and mired in scandal, corruption, and controversy for 30 years. Thousands have closed since 1992. And collectively, charter schools have deprived public schools of tens of billions of public dollars, leaving them, the economy, and society worse off. With such a record, and given their very nature, it is no surprise that there are even some divisions and conflicts within the crisis-prone charter school sector itself (e.g., brick-and-mortar charter schools versus cyber charter schools).

    The main issue is that social consciousness about the harms of school privatization is growing and that individuals and organizations are increasingly combining action with analysis to oppose school privatization and defend the public interest.

    More actions against charter schools and in favor of public schools is slowly activating and galvanizing the human factor and the social consciousness needed to change the direction of education and society to benefit the public interest. Over time, more possibilities to unite and collaborate against school privatization will present themselves and enable people to resolve problems in a manner that favors them instead of narrow private interests who strive to deprive the public of enormous sums of public wealth.

    The public does not benefit from the ongoing multiplication of charter schools. These contract schools only create more headaches for public schools and for charter schools themselves.

    This article was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2021 at 12:18pm and is filed under Charter Schools, Education, Public Schools, School Privatization, Teachers/Teachers Unions.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing

    Over the years, as more problems with charter schools have been exposed, analyzed, and critiqued, more people have come to see the need for opposing them and for defending public education and the public interest. Criticism and rejection of these privately-operated schools has become more mainstream in recent years and it is safe to say that opposition to charter schools will keep growing so long as neoliberals and privatizers impose more charter schools on society.

    Public school boards and many different education advocacy groups, along with more legislators, former charter school teachers, many public school teachers, countless teacher educators and teacher education students, teacher unions, and myriad rights and justice groups are just some of the forces that are increasingly speaking out and taking action against charter schools. Many others have also heard of charter schools, and even with little or no investigation, they tend to approach charter schools with some skepticism. The days when charter schools were blindly embraced and investigation was deemed unnecessary are gradually fading. More people are doing their homework and learning about the numerous problems these segregated contract schools create.

    Recent Actions

    In April 2021, the Buffalo Public School Board voted to close two Buffalo charter schools that have been failing for years. There is also a legal push to pass a moratorium on charter schools for the next three years in the city. And in the past year even the New York State legislature has also become a little less supportive of charter schools.

    In recent months and years, many more public school boards across the country have also rejected charter school applications or been less hesitant to close failing or corrupt charter schools. For example, the Leon County School Board in Florida recently denied the application of a proposed new charter school. In 2020, the Lee County School Board shut down a charter school in Fort Myers (Florida). In March 2021, the Philadelphia school board unanimously denied five new charter schools. Also in March of this year, the Escondido Union School District (EUSD) board in California unanimously rejected a five-year renewal for Epiphany Prep Charter School. And in January 2021, the Montgomery County Board of Education in Alabama rejected a charter school application. In late 2019, parents and community members called for closing of a Memphis, Tennessee charter school under investigation. Reasons for rejection or closing a charter school usually include poorly-written and poorly-conceived charter school applications, a long record of mismanagement, and/or years of poor academic performance. Such actions are becoming more commonplace from coast to coast. These examples represent a small fraction of public actions against non-profit and for-profit charter schools.

    In Oklahoma, about 200 public school districts have consciously banded together recently to legally challenge the funneling of public school dollars to privately-operated charter schools.

    In New Jersey there is a new court case challenging the expansion of charter schools in that state. And in Pennsylvania, by a margin of 3-1, hundreds of Propel Charter School staff recently voted to form a union to defend their rights because they are routinely violated by their charter school operator. Late last month, 15 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, and various other officials requesting a significant reduction in funding for the federal Charter School Program (CSP) as well as a commitment to ensuring better oversight of charter schools to minimize chronic waste and fraud.

    Many other examples of opposition to charter schools and their practices could be given.

    It should be noted that charter schools, which are run by unelected individuals and are heavily focused on revenue and profit, have been controversial and mired in scandal, corruption, and controversy for 30 years. Thousands have closed since 1992. And collectively, charter schools have deprived public schools of tens of billions of public dollars, leaving them, the economy, and society worse off. With such a record, and given their very nature, it is no surprise that there are even some divisions and conflicts within the crisis-prone charter school sector itself (e.g., brick-and-mortar charter schools versus cyber charter schools).

    The main issue is that social consciousness about the harms of school privatization is growing and that individuals and organizations are increasingly combining action with analysis to oppose school privatization and defend the public interest.

    More actions against charter schools and in favor of public schools is slowly activating and galvanizing the human factor and the social consciousness needed to change the direction of education and society to benefit the public interest. Over time, more possibilities to unite and collaborate against school privatization will present themselves and enable people to resolve problems in a manner that favors them instead of narrow private interests who strive to deprive the public of enormous sums of public wealth.

    The public does not benefit from the ongoing multiplication of charter schools. These contract schools only create more headaches for public schools and for charter schools themselves.

    The post Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No Justification for the Existence of Charter Schools

    Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are privatized, marketized, corporatized education arrangements that appeared 30 years ago in the U.S. They are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 3.3 million youth are currently enrolled in roughly 7,400 charter schools.

    Charter schools openly embrace “free market” ideology and siphon billions of public dollars a year from public schools, many of which are chronically under-funded. Their academic track record is unimpressive and often very poor. Many do not provide employee retirement programs. Like a private business, charter schools spend lots of money on advertising and marketing and have high student, teacher, and principal turnover rates. They are also frequently mired in controversy, scandal, and corruption. They cannot levy taxes, are run by unelected individuals, and regularly hire uncertified teachers. Most charter schools are segregated and thousands have closed over the course of three decades, leaving many minority families out in the cold. The three main reasons for charter school closures are: financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance. Charter schools also dodge many public standards and laws followed by public schools. Moreover, about 90% of charter schools have no teacher unions and charter school authorizing is defective in many states. Many other problems could be listed.

    It is also worth observing that the vast majority of individuals who enroll in teacher education programs do so in order to graduate and teach in a public school. Few, if any, teacher education candidates enroll in teacher education programs because they want to graduate and teach in a charter school. That is typically not the goal or outlook of people enrolled in teacher education programs. Further, as more problems with charter schools are exposed and publicized, the larger the number of people who oppose them. Criticism and rejection of charter schools has steadily increased over the years.

    To be sure, charter schools did not start out as a humble, virtuous, principled, benign grass-roots effort. The charter school idea did not come from ordinary everyday parents, students, and teachers. There was never anything grass-roots or pro-social about the charter school movement. It is no surprise that many millionaires and billionaires are involved in charter schools. From the very beginning, charter schools have been a top-down initiative to break the public school “monopoly” and outsource education to the private sector under the veneer of high ideals. Charter schools did not emerge 30 years ago free of the influence of narrow private interests. They are a textbook product of the neoliberal period and project.

    The notion that charter schools began as a way to empower teachers, serve as a laboratory for innovative replicable practices, provide parents with “choices,” reach kids who are “at-risk,” or some other lofty goal is designed to fool the gullible and divert attention from their inherently privatized and marketized character. It is not the case that charter schools started out as a great desirable idea that everyone could get behind but later on were hijacked by “the wrong people” and turned into the crisis-prone controversial schools that they are today. Such a perception implies that there is something legitimate or worth supporting about charter schools, which is another way of saying that there is something legitimate or worth supporting about the privatization of public schools.

    From a human-centered perspective, privatization only increases problems, it does not solve them.

    Privatization usually leads to more corruption, less transparency, poorer services, higher costs, diminished worker voice, more inequality, and less efficiency. Privatization negates the public interest. Privatization leaves workers and the public with fewer funds to serve workers and the public.

    Private literally means the opposite of public. Private and public are antonyms. Blurring or trivializing the distinction between public and private serves only private interests and creates the illusion that the public sphere and private sphere do not have irreconcilable aims and practices. Public-private “partnerships” (PPPs), for example, have nothing to do with benefiting the public. PPPs, which are growing rapidly at home and abroad, mainly transfer public money to private hands under the banner of high ideals.

    The aim of privatizers is not to advance the public interest but to seize as much public wealth as fast as possible through neoliberal state restructuring, that is, through state-organized corruption to funnel money to the rich. This harms education, society, the economy, and has nothing to do with a modern nation-building project.

    The challenge confronting the society as a whole is how to ensure that the country has fully-funded, publicly-governed, world-class, integrated public schools in every neighborhood. Treating education as a commodity and parents and students as consumers and “school shoppers” is not the way forward. It reinforces a “winner-loser” ethos, which has no place in education. A modern society based on mass industrial production cannot operate and develop well on such a basis.

    Creating the impression that there is something legitimate about charter schools 1 or that they can somehow be improved and become something other than charter schools does not serve the public interest or jibe with the results of investigation. More charter schools equals more problems, including for charter schools themselves.

    Closing all charter schools will help improve education, society, the economy, and the national interest in many ways. The deepening crisis in these spheres cannot be solved by further empowering the rich while further excluding people from making the decisions that affect their lives.

    1. Charter means contract. Charter schools are contract schools. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not state agencies.
    The post No Justification for the Existence of Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No Justification for the Existence of Charter Schools

    Non-profit and for-profit charter schools are privatized, marketized, corporatized education arrangements that appeared 30 years ago in the U.S. They are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 3.3 million youth are currently enrolled in roughly 7,400 charter schools.

    Charter schools openly embrace “free market” ideology and siphon billions of public dollars a year from public schools, many of which are chronically under-funded. Their academic track record is unimpressive and often very poor. Many do not provide employee retirement programs. Like a private business, charter schools spend lots of money on advertising and marketing and have high student, teacher, and principal turnover rates. They are also frequently mired in controversy, scandal, and corruption. They cannot levy taxes, are run by unelected individuals, and regularly hire uncertified teachers. Most charter schools are segregated and thousands have closed over the course of three decades, leaving many minority families out in the cold. The three main reasons for charter school closures are: financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance. Charter schools also dodge many public standards and laws followed by public schools. Moreover, about 90% of charter schools have no teacher unions and charter school authorizing is defective in many states. Many other problems could be listed.

    It is also worth observing that the vast majority of individuals who enroll in teacher education programs do so in order to graduate and teach in a public school. Few, if any, teacher education candidates enroll in teacher education programs because they want to graduate and teach in a charter school. That is typically not the goal or outlook of people enrolled in teacher education programs. Further, as more problems with charter schools are exposed and publicized, the larger the number of people who oppose them. Criticism and rejection of charter schools has steadily increased over the years.

    To be sure, charter schools did not start out as a humble, virtuous, principled, benign grass-roots effort. The charter school idea did not come from ordinary everyday parents, students, and teachers. There was never anything grass-roots or pro-social about the charter school movement. It is no surprise that many millionaires and billionaires are involved in charter schools. From the very beginning, charter schools have been a top-down initiative to break the public school “monopoly” and outsource education to the private sector under the veneer of high ideals. Charter schools did not emerge 30 years ago free of the influence of narrow private interests. They are a textbook product of the neoliberal period and project.

    The notion that charter schools began as a way to empower teachers, serve as a laboratory for innovative replicable practices, provide parents with “choices,” reach kids who are “at-risk,” or some other lofty goal is designed to fool the gullible and divert attention from their inherently privatized and marketized character. It is not the case that charter schools started out as a great desirable idea that everyone could get behind but later on were hijacked by “the wrong people” and turned into the crisis-prone controversial schools that they are today. Such a perception implies that there is something legitimate or worth supporting about charter schools, which is another way of saying that there is something legitimate or worth supporting about the privatization of public schools.

    From a human-centered perspective, privatization only increases problems, it does not solve them.

    Privatization usually leads to more corruption, less transparency, poorer services, higher costs, diminished worker voice, more inequality, and less efficiency. Privatization negates the public interest. Privatization leaves workers and the public with fewer funds to serve workers and the public.

    Private literally means the opposite of public. Private and public are antonyms. Blurring or trivializing the distinction between public and private serves only private interests and creates the illusion that the public sphere and private sphere do not have irreconcilable aims and practices. Public-private “partnerships” (PPPs), for example, have nothing to do with benefiting the public. PPPs, which are growing rapidly at home and abroad, mainly transfer public money to private hands under the banner of high ideals.

    The aim of privatizers is not to advance the public interest but to seize as much public wealth as fast as possible through neoliberal state restructuring, that is, through state-organized corruption to funnel money to the rich. This harms education, society, the economy, and has nothing to do with a modern nation-building project.

    The challenge confronting the society as a whole is how to ensure that the country has fully-funded, publicly-governed, world-class, integrated public schools in every neighborhood. Treating education as a commodity and parents and students as consumers and “school shoppers” is not the way forward. It reinforces a “winner-loser” ethos, which has no place in education. A modern society based on mass industrial production cannot operate and develop well on such a basis.

    Creating the impression that there is something legitimate about charter schools  or that they can somehow be improved and become something other than charter schools does not serve the public interest or jibe with the results of investigation. More charter schools equals more problems, including for charter schools themselves.

    Closing all charter schools will help improve education, society, the economy, and the national interest in many ways. The deepening crisis in these spheres cannot be solved by further empowering the rich while further excluding people from making the decisions that affect their lives.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 at 4:57pm and is filed under Charter Schools, Neoliberalism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Economic Collapse Continues Uninterrupted

    To conceal the economic and social decline that continues to unfold at home and abroad, major newspapers are working overtime to promote happy economic news. Many headlines are irrational and out of touch. They make no sense. Desperation to convince everyone that all is well or all will soon be great is very high. The assault on economic science and coherence is intense. Working in concert, and contrary to the lived experience of millions of people, many newspapers are declaring miraculous “economic growth rates” for country after country. According to the rich and their media, numerous countries are experiencing or are on the cusp of experiencing very strong “come-backs” or “complete recoveries.” Very high rates of annual economic growth, generally not found in any prior period, are being floated regularly. The numbers defy common sense.

    In reality, economic and social problems are getting worse nationally and internationally.

    “Getting back to the pre-Covid standard will take time,” said Carmen Reinhart, the World Bank’s chief economist. “The aftermath of Covid isn’t going to reverse for a lot of countries. Far from it.” Even this recent statement is misleading because it implies that pre-Covid economic conditions were somehow good or acceptable when things have actually been going downhill for decades. Most economies never really “recovered” from the economic collapse of 2008. Most countries are still running on gas fumes while poverty, unemployment, under-employment, inequality, debt, food insecurity, generalized anxiety, and other problems keep worsening. And today, with millions of people fully vaccinated and trillions of phantom dollars, euros, and yen printed by the world’s central banks, there is still no real and sustained stability, prosperity, security, or harmony. People everywhere are still anxious about the future. Pious statements from world leaders about “fixing” capitalism have done nothing to reverse the global economic decline that started years ago and was intensified by the “COVID Pandemic.”

    In the U.S. alone, in real numbers, about 3-4 million people a month have been laid off for 13 consecutive months. At no other time in U.S. history has such a calamity on this scale happened. This has “improved” slightly recently but the number of people being laid off every month remains extremely high and troubling. In New York State, for example:

    the statewide [official] unemployment rate remains the second highest in the country at just under 9%. One year after the start of the pandemic and the recession it caused, most of the jobs New York lost still have not come back. (emphasis added, April 2021).

    In addition, nationally the number of long-term unemployed remains high and the labor force participation rate remains low. And most new jobs that are “created” are not high-paying jobs with good benefits and security. The so-called “Gig Economy” has beleaguered millions.

    Some groups have been more adversely affected than others. In April 2021, U.S. News & World Report conveyed that:

    In February 2020, right before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, Black women had an employment to population ratio of 60.8%; that now stands at 54.8%, a drop of 6 percentage points.

    The obsolete U.S. economic system has discarded more than half a million black women from the labor force in the past year.

    In December 2019, around the time the “COVID Pandemic” began to emerge, Brookings reported that:

    An estimated 53 million people—44 percent of all U.S. workers ages 18–64—are low-wage workers. That’s more than twice the number of people in the 10 most populous U.S. cities combined. Their median hourly wage is $10.22, and their median annual earnings are $17,950.

    The Federal Reserve reports that 37 percent of Americans in 2019 did not have $400 to cover an unanticipated emergency. In Louisiana alone, 1 out of 5 families today are living at the poverty level.  Sadly, “60% of Americans will live below the official poverty line for at least one year of their lives.” While American billionaires became $1.3 trillion richer, about 8 million Americans joined the ranks of the poor during the “COVID Pandemic.”

    And more inflation will make things worse for more people. A March 2021 headline from NBC News reads: “The price of food and gas is creeping higher — and will stay that way for a while.”  ABC News goes further in April 2021 and says that “the post-pandemic economy will include higher prices, worse service, longer delays.”

    Homelessness in the U.S. is also increasing:

    COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession. Over the next four years the current Pandemic Recession is projected to cause chronic homelessness to increase 49 percent in the United States, 68 percent in California and 86 percent in Los Angeles County. [The homeless include the] homeless on the streets, shelter residents and couch surfers. (emphasis added, January 11, 2021)

    Perhaps ironically, just “Two blocks from the Federal Reserve, a growing encampment of the homeless grips the economy’s most powerful person [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell].”

    Officially, about four million businesses, including more than 110,000 restaurants, have permanently closed in the U.S. over the past 14 months.  In April 2021 Business Insider stated that, “roughly 80,000 stores are doomed to close in the next 5 years as the retail apocalypse continues to rip through America.”  The real figure is likely higher.

    Bankruptcies have also risen in some sectors. For example, bankruptcies by North American oil producers “rose to the highest first-quarter level since 2016.”

    In March 2021 the Economic Policy Institute reported that “more than 25 million workers are directly harmed by the COVID labor market.” Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more than 100 applicants for each job opening in some sectors.

    Given the depth and breadth of the economic collapse in the U.S., it is no surprise that “1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.” The number of people affected by depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide worldwide as a direct result of the long depression is very high. These harsh facts and realities are also linked to more violence, killings, protests, demonstrations, social unrest, and riots worldwide.

    In terms of physical health, “Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults report undesired weight changes since the COVID-19 pandemic began.” This will only exacerbate the diabetes pandemic that has been ravaging more countries every year.

    On another front, the Pew Research Center informs us that, as a result of the economic collapse that has unfolded over the past year, “A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression.”   And it does not help that student debt now exceeds $1.7 trillion and is still climbing rapidly.

    Millions of college faculty have also suffered greatly over the past year. A recent survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that:

    real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession[in 2008], and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions.

    This does not account for the thousands of higher education adjuncts (part-time faculty) and staff that lost their jobs permanently.

    In April 2021, the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities stated that, “millions of people are still without their pre-pandemic income sources and are borrowing to get by.” Specifically:

    • 54 million adults said they didn’t use regular income sources like those received before the pandemic to meet their spending needs in the last seven days.
    • 50 million used credit cards or loans to meet spending needs.
    • 20 million borrowed from friends or family. (These three groups overlap.)

    Also in April 2021, the Washington Post wrote:

    The pandemic’s disruption has created inescapable financial strain for many Americans. Nearly 2 of 5 of adults have postponed major financial decisions, from buying cars or houses to getting married or having children, due to the coronavirus crisis, according to a survey last week from Bankrate.com. Among younger adults, ages 18 to 34, some 59 percent said they had delayed a financial milestone. (emphasis added)

    According to Monthly Review:

    The U.S. economy has seen a long-term decline in capacity utilization in manufacturing, which has averaged 78 percent from 1972 to 2019—well below levels that stimulate net investment. (emphasis added, January 1, 2021).

    Capitalist firms will not invest in new ventures or projects when there is little or no profit to be made, which is why major owners of capital are engaged in even more stock market manipulation than ever before. “Casino capitalism” is intensifying. This, in turn, is giving rise to even larger stock market bubbles that will eventually burst and wreak even more havoc than previous stock market crashes. The inability to make profit through normal investment channels is also why major owners of capital are imposing more public-private “partnerships” (PPPs) on people and society through neoliberal state restructuring. Such pay-the-rich schemes further marginalize workers and exacerbate inequality, debt, and poverty. PPPs solve no problems and must be replaced by human-centered economic arrangements.

    The International Labor Organization estimates that the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs have been lost globally as a result of government actions over the past 13-14 months.

    In March of this year, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reported that, “Acute hunger is set to soar in over 20 countries in the coming months without urgent and scaled-up assistance.” The FAO says, “”The magnitude of suffering is alarming.”

    And according to Reuters, “Overall, global FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] had collapsed in 2020, falling by 42% to an estimated $859 billion, from $1.5 trillion in 2019, according to the UNCTAD report.” UNCTAD stands for United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

    The international organization Oxfam tells us that:

    The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to lead to an increase in inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began…. Billionaire fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade. (emphasis added, January 25, 2021)

    According to the World Bank, “The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed about 120 million people into extreme poverty over the last year in mostly low- and middle-income countries.”  And despite the roll-out of vaccines in various countries:

    the economic implications of the pandemic are deep and far-reaching. It is ushering in a “new poor” profile that is more urban, better educated, and reliant on informal sector work such as construction, relative to the existing global poor (those living on less than $1.90/day) who are more rural and heavily reliant on agriculture. (emphasis added)

    Another source notes that:

    Pew Research Center, using World Bank data, has estimated that the number of poor in India (with income of $2 per day or less in purchasing power parity) has more than doubled from 60 million to 134 million in just a year due to the pandemic-induced recession. This means, India is back in a situation to be called a “country of mass poverty” after 45 years. (emphasis added)

    In Europe, there is no end in sight to the economic decline that keeps unfolding. The United Kingdom, for example, experienced its worst economy in literally 300 years:

    The economy in the U.K. contracted 9.9 percent in 2020, the worst year on record since 1709, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a report on Friday (Feb. 12). The overall economic drop in 2020 was more than double in 2009, when U.K. GDP declined 4.1 percent due to the worldwide financial crisis. Britain experienced the biggest annual decline among the G7 economies — France saw its economy decline 8.3 percent, Italy dropped 8.8 percent, Germany declined 5 percent and the U.S. contracted 3.5 percent. (emphasis added)

    Another source also notes that, “The Eurozone is being haunted by ‘ghost bankruptcies,’ with more than 200,000 firms across the European Union’s four biggest nations under threat when Covid financial lifelines stop.” In another sign of economic decline, this time in Asia, Argus Media reported in April 2021 that Japan’s 2020-21 crude steel output fell to a 52-year low.

    Taken alone, on a country-by-country basis, these are not minor economic downturns, but when viewed as a collective cumulative global phenomenon, the consequences are more serious. It is a big problem when numerous economies decline simultaneously. The world is more interdependent and interconnected than ever. What happens in one region necessarily affects other regions.

    One could easily go country by country and region by region and document many tragic economic developments that are still unfolding and worsening. Argentina, Lebanon, Colombia, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Jordan, South Africa, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries are all experiencing major economic setbacks and hardships that will take years to overcome and will negatively affect the economies of other countries in an increasingly interdependent world. And privatization schemes around the world are just making conditions worse for the majority of people. Far from solving any problems, neoliberalism has made everything worse for working people and society.

    It is too soon for capitalist ideologues to be euphoric about “miraculous economic growth and success.” There is no meaningful evidence to show that there is deep, significant, sustained economic growth on a broad scale. There is tremendous economic carnage and pain out there, and the scarring and consequences are going to linger for some time. No one believes that a big surge of well-paying jobs is right around the corner. Nor does anyone believe that more schemes to pay the rich under the banner of high ideals will improve things either.

    Relentless disinformation about the economy won’t solve any problems or convince people that they are not experiencing what they are experiencing. Growing poverty, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, under-employment, debt, inequality, anxiety, and insecurity are real and painful. They require real solutions put forward by working people, not major owners of capital concerned only with maximizing private profit as fast as possible.

    The economy cannot improve and serve a pro-social aim and direction so long as those who produce society’s wealth, workers, are disempowered and denied any control of the economy they run. Allowing major decisions to be made by a historically superfluous financial oligarchy is not the way forward. The rich and their representatives are unfit to rule and have no real solutions for the recurring crises caused by their outmoded system. They are focused mainly on depriving people of an outlook that opens the path of progress to society.

    There is no way for the massive wealth of society to be used to serve the general interests of society so long as the contradiction between the socialized nature of the economy and its continued domination by competing private interests remain unresolved. All we are left with are recurring economic crises that take a bigger and bigger toll on humanity. To add insult to injury, we are told that there is no alternative to this outdated system, and that the goal is to strive for “inclusive capitalism,” “ethical capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” or some other oxymoron.

    But there is an alternative. Existing conditions do not have to be eternal or tolerated. History shows that conditions that favor the people can be established. The rich must be deprived of their ability to deprive the people of their rights, including the right to govern their own affairs and control the economy. The economy, government, nation-building, and society must be controlled and directed by the people themselves, free of the influence of narrow private interests determined to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone and everything else.

    The rich and their political and media representatives are under great pressure to distort social consciousness, undermine the human factor, and block progress. The necessity for change is for humanity to rise up and usher in a modern society that ensures prosperity, stability, and peace for all. It can be done and must be done.

    The post Economic Collapse Continues Uninterrupted first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Economic Collapse Continues Uninterrupted

    To conceal the economic and social decline that continues to unfold at home and abroad, major newspapers are working overtime to promote happy economic news. Many headlines are irrational and out of touch. They make no sense. Desperation to convince everyone that all is well or all will soon be great is very high. The assault on economic science and coherence is intense. Working in concert, and contrary to the lived experience of millions of people, many newspapers are declaring miraculous “economic growth rates” for country after country. According to the rich and their media, numerous countries are experiencing or are on the cusp of experiencing very strong “come-backs” or “complete recoveries.” Very high rates of annual economic growth, generally not found in any prior period, are being floated regularly. The numbers defy common sense.

    In reality, economic and social problems are getting worse nationally and internationally.

    “Getting back to the pre-Covid standard will take time,” said Carmen Reinhart, the World Bank’s chief economist. “The aftermath of Covid isn’t going to reverse for a lot of countries. Far from it.” Even this recent statement is misleading because it implies that pre-Covid economic conditions were somehow good or acceptable when things have actually been going downhill for decades. Most economies never really “recovered” from the economic collapse of 2008. Most countries are still running on gas fumes while poverty, unemployment, under-employment, inequality, debt, food insecurity, generalized anxiety, and other problems keep worsening. And today, with millions of people fully vaccinated and trillions of phantom dollars, euros, and yen printed by the world’s central banks, there is still no real and sustained stability, prosperity, security, or harmony. People everywhere are still anxious about the future. Pious statements from world leaders about “fixing” capitalism have done nothing to reverse the global economic decline that started years ago and was intensified by the “COVID Pandemic.”

    In the U.S. alone, in real numbers, about 3-4 million people a month have been laid off for 13 consecutive months. At no other time in U.S. history has such a calamity on this scale happened. This has “improved” slightly recently but the number of people being laid off every month remains extremely high and troubling. In New York State, for example:

    the statewide [official] unemployment rate remains the second highest in the country at just under 9%. One year after the start of the pandemic and the recession it caused, most of the jobs New York lost still have not come back. (emphasis added, April 2021).

    In addition, nationally the number of long-term unemployed remains high and the labor force participation rate remains low. And most new jobs that are “created” are not high-paying jobs with good benefits and security. The so-called “Gig Economy” has beleaguered millions.

    Some groups have been more adversely affected than others. In April 2021, U.S. News & World Report conveyed that:

    In February 2020, right before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, Black women had an employment to population ratio of 60.8%; that now stands at 54.8%, a drop of 6 percentage points.

    The obsolete U.S. economic system has discarded more than half a million black women from the labor force in the past year.

    In December 2019, around the time the “COVID Pandemic” began to emerge, Brookings reported that:

    An estimated 53 million people—44 percent of all U.S. workers ages 18–64—are low-wage workers. That’s more than twice the number of people in the 10 most populous U.S. cities combined. Their median hourly wage is $10.22, and their median annual earnings are $17,950.

    The Federal Reserve reports that 37 percent of Americans in 2019 did not have $400 to cover an unanticipated emergency. In Louisiana alone, 1 out of 5 families today are living at the poverty level.  Sadly, “60% of Americans will live below the official poverty line for at least one year of their lives.” While American billionaires became $1.3 trillion richer, about 8 million Americans joined the ranks of the poor during the “COVID Pandemic.”

    And more inflation will make things worse for more people. A March 2021 headline from NBC News reads: “The price of food and gas is creeping higher — and will stay that way for a while.”  ABC News goes further in April 2021 and says that “the post-pandemic economy will include higher prices, worse service, longer delays.”

    Homelessness in the U.S. is also increasing:

    COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession. Over the next four years the current Pandemic Recession is projected to cause chronic homelessness to increase 49 percent in the United States, 68 percent in California and 86 percent in Los Angeles County. [The homeless include the] homeless on the streets, shelter residents and couch surfers. (emphasis added, January 11, 2021)

    Perhaps ironically, just “Two blocks from the Federal Reserve, a growing encampment of the homeless grips the economy’s most powerful person [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell].”

    Officially, about four million businesses, including more than 110,000 restaurants, have permanently closed in the U.S. over the past 14 months.  In April 2021 Business Insider stated that, “roughly 80,000 stores are doomed to close in the next 5 years as the retail apocalypse continues to rip through America.”  The real figure is likely higher.

    Bankruptcies have also risen in some sectors. For example, bankruptcies by North American oil producers “rose to the highest first-quarter level since 2016.”

    In March 2021 the Economic Policy Institute reported that “more than 25 million workers are directly harmed by the COVID labor market.” Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more than 100 applicants for each job opening in some sectors.

    Given the depth and breadth of the economic collapse in the U.S., it is no surprise that “1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.” The number of people affected by depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide worldwide as a direct result of the long depression is very high. These harsh facts and realities are also linked to more violence, killings, protests, demonstrations, social unrest, and riots worldwide.

    In terms of physical health, “Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults report undesired weight changes since the COVID-19 pandemic began.” This will only exacerbate the diabetes pandemic that has been ravaging more countries every year.

    On another front, the Pew Research Center informs us that, as a result of the economic collapse that has unfolded over the past year, “A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression.”   And it does not help that student debt now exceeds $1.7 trillion and is still climbing rapidly.

    Millions of college faculty have also suffered greatly over the past year. A recent survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that:

    real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession[in 2008], and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions.

    This does not account for the thousands of higher education adjuncts (part-time faculty) and staff that lost their jobs permanently.

    In April 2021, the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities stated that, “millions of people are still without their pre-pandemic income sources and are borrowing to get by.” Specifically:

    • 54 million adults said they didn’t use regular income sources like those received before the pandemic to meet their spending needs in the last seven days.
    • 50 million used credit cards or loans to meet spending needs.
    • 20 million borrowed from friends or family. (These three groups overlap.)

    Also in April 2021, the Washington Post wrote:

    The pandemic’s disruption has created inescapable financial strain for many Americans. Nearly 2 of 5 of adults have postponed major financial decisions, from buying cars or houses to getting married or having children, due to the coronavirus crisis, according to a survey last week from Bankrate.com. Among younger adults, ages 18 to 34, some 59 percent said they had delayed a financial milestone. (emphasis added)

    According to Monthly Review:

    The U.S. economy has seen a long-term decline in capacity utilization in manufacturing, which has averaged 78 percent from 1972 to 2019—well below levels that stimulate net investment. (emphasis added, January 1, 2021).

    Capitalist firms will not invest in new ventures or projects when there is little or no profit to be made, which is why major owners of capital are engaged in even more stock market manipulation than ever before. “Casino capitalism” is intensifying. This, in turn, is giving rise to even larger stock market bubbles that will eventually burst and wreak even more havoc than previous stock market crashes. The inability to make profit through normal investment channels is also why major owners of capital are imposing more public-private “partnerships” (PPPs) on people and society through neoliberal state restructuring. Such pay-the-rich schemes further marginalize workers and exacerbate inequality, debt, and poverty. PPPs solve no problems and must be replaced by human-centered economic arrangements.

    The International Labor Organization estimates that the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs have been lost globally as a result of government actions over the past 13-14 months.

    In March of this year, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reported that, “Acute hunger is set to soar in over 20 countries in the coming months without urgent and scaled-up assistance.” The FAO says, “”The magnitude of suffering is alarming.”

    And according to Reuters, “Overall, global FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] had collapsed in 2020, falling by 42% to an estimated $859 billion, from $1.5 trillion in 2019, according to the UNCTAD report.” UNCTAD stands for United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

    The international organization Oxfam tells us that:

    The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to lead to an increase in inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began…. Billionaire fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade. (emphasis added, January 25, 2021)

    According to the World Bank, “The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed about 120 million people into extreme poverty over the last year in mostly low- and middle-income countries.”  And despite the roll-out of vaccines in various countries:

    the economic implications of the pandemic are deep and far-reaching. It is ushering in a “new poor” profile that is more urban, better educated, and reliant on informal sector work such as construction, relative to the existing global poor (those living on less than $1.90/day) who are more rural and heavily reliant on agriculture. (emphasis added)

    Another source notes that:

    Pew Research Center, using World Bank data, has estimated that the number of poor in India (with income of $2 per day or less in purchasing power parity) has more than doubled from 60 million to 134 million in just a year due to the pandemic-induced recession. This means, India is back in a situation to be called a “country of mass poverty” after 45 years. (emphasis added)

    In Europe, there is no end in sight to the economic decline that keeps unfolding. The United Kingdom, for example, experienced its worst economy in literally 300 years:

    The economy in the U.K. contracted 9.9 percent in 2020, the worst year on record since 1709, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a report on Friday (Feb. 12). The overall economic drop in 2020 was more than double in 2009, when U.K. GDP declined 4.1 percent due to the worldwide financial crisis. Britain experienced the biggest annual decline among the G7 economies — France saw its economy decline 8.3 percent, Italy dropped 8.8 percent, Germany declined 5 percent and the U.S. contracted 3.5 percent. (emphasis added)

    Another source also notes that, “The Eurozone is being haunted by ‘ghost bankruptcies,’ with more than 200,000 firms across the European Union’s four biggest nations under threat when Covid financial lifelines stop.” In another sign of economic decline, this time in Asia, Argus Media reported in April 2021 that Japan’s 2020-21 crude steel output fell to a 52-year low.

    Taken alone, on a country-by-country basis, these are not minor economic downturns, but when viewed as a collective cumulative global phenomenon, the consequences are more serious. It is a big problem when numerous economies decline simultaneously. The world is more interdependent and interconnected than ever. What happens in one region necessarily affects other regions.

    One could easily go country by country and region by region and document many tragic economic developments that are still unfolding and worsening. Argentina, Lebanon, Colombia, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Jordan, South Africa, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries are all experiencing major economic setbacks and hardships that will take years to overcome and will negatively affect the economies of other countries in an increasingly interdependent world. And privatization schemes around the world are just making conditions worse for the majority of people. Far from solving any problems, neoliberalism has made everything worse for working people and society.

    It is too soon for capitalist ideologues to be euphoric about “miraculous economic growth and success.” There is no meaningful evidence to show that there is deep, significant, sustained economic growth on a broad scale. There is tremendous economic carnage and pain out there, and the scarring and consequences are going to linger for some time. No one believes that a big surge of well-paying jobs is right around the corner. Nor does anyone believe that more schemes to pay the rich under the banner of high ideals will improve things either.

    Relentless disinformation about the economy won’t solve any problems or convince people that they are not experiencing what they are experiencing. Growing poverty, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, under-employment, debt, inequality, anxiety, and insecurity are real and painful. They require real solutions put forward by working people, not major owners of capital concerned only with maximizing private profit as fast as possible.

    The economy cannot improve and serve a pro-social aim and direction so long as those who produce society’s wealth, workers, are disempowered and denied any control of the economy they run. Allowing major decisions to be made by a historically superfluous financial oligarchy is not the way forward. The rich and their representatives are unfit to rule and have no real solutions for the recurring crises caused by their outmoded system. They are focused mainly on depriving people of an outlook that opens the path of progress to society.

    There is no way for the massive wealth of society to be used to serve the general interests of society so long as the contradiction between the socialized nature of the economy and its continued domination by competing private interests remain unresolved. All we are left with are recurring economic crises that take a bigger and bigger toll on humanity. To add insult to injury, we are told that there is no alternative to this outdated system, and that the goal is to strive for “inclusive capitalism,” “ethical capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” or some other oxymoron.

    But there is an alternative. Existing conditions do not have to be eternal or tolerated. History shows that conditions that favor the people can be established. The rich must be deprived of their ability to deprive the people of their rights, including the right to govern their own affairs and control the economy. The economy, government, nation-building, and society must be controlled and directed by the people themselves, free of the influence of narrow private interests determined to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone and everything else.

    The rich and their political and media representatives are under great pressure to distort social consciousness, undermine the human factor, and block progress. The necessity for change is for humanity to rise up and usher in a modern society that ensures prosperity, stability, and peace for all. It can be done and must be done.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2021 at 11:09pm and is filed under Bankruptcies, COVID-19, Debt, Economic Inequality, Economy/Economics, Federal Reserve, Food Security, Global Capitalism, Housing/Homelessness, Hunger, Joe Biden, Lies, Media, Minimum Wage, Neoliberalism, Opinion, Poverty, Ruling Elite, Student Loans, Unemployment.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Inflated Charter School Waitlists

    With great frequency, promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools like to claim that charter schools are so great that they have very long lists of students waiting to get into them. They use such claims and “data” to argue that more charter schools are needed and that more public money should be spent on creating and multiplying more privately-operated charter schools.

    However, many reports show that such waitlist numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt because they are usually inaccurate and misleading for various reasons. For example, a recent report from the North Carolina State Board of Education reported that:

    During the 2019-2020 school year, over 117,000 North Carolina students were enrolled in [200] charter schools. As of October 1, 2020, over 126,000 North Carolina students are enrolled in charter schools. Self-reported data from the state’s charter schools indicate that 78% of charter schools had a waitlist totaling nearly 76,000 students statewide. (p. 3)

    But in a footnote attached to this observation, the report notes that this “Figure may include duplicates, as students are often waitlisted at multiple charter schools.” An article from NC Policy Watch states: “76,000 names on waitlists aren’t the same as 76,000 students.” Names that appear on waitlists at multiple schools can result in a large overcount. Thus, for example, when one student is on multiple school’s waitlists, they are counted as being on each school’s waitlist. In other words, one student could be counted two, three, or more times, thereby inflating the final waitlist number. Such data could cause people to “mistakenly think that demand for charter schools is a lot higher than it actually is.”

    A related waitlist overcounting problem is highlighted by Durham (North Carolina) school board member Natalie Beyer:

    Families apply to multiple magnet schools, charter schools and private schools often in multiple counties for individual students. After lottery results, families choose a single school but do not remove their child from waiting lists and as a result those individual school waiting lists often include multiple duplications and are not an accurate reflection of demand for charter schools. (emphasis added)

    The real number of students on charter school waitlists is usually significantly lower than what is officially misreported. 1 While school privatizers profit from such misleading data, the public does not benefit from misrepresentative data.

    In 2014, the National Education Policy Center produced a policy memo titled: Wait, Wait. Don’t Mislead Me! Nine Reasons to be Skeptical About Charter School Waitlist Numbers.  Researchers showed that student waitlists for charter schools are highly inflated and misleading.

    Similar overcounting problems were reported in a 2016 Massachusetts news article titled Charter School Wait Lists May Not Be What They Seem.

    In March 2021, Texas AFT had this to say about bogus charter school waitlist numbers:

    In the past, the charter industry often claimed there were anywhere between 150,000 to 200,000 students on a “waitlist” they maintained and used this number to argue for even more state dollars for a duplicate education system—one that is more costly than real public schools and lacks any voter accountability. A new law required TEA [Texas Education Agency] to request waitlist information from charters and found only 55,000 on this self-reported “waitlist.” The numbers still seem inflated considering the millions that charter schools spend on television advertising (including Super Bowl and World Series ads), glossy mailers, and even billboards on IH-35 trying to attract students.

    Additional research would likely show that inflated charter school waitlist numbers are more common than initially thought.

    While it is understandable that the private interests that own-operate deregulated charter schools would make misleading data claims to advance their school privatization agenda, the public must not tolerate such distortions and should take action to stop misreporting and the flow of public funds to privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. Public money belongs to public schools and the destiny and use of this money must be determined by the public without the influence of any private interests. Public money must stay in public hands regardless of whether or not charter schools have waitlists. No pretext should be tolerated for funneling money from the public sphere into the crisis-prone charter school sector. Even if 20 million students were on charter school waitlists, this is not a justification for transferring public money to private interests. Public funds must not fall under the control of narrow competing private interests. This will only distort the economy and exacerbate many other problems. Pay-the-rich schemes harm the general interests of society.

    Charter schools are not public schools; they are privatized, marketized, corporatized education arrangements that serve a fraction of the nation’s youth. Charter schools have no legitimate claim to public funds. They are run by unelected individuals, focus on revenue and profit, cannot levy taxes, are frequently mired in corruption, regularly engage in numerous shady real estate deals, often hire uncertified teachers, and usually intensify segregation. Homeless students, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners are consistently under-represented in charter schools. And unlike public schools, charter schools spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing their schools to mostly vulnerable minority families. This enormous sum of public money would be better used for classroom teaching and learning. If privately-operated charter schools wish to grow and multiply, they must do so without public funds, assets, and resources.

    1. In fact, many charter schools around the country fail to meet their enrollment projections. Numerous charter schools are under-enrolled. California, with the most charter schools in the country, is a good example of this.
    The post Inflated Charter School Waitlists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Inflated Charter School Waitlists

    With great frequency, promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools like to claim that charter schools are so great that they have very long lists of students waiting to get into them. They use such claims and “data” to argue that more charter schools are needed and that more public money should be spent on creating and multiplying more privately-operated charter schools.

    However, many reports show that such waitlist numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt because they are usually inaccurate and misleading for various reasons. For example, a recent report from the North Carolina State Board of Education reported that:

    During the 2019-2020 school year, over 117,000 North Carolina students were enrolled in [200] charter schools. As of October 1, 2020, over 126,000 North Carolina students are enrolled in charter schools. Self-reported data from the state’s charter schools indicate that 78% of charter schools had a waitlist totaling nearly 76,000 students statewide. (p. 3)

    But in a footnote attached to this observation, the report notes that this “Figure may include duplicates, as students are often waitlisted at multiple charter schools.” An article from NC Policy Watch states: “76,000 names on waitlists aren’t the same as 76,000 students.” Names that appear on waitlists at multiple schools can result in a large overcount. Thus, for example, when one student is on multiple school’s waitlists, they are counted as being on each school’s waitlist. In other words, one student could be counted two, three, or more times, thereby inflating the final waitlist number. Such data could cause people to “mistakenly think that demand for charter schools is a lot higher than it actually is.”

    A related waitlist overcounting problem is highlighted by Durham (North Carolina) school board member Natalie Beyer:

    Families apply to multiple magnet schools, charter schools and private schools often in multiple counties for individual students. After lottery results, families choose a single school but do not remove their child from waiting lists and as a result those individual school waiting lists often include multiple duplications and are not an accurate reflection of demand for charter schools. (emphasis added)

    The real number of students on charter school waitlists is usually significantly lower than what is officially misreported.  While school privatizers profit from such misleading data, the public does not benefit from misrepresentative data.

    In 2014, the National Education Policy Center produced a policy memo titled: Wait, Wait. Don’t Mislead Me! Nine Reasons to be Skeptical About Charter School Waitlist Numbers.  Researchers showed that student waitlists for charter schools are highly inflated and misleading.

    Similar overcounting problems were reported in a 2016 Massachusetts news article titled Charter School Wait Lists May Not Be What They Seem.

    In March 2021, Texas AFT had this to say about bogus charter school waitlist numbers:

    In the past, the charter industry often claimed there were anywhere between 150,000 to 200,000 students on a “waitlist” they maintained and used this number to argue for even more state dollars for a duplicate education system—one that is more costly than real public schools and lacks any voter accountability. A new law required TEA [Texas Education Agency] to request waitlist information from charters and found only 55,000 on this self-reported “waitlist.” The numbers still seem inflated considering the millions that charter schools spend on television advertising (including Super Bowl and World Series ads), glossy mailers, and even billboards on IH-35 trying to attract students.

    Additional research would likely show that inflated charter school waitlist numbers are more common than initially thought.

    While it is understandable that the private interests that own-operate deregulated charter schools would make misleading data claims to advance their school privatization agenda, the public must not tolerate such distortions and should take action to stop misreporting and the flow of public funds to privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. Public money belongs to public schools and the destiny and use of this money must be determined by the public without the influence of any private interests. Public money must stay in public hands regardless of whether or not charter schools have waitlists. No pretext should be tolerated for funneling money from the public sphere into the crisis-prone charter school sector. Even if 20 million students were on charter school waitlists, this is not a justification for transferring public money to private interests. Public funds must not fall under the control of narrow competing private interests. This will only distort the economy and exacerbate many other problems. Pay-the-rich schemes harm the general interests of society.

    Charter schools are not public schools; they are privatized, marketized, corporatized education arrangements that serve a fraction of the nation’s youth. Charter schools have no legitimate claim to public funds. They are run by unelected individuals, focus on revenue and profit, cannot levy taxes, are frequently mired in corruption, regularly engage in numerous shady real estate deals, often hire uncertified teachers, and usually intensify segregation. Homeless students, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners are consistently under-represented in charter schools. And unlike public schools, charter schools spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing their schools to mostly vulnerable minority families. This enormous sum of public money would be better used for classroom teaching and learning. If privately-operated charter schools wish to grow and multiply, they must do so without public funds, assets, and resources.

    This article was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2021 at 2:00am and is filed under Charter Schools, Education.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Public Funds For Charter Schools Is Socially Irresponsible

    Public money comes from the new value workers produce. It does not come from somewhere else. This value is presently controlled not by those who produce it but by the financial oligarchy and its state. When socially-produced wealth is not controlled by those who actually produce it, endless problems arise. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society when it is dominated by a handful of billionaires.

    Socially-produced wealth belongs to the public and must be used for social programs and public services that benefit the socialized economy and the general interests of society. This includes education, healthcare, municipal services, and more. This can be achieved when major economic decisions are made by a public authority worthy of the name. A government beholden to the rich and their political representatives leads only to more retrogressive developments.

    Since public money does not come from, or belong to, narrow private interests, it must not be used for privatized education arrangements such as charter schools. That is socially irresponsible.

    Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools are contract schools run by unelected individuals. They are not state agencies like public schools. They differ significantly from public schools, legally, organizationally, ideologically, and otherwise. Besides being governed by unelected individuals, charter schools cannot levy taxes, frequently hire uncertified teachers, and do not operate according to the same laws, rules, and regulations as public schools. Many courts have ruled that charter schools are not public entities.  In addition, charter schools support fewer high-needs students than public schools and lack the transparency of public schools.  Charter schools intensify segregation and are often plagued by instability and corruption as well. Further, more than 150 charter schools close every year, usually for financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or academic failure. Between 1999 and 2017, more than one-quarter of charter schools closed after operating for only five years.  Such instability has left hundreds of thousands of minority students out in the cold. Many other problems could be listed.

    Although they are not public agencies, privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools siphon tens of billions of public dollars every year from the public purse, which leaves public schools worse off. In cities like Rochester and Buffalo, New York, charter schools collectively siphon over $225 million a year from under-funded public schools. And it does not help that the “results” delivered by privately-operated charter schools, especially cyber charter schools, are often unimpressive, if not abysmal.

    All of this is inevitable when schools are run on the basis of “free market” ideology. Social responsibility and the “free market” simply do not go together. “Good business sense” and social responsibility negate each other. They are oxymorons, and attempts to blur the distinction between them should be opposed. Corporations pursuing maximum profits as fast as possible—unlimited greed—has nothing to do with serving the general interests of society. Social responsibilities like education must not be subjected to the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market.” The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.

    Contrary to what neoliberals and privatizers claim, privatization does not serve the common good or improve “outcomes” for everyone. It just funnels public wealth produced by workers into the hands of narrow private interests, leaving fewer funds for the public and the economy.

    The public, not narrow private interests, must have the first and last say over the use of public funds. Wealth produced collectively by workers must not escape their control. Socially-produced wealth must remain in public hands and not find its way to private entities. Publicly funded private entities and so-called public-private “partnerships” distort the socialized economy, increase inequality, diminish the voice of workers, and exacerbate a range of other problems. Around the globe, privatization in its many forms is intensifying problems in many sectors and spheres.

    A modern economy and society cannot develop in a healthy, balanced, and self-reliant way when decisions are made mainly by competing owners of capital seeking to maximize profit as fast as possible. Education and all the affairs of society must be determined by working people, not by those who strive to use the new value produced by workers to enrich themselves.

    Fight for public funds for public schools. Stand for social responsibility and oppose the flow of all public funds to charter schools. The powerful private companies that run charter schools must not receive any public funds or assets. Society needs a government that takes up its social responsibility to meet the broad educational needs of a modern society based on mass industrial production.

    Charter schools are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Currently, about 3.3 million youth attend roughly 7,400 charter schools across the nation. This is a small fraction of all students and all schools in the United States.

    The post Public Funds For Charter Schools Is Socially Irresponsible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Public Funds For Charter Schools Is Socially Irresponsible

    Public money comes from the new value workers produce. It does not come from somewhere else. This value is presently controlled not by those who produce it but by the financial oligarchy and its state. When socially-produced wealth is not controlled by those who actually produce it, endless problems arise. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society when it is dominated by a handful of billionaires.

    Socially-produced wealth belongs to the public and must be used for social programs and public services that benefit the socialized economy and the general interests of society. This includes education, healthcare, municipal services, and more. This can be achieved when major economic decisions are made by a public authority worthy of the name. A government beholden to the rich and their political representatives leads only to more retrogressive developments.

    Since public money does not come from, or belong to, narrow private interests, it must not be used for privatized education arrangements such as charter schools. That is socially irresponsible.

    Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools are contract schools run by unelected individuals. They are not state agencies like public schools. They differ significantly from public schools, legally, organizationally, ideologically, and otherwise. Besides being governed by unelected individuals, charter schools cannot levy taxes, frequently hire uncertified teachers, and do not operate according to the same laws, rules, and regulations as public schools. Many courts have ruled that charter schools are not public entities.  In addition, charter schools support fewer high-needs students than public schools and lack the transparency of public schools.  Charter schools intensify segregation and are often plagued by instability and corruption as well. Further, more than 150 charter schools close every year, usually for financial malfeasance, mismanagement, or academic failure. Between 1999 and 2017, more than one-quarter of charter schools closed after operating for only five years.  Such instability has left hundreds of thousands of minority students out in the cold. Many other problems could be listed.

    Although they are not public agencies, privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools siphon tens of billions of public dollars every year from the public purse, which leaves public schools worse off. In cities like Rochester and Buffalo, New York, charter schools collectively siphon over $225 million a year from under-funded public schools. And it does not help that the “results” delivered by privately-operated charter schools, especially cyber charter schools, are often unimpressive, if not abysmal.

    All of this is inevitable when schools are run on the basis of “free market” ideology. Social responsibility and the “free market” simply do not go together. “Good business sense” and social responsibility negate each other. They are oxymorons, and attempts to blur the distinction between them should be opposed. Corporations pursuing maximum profits as fast as possible—unlimited greed—has nothing to do with serving the general interests of society. Social responsibilities like education must not be subjected to the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market.” The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.

    Contrary to what neoliberals and privatizers claim, privatization does not serve the common good or improve “outcomes” for everyone. It just funnels public wealth produced by workers into the hands of narrow private interests, leaving fewer funds for the public and the economy.

    The public, not narrow private interests, must have the first and last say over the use of public funds. Wealth produced collectively by workers must not escape their control. Socially-produced wealth must remain in public hands and not find its way to private entities. Publicly funded private entities and so-called public-private “partnerships” distort the socialized economy, increase inequality, diminish the voice of workers, and exacerbate a range of other problems. Around the globe, privatization in its many forms is intensifying problems in many sectors and spheres.

    A modern economy and society cannot develop in a healthy, balanced, and self-reliant way when decisions are made mainly by competing owners of capital seeking to maximize profit as fast as possible. Education and all the affairs of society must be determined by working people, not by those who strive to use the new value produced by workers to enrich themselves.

    Fight for public funds for public schools. Stand for social responsibility and oppose the flow of all public funds to charter schools. The powerful private companies that run charter schools must not receive any public funds or assets. Society needs a government that takes up its social responsibility to meet the broad educational needs of a modern society based on mass industrial production.

    Charter schools are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Currently, about 3.3 million youth attend roughly 7,400 charter schools across the nation. This is a small fraction of all students and all schools in the United States.

    The post Public Funds For Charter Schools Is Socially Irresponsible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New York State: 50 Charter Schools Closed in 20 Years

    by Shawgi Tell / April 7th, 2021

    According to New York Charter School Fact Sheet (January 2021) from the New York State Education Department, the number of charter schools issued in New York State since the passage of the state’s charter school law in 1998 is 397. The total number of privately-operated charters permitted statewide under 2015 legislative amendments is 460. It is worth noting that a conversion of an existing public school to a charter school is not counted toward the numerical limits established by Article 56 of Education Law. This amounts to about 10 charter schools.

    A separate but related document from the New York State Education Department, New York State Charter Schools (January 2021), claims that 46 privately-operated charter schools closed or never opened in the state. Fifteen of these charter schools closed since 2010.

    It is not unreasonable to assume that more investigation and more recent data would reveal that more than 46 charter schools have actually closed in the state over the past 20 years. For example, the Buffalo School Board voted in April 2021 to close two failing charter schools in Buffalo.

    Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999 – 2017 provides a more comprehensive picture of the high failure and closure rate of charter schools nationwide. Equally problematic, persistently poor oversight and weak accountability in the charter school sector have kept many failing charter schools open.

    The frequent failure and closure of privately-operated charter schools is part of the constant instability in the crisis-prone charter school sector that has left thousands of black and brown families out in the cold.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2021 at 11:29pm and is filed under Charter Schools, Education.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New York State: 50 Charter Schools Closed in 20 Years

    According to New York Charter School Fact Sheet (January 2021) from the New York State Education Department, the number of charter schools issued in New York State since the passage of the state’s charter school law in 1998 is 397. The total number of privately-operated charters permitted statewide under 2015 legislative amendments is 460. It is worth noting that a conversion of an existing public school to a charter school is not counted toward the numerical limits established by Article 56 of Education Law. This amounts to about 10 charter schools.

    A separate but related document from the New York State Education Department, New York State Charter Schools (January 2021), claims that 46 privately-operated charter schools closed or never opened in the state. Fifteen of these charter schools closed since 2010.

    It is not unreasonable to assume that more investigation and more recent data would reveal that more than 46 charter schools have actually closed in the state over the past 20 years. For example, the Buffalo School Board voted in April 2021 to close two failing charter schools in Buffalo.

    Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999 – 2017 provides a more comprehensive picture of the high failure and closure rate of charter schools nationwide. Equally problematic, persistently poor oversight and weak accountability in the charter school sector have kept many failing charter schools open.

    The frequent failure and closure of privately-operated charter schools is part of the constant instability in the crisis-prone charter school sector that has left thousands of black and brown families out in the cold.

    The post New York State: 50 Charter Schools Closed in 20 Years first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter Schools: “Choice” Is Not An Argument

    Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have long ignored serious criticisms of charter schools in a variety of ways. They have always believed, for example, that simply repeating worn-out phrases like “charter schools provide choice” will automatically cause everyone to dismiss the need for any discussion, investigation, and critical thinking about the well-documented negative effects of charter schools on education, society, the economy, and the national interest.

    “Choice,” however, is not an argument for the existence or expansion of privately-operated charter schools.

    When charter school promoters use the language of “choice,” they want people to:

    1. Not recognize that education is an inalienable human right that must be guaranteed in practice by a public authority worthy of the name.
    2. Believe that “free market” ideology is the best and most pro-social way to organize education in a modern society based on mass industrial production.
    3. Ignore how “choice” leads to greater stratification and segregation in charter schools through their geographic location and selective student enrollment and attrition practices.
    4. Disregard the fact that by “choice” charter school promoters really mean education is a commodity, not a social responsibility, and parents and students are consumers, not humans and citizens, who fend for themselves while shopping for a “good” school that hopefully does not close in under 10 years.
    5. Think that there is no need to analyze how and why public schools have been set up to fail by privatizers so as to justify the rise of deregulated charter schools.
    6. Get used to the disinformation that public schools are automatically bad and charter schools are inherently superior.
    7. Ignore the fact that charter schools usually choose parents and students, not the other way around.
    8. Overlook the fact that “choice” does not guarantee excellence, stability, or equity. Several thousand deregulated charter schools run by unelected individuals have closed in recent decades.
    9. Believe that it does not matter who “delivers” education, but what kind of “results” are produced.
    10. Dismiss the fact that “choice” means taking money away from under-funded public schools that educate thousands of students and that public schools in many instances are even compelled to provide some free services to charter schools.

    It is not possible to conceal the fact that deregulated charter schools fail and close regularly, educate far fewer students than public schools, are continually mired in fraud and corruption, are governed by unelected individuals, have high teacher and principal turnover rates, spend a lot of public money on advertising and marketing, dodge public standards for meetings and accountability, and siphon enormous amounts of money from public schools every day. Privately-operated charter schools also have more inexperienced and lower-paid teachers than public schools. In addition, many charter schools offer fewer services and programs than public schools. It is also worth noting that the performance of cyber charter schools is consistently abysmal. This is what “choice” has delivered.

    The 50 problems plaguing privately-operated charter schools will not disappear by endlessly repeating “choice is good” and by treating parents and students as consumers and shoppers instead of humans and citizens with rights that must be guaranteed. Turning major human responsibilities like education into a “free market” commodity is not a modern way of educating people in the 21st century. It will not solve any problems. Over the past 30 years, segregated charter schools have only given rise to more problems, including many problems for themselves.

    Parents and students do not need more problematic “choices” or choice just for the sake of choice. They need locally-controlled, world-class, fully-funded, non-demonized, free schools completely uninfluenced by narrow private interests. A modern nation and economy can’t be built on an education system based on the ideology of “survival of the fittest.”

    To be sure, the rapid multiplication of privately-operated charter schools under President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona will go a long way toward nation-wrecking, undermining public education, harming the public interest, and dehumanizing the natural and social environment. It is no surprise that intense controversy and upheaval have characterized the charter school sector since day one and seem to increase every month.

    Now is the time to step up defense of public schools and the public interest. The public matters more than ever. The privatization of schools and many other public enterprises through neoliberal state restructuring harms the majority, the economy, society, and the national interest. Privatization increases corruption and inefficiency, while lowering quality, increasing costs, and restricting democracy. The public must not permit neoliberals and privatizers to wreck public schools that have been serving 90% of America’s youth for well over a century. Schemes based on the “free market” and a “fend-for-yourself” ethos will certainly benefit a tiny handful of owners of capital, but they won’t solve deep problems that have worsened due to the actions of major owners of capital desperately hanging on to an obsolete economic system.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 9:47pm and is filed under Charter Schools, Corruption, Education, Neoliberalism, Public Schools.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.