Charter Schools Were Never A Good Idea, Corporate Plot To Privatize & Make Money

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Last edited Sat Sep 21, 2019, 08:31 PM - Edit history (1)

"Charter Schools Were Never a Good Idea. They Were a Corporate Plot All Along." The concept always was about privatizing schools to make money. By Steven Singer, Common Dreams, Sept. 19, 2019.

America has been fooled by the charter school industry for too long. The popular myth that charter schools were invented by unions to empower teachers and communities so that students would have better options is as phony as a three dollar bill. The concept always was about privatizing schools to make money.

It has always been about stealing control of public education, enacting corporate welfare, engaging in union busting, and an abiding belief that the free hand of the market can do no wrong. Charter schools are, after all, institutions run privately but paid for with tax dollars. So operators can make all decisions behind closed doors without public input or accountability. They can cut student services and pocket the difference. And they can enroll whoever the heck they want without providing the same level of education or programs you routinely get at your neighborhood public school.

In essence, charter schools are a scheme to eliminate the public from public education paid for at public expense.

But whenever anyone brings up these facts, they are confronted by the bedtime story of Albert Shanker and his alleged advocacy of the industry. So grab your teddy bear and put on your jammies, because here’s how it goes: Once upon a time, hero president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Al Shanker had an idea. He wanted to make laboratory schools where educators would be freed of regulations so they could experiment and find new pedagogies that worked. Then these innovations could spread to the rest of the school system.

One day in 1988, he gave a speech at the National Press Club and subsequently published a column in the New York Times advancing this idea. And he called it – Dum, Dum, DUM! – charter schools! The second act of the story opens in the mid-1990s when Shanker had largely turned against the idea after it had been co-opted by business interests. He dreamed of places where unionized teachers would work with union representatives on charter authorizing boards, and all charter proposals would include plans for “faculty decision-making.” But instead he got for-profit monstrosities that didn’t empower workers but busted their unions.

If only we’d stuck with Shanker’s bold dream! Or at least, that’s how the story goes. Unfortunately it’s just a story. It’s not true. Hardly a word of it. Shanker did not come up with the idea of charter schools. He wasn’t part of the plan to popularize them. He didn’t even come up with the term “charter school.” If anything, he was a useful patsy in this stratagem who worked tirelessly to give teachers unions a seat at the table where he then discovered they were also on the menu.

The real origin of charter schools goes back decades to at least the 1950s and the far right push for deregulation.



-- Charter schools are a scheme to eliminate the public from public education paid for at public expense.

When the afterglow of the atomic bomb and the allied victory in Europe had faded, there was political backlash at home to roll back the amazing economic successes of the New Deal. Social security, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, a minimum wage, job programs that put millions of people to work – all of that had to go in favor of right wing ideology. A cabal of mostly wealthy, privileged elites wanted to do away with these policies in the name of the prosperity it would bring to themselves and their kind. They claimed it would be for the good of everyone but it was really just about enriching the already rich who felt entitled to all economic goods and that everyone else should have to fight over the crumbs.

Never mind that it was just such thinking that burst economic bubbles causing calamities like the Great Depression in the first place and made the conditions ripe for two world wars. Show me the money! However, this really didn’t go anywhere until it was combined with that most American of institutions – racism. Even before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board decision struck down school segregation, many white people said they’d never allow their children to go to school with black children.

In the South, several districts tried “freedom of choice” plans to allow white kids to transfer out of desegregated schools.

In 1952 and ’57, governments in two states – Georgia and Virginia – tried out what became known as the “private school plan.” Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge and community leaders in Prince Edward County, Virginia, tried to privatize public schools to avoid any federal desegregation requirements. Each student would be given a voucher to go to whatever school would enroll them – segregated by race. The plan was never implemented in Georgia and struck down by the federal government in Virginia after only one year as a misuse of taxpayer funds.

But these failed plans got the attention of one of the leading deregulation champions, economist Milton Friedman. He sided with the segregationists citing their prejudice and racism as merely “market forces.” In his seminal 1955 tract, “The Role of Government in Education,” he wrote: “So long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma … Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.”

Throughout the 1970s, school voucher proposals were widely understood as a means to preserve school segregation, according to education historian Diane Ravitch. But they couldn’t gain any traction until privatizers came up with a new wrinkle in the formula – the charter school.

Charter schools are really just school vouchers with more money and regulations.

In the case of vouchers, we use tax dollars to pay for a portion of student enrollment at private and parochial schools. In the case of charters, we use tax dollars to pay for all of a student’s enrollment at a school that is privately managed. The only difference is how much taxpayer money we give to these privatized schools and how much leeway we give them in terms of pedagogy.

Charter schools can do almost whatever they want but they can’t blatantly teach religion. Voucher schools can. Other than that, they’re almost the same thing.

In order to get the public to support school privatization, Friedman thought we’d need to convince them that they didn’t need the burden of self-government. This was especially true of minorities. In his 1981 book Free to Choose, Friedman and his wife Rose suggested the necessity of convincing black voters that they didn’t need Democracy. School privatization could be pitched as a system that would “free the black man from dominion by his own political leaders.”

The opportune moment came in 1983 with the publication of the Reagan administration’s propaganda piece A Nation at Risk. Using bogus statistics and outright lies, the report painted our public school system as a failure and set up the false urgency that school deregulationists needed.

From this point forward, a series of supply side lawmakers, policy wonks, economists, billionaires and CEOs came out of the woodwork to push for school privatization which culminated in the first charter school law in 1991 in Minnesota. In the middle of all this tumult came Shanker’s National Press Club speech in 1988. Ronald Reagan was still in office and it’s hard to overstate the threat he posed to unions having infamously fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.

Shanker was trying to ride the tide of public opinion in favor of deregulation and privatization. He accepted the bogus criticisms of schools in A Nation At Risk and offered to restructure schools to fix the problem. Like so many union leaders after him, Shanker gave away much of the power of his people-driven movement so as not to come across as obstructionist. He didn’t think teachers unions could oppose the rising tide of privatization without offering innovations of their own.

It’s true that he called these reforms “charter schools” but he didn’t invent the term. He borrowed it from a little-known Massachusetts educator, Ray Budde, who meant by it something very different from what it has become. Budde thought school boards could offer “charters” directly to teachers allowing them to create new programs or departments.

Shanker’s proposal wasn’t nearly the first time a public figure had suggested restructuring public schools...

More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/19/charter-schools-were-never-good-idea-they-were-corporate-plot-all-along

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_at_Risk