5 Devastating Facts About Charter Schools You Won't Hear from the 'National School Choice Week'

[Orrex]

21. The problems you cite won't be corrected by leeching money from public schools

Nor will they be improved by having charter schools cherrypick the better-performing students while excluding the more challenging students, as is a common practice.

Incidentally, creationists also love to push their agenda in schools by singing the praises of "competition" and "choice," so you should be conscious of the way your arguments resonate with the slogans of those groups, too.

I am afraid there are far too many families and children trapped by circumstance in schools and districts where mediocrity is accepted as the status quo, and any challenge to it must be quelled.

That's a slogan taken straight out of the privatization playbook. And I guarantee you with 100% certainty that charter schools don't welcome "challenges to the status quo" nearly as readily as you seem to believe.

No doubt they accept "challenges" of a certain type and within a certain framework, but they're profit-generating machines that don't, ultimately, tolerate challenges to the bottom line. Under-performing students will be booted back to the public schools, and the charters will re-declare the superduper achievements of the students who survive the cut.

The single biggest predictor of educational success is parental involvement in the schools, and that is where charter schools have the huge advantage over regular public schools: They often require that parents volunteer their time.

That's another lovely slogan, but it's simply a formula for restricting access to this much-touted resource. You claim to advocate for children "trapped by circumstances," but you're simply not seeing reality: A single mother with two jobs and a brilliant child won't be able to volunteer at the school, so her child will be excluded.

You're arguing, in effect, that it's ok to trap low-income children in very circumstances of mediocrity that you claim to decry.


Parents who wish to enroll their children in private schools with distinguished records of performance are free and welcome to do so, but neither they nor the charter schools have any business stealing money from public schools in order to subsidize that effort.