Charter School Roaches Crawling Out of the Woodwork

David Adams, Ron Paul's former campaign manager, is supposedly putting together a "Tea Party" slate for next year's gubernatorial election in Kentucky. One of the names being mentioned for the top of the ticket is Phil Moffett. Back in April, Page One Kentucky outed Moffett as a charter school promoter.

Charter schools are the latest repug issue in Kentucky, the lack of tax dollars being poured down that drain being blamed for Kentucky failing to make the feds' "Race to the Top" list.

Last month, local wingnut freakazoid homophobe Jim Waters claimed "studies support charter schools."

No, they don't.

The New York Times in May:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.

But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition: raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and often expensive.

But that's OK, because Kentucky is just rolling in billions of extra education dollars begging to be flushed down the charter school toilet.

In June, The Nation devoted an issue to education reform. In one of the articles, former charter school advocate Diane Ravich explained why she changed her mind:

The other popular nostrum of our day is "choice," which has captured the imagination of big foundations and many wealthy business leaders. Vouchers still have fervent proponents, even though only 30,000 students use them, and there is slight evidence of their effectiveness. Vouchers have been replaced by charters as the vehicle for promoting free-market reforms. What was but an idea in the late 1980s is a full-blown movement today, with 1.5 million students enrolled in 5,000 charter schools.

Charter schools receive public money but are privately managed. Unlike regular public schools, they operate free of most rules and regulations. More than 95 percent of charter schools are nonunion. When the state comptroller in New York sought to audit the state's charter schools, they sued to block him, claiming that they should be trusted to do their own audits.

Charters vary widely in quality. Some are excellent, some are abysmal, most are somewhere in between. The only major national evaluation of the charter sector was carried out by economist Margaret Raymond at Stanford University. Her study was funded by the staunchly procharter Walton Family Foundation, among others; yet she found that only 17 percent of charters outperformed a matched public school. The other 83 percent were either no better, or they were worse. On the NAEP exams in reading and mathematics, students in charter schools perform no better than those in regular public schools, whether one looks at black, Hispanic or low-income students, or students in urban districts.

Remember hedge fund managers? The Wall Street billionaire assholes whose greed for low-tax profits helped bring down the economy in 2008? Guess what they're investing their money in?

Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm.

Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form [...]

They have been contributing generously to lawmakers in hopes of creating a friendlier climate for charter schools. More immediately, they have raised a multimillion-dollar war chest to lobby this month for a bill to raise the maximum number of charter schools statewide to 460 from 200.

The money has paid for television and radio advertisements, phone banks and some 40 neighborhood canvassers in New York City and Buffalo — all urging voters to put pressure on their lawmakers.

Why invest in charter schools? Why do the fuckers on Wall Street do anything? Because there's a huge profit in it:

There’s a lot of money to be made in charter schools, and I’m not talking just about the for-profit management companies that run a lot of these charter schools. It turns out that at the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, Congress passed a new kind of tax credit called a New Markets tax credit. What this allows is it gives enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools. I have focused on Albany, New York, which in New York state, is the district with the highest percentage of children in charter schools, twenty percent of the schoolchildren in Albany attend are now attending charter schools. I discovered that quite a few of the charter schools there have been built using these New Markets tax credits.

What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that they’re lending, so they’re also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggy-back the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.

The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money.

Looking for an alternative to traditional schools that actually does outperform both traditional schools and charters?

They're right under your nose: Magnet schools.

While research on magnets and academic achievement is far from conclusive and often complicated by methodological concerns, you might think that the increasingly promising results emerging from a variety of locations, coupled with magnets' desegregation mission, would make them serious contenders for the $4.3 billion made available through the Education Department's competitive grant program, Race to the Top. But the Obama administration's reform strategy mostly overlooks the nation's thousands of magnet schools. Instead, administration officials much more strongly favor a newer "reform"—charter schools, which demonstrate no evidence of sustained, large-scale success and tend to compound racial and economic segregation.

Charter schools offer cover for a wide variety of anti-education con artists: Freakazoids who want to indocrinate students in creationism, abstinence, false history and un-democratic civics; wingnut repugs using the charter school transfer of public money to private pockets to destroy the public school system; and of course Wall Street "investors" determined to get the middle class' last dime.

Charter schools are a classic con game. Don't fall for it.