Camel's Nose of Charter Schools Now Under Kentucky's Tent

And the whole vicious, ugly monster will be inside wreaking havoc before you know it if we don't stomp that sucker down hard right now.

Chris Kenning at the Courier:

The program was created earlier this year under House Bill 37, modeled in part on components of charter laws in other states.


But Kentucky charter school proponents — who for years have pushed unsuccessfully for a law legalizing charter schools — say it’s not a meaningful substitute. And they say it won’t keep them from seeking true charter legislation, which teacher unions and most Democrats oppose.



“It will help by relieving a few more regulations and red tape, but it’s not even close to true charter schools,” said Richard Innes, an education analyst for the conservative Bluegrass Institute policy center, noting that innovative schools will still be run by the school system.

Ooops - Innes slipped up and told the truth: their real goal is to eliminate public schools by forcing taxpayers to support private, for-profit xian madrassas and corporate drone factories.

Still think charter school proponents really want to improve public education? Check out this piece in The Nation about why so many billionaires are bankrolling the school privatization crusade in Louisiana:

While much of the reporting on these bills has focused on the fact that they will significantly lower the quality of education in Louisiana—through the voucher program, the state has begun funding schools that refuse to teach evolution, teach that the Loch Ness Monster is an example of scientific proof that humans and dinosaurs once coexisted and claim that the Ku Klux Klan had some positive impact on this nation’s history—little attention has been paid to the influx of out-of-state money to advance the education reform movement in Louisiana. And although the media have presented the case of Louisiana as anomalous—Wonkette’s Kris Benson asked “Is Louisiana not part of the U.S. anymore, or something?”—if one takes a longer view, it quickly becomes apparent that Louisiana is very much still part of the United States, and what has happened there is not anomalous but in fact is a test case for the privatization of education nationwide.

SNIP

But the passage appropriation mechanism made it clear what the entire education reform project in Louisiana was about: the state spends $8.7 billion dollars annually on education, and some exceedingly powerful private business interests want a piece of it.

SNIP

 

Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, says that despite the media focus on the voucher program, the bigger story is that of charter schools. “The pro-charter people, which include most of the research and advocacy interest groups, favor charter schools but were opposed to vouchers.” He explains, “Vouchers shift public funding into an already extant structure, but the charter schools open up an entire new market.… Every charter school in the state gets a facility for free, no rent. The old school is declared a failing school, they fire all the teachers, fires all students, and they have a whole new for-profit operation.”

SNIP

There has also been widespread outcry about John White’s decision to hold public schools to a higher educational standard than private and charter schools: under new rules released in July, public schools must score above a C to avoid having vouchers suck money away from them, while private schools only need to score above an F to continue receiving public money. In addition, only about a quarter of the private schools covered by the new bill will be required to disclose whether or not their voucher students are failing—only schools with more than forty voucher students, or ten in a grade, are required to disclose the test scores of their students. White has also attracted criticism for his opposition to the teacher certification process, hiring a 27-year-old without a teaching certificate to direct the state’s teacher evaluation, and his decision to hire a highly priced PR staff.

SNIP

As other experiments in wholesale privatization have indicated, the likely result of this is an acceleration of wealth and power into the hands of the 1 percent, while violence and political exclusion characterize the lives of everyone else. The same forces that have initiated this process in Louisiana are hard at work implementing their agenda elsewhere, and they have nearly unlimited resources at their disposal. There comes a time, however, when enough is enough.

 If the charter school fanatics took a fraction of what they spend promoting privatization and put it into actually improving existing public schools, we wouldn't have a public education crisis in this country.

But actually improving public schools is the last thing the privatizers want.

They're writing charter school legislation right now to introduce in the General Assembly in January. Don't be fooled.