The charter school movement is a politically motivated. The ultimate goal of the politicization of education is to privatize our public schools. There are huge profits to be made, and big money is funding the charter and voucher alternatives. More and more charter schools are privately operated with public funding and generous private infusions of cash from billionaires like the Walton Family, and the Gates Foundation. Charters are able to cherry pick their students, avoid students with disabilities, and practice "selective attrition" to weed out difficult children who might adversely effect their front page statistics. Public schools have no such option. As Jonothan Kozol has asserted, a major flaw with school "choice" is that the "ultimate choices" tend to get made "by those who own or operate the school." It is reasonable to compare the effectiveness of two ideas as long as the same metric is used for both. Charter schools are the snake oil of corporate reformers. They have been marketed just as effectively as our dumb and dumber presidential and Congressional candidates. Billions are spent on branding, very little on substance. The sophistry of charter proponents is embarrassing, but with gobs of money and politics driving the endless attacks on public school teachers and unions, the fight will continue to favor the corporate take-over of America's schools. Ultimately, what do we want for our children? Do we want thinkers and problem-solvers or do we want believers who have never learned to question. Private schools like Harvard specialize in the latter. Look at Wall Street.
Charter Schools Continue to Fail Our Children
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