Charter Privatization Movement Replaces Voucher Failure

If you've read any of the latest critiques of the charter school movement, this next opinion might be something you can pass along to a privatization friend. It sums up many of its short comings while dismantling the idea that President Obama is come kind of Marxist.

It doesn't mention however a point that I have been making all along, and that is; Charter and voucher schools would end up being two additional parallel systems, running side by side with public schools, that we will have to spend huge amounts of money watch dogging, testing and debating. It only triples the problem.

SocialistWorker.com: Hammer and Sickle High?
The right-wingers who think Barack Obama is trying to indoctrinate school kids in socialism have it upside down and backwards, says Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian.

Regardless of how cross-eyed with rage they get, the right wing couldn't be more erroneous when they rant about Obama's desire to paint the White House--or the schoolhouse--red ... it's in education--through his relentless push for the privatization of the public schools in the form of charter schools--where Obama's dedication to the free market put him in a class of his own.

The public schools represent one of the last free public government services guaranteed to all--and one of the last great frontiers for Corporate America. With right-wing school voucher programs discredited, the school privatization movement has reinvented itself with a liberal veneer in the form of the charter school lobby.

Charter schools operate by taking public money and placing it in schools that are outside public oversight--and are run by independent charter associations or for-profit entities. Often times, the CEOs of these charters get bloated salaries, and--just like health insurance companies--the schools deny applicants deemed to be "high risk."

Obama's charisma and liberal credentials have helped put the charter school movement on the fast track--along with his Race to the Top Fund, designed to pressure school districts around the country to turn significant portions of their schools into these unaccountable charters, or be cut off from desperately needed federal dollars.

...fact is that charter schools rival investment banks for best example of the failure of the free market.

In the largest study on charter schools to date (funded by the Walton Family of Wal-mart infamy), Stanford University found that students in more than 80 percent of charter schools either performed the same as or worse than students in traditional public schools on reading and math tests. Fully 37 percent of charter schools students did worse than students enrolled in local traditional public schools.