Charter schools simply don't work as well as the profit seekers would have us believe by Paul Buchheit

…Children as Products

“Leading capitalists like Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, Michael Bloomberg, Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, who together have a few months teaching experience, have decided that the business model can pump out improved assembly line versions of our children.

“Charter schools simply don't work as well as the profit seekers would have us believe. The recently updated CREDO study at Stanford concluded again "CMOs (Charter Management Organizations) on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning." Approximately the same percentages of charters and non-charters are showing improvement (or lack of improvement) in reading and math. In addition, poorly-performing charters tend not to improve over time.

“Nevertheless, charter schools remain appealing to poorly informed parents. The schools like to represent themselves as equal opportunity educational options, but facts state the opposite, as many of them have strict application standards that ensure access to the most qualified students. Funding for such schools drains money out of the public system.

“Children are viewed as products in another way—on the school-to-prison pipeline. Many school districts employ "school resource officers" to patrol their hallways and to ticket, or arrest kids who disrupt the academic routine no matter the age of the offender, or the nature of the "offense:" A twelve-year-old was arrested for wearing too much perfume. A five-year-old was handcuffed for committing "battery" on a police officer. A six-year-old was called a "terrorist threat" for talking about shooting bubbles at a classmate.

“Along with these bizarre instances is the frightening precedent set by a private prison, Corrections Corporation of America, which, despite having no law enforcement authority, was allowed to participate in a drug sweep at a high school in Arizona…”

The entire article was published at Nation of Change: Five Poisons of Privatization by Paul Buchheit