Charter Schools in Surprise Political Fight as Trump and Democrats Turn Away

Charters misrepresent themselves as succeeding where public schools don't. Unemployed or drug involved parents don't apply to Charters for their children. And students, once in a charter, can be eased out. This paper reported one Success Academy school that created a "Got to Go" list of students the wanted out. Public schools MUST educated everyone. Period.

shouldn’t this story include whether charter schools are doing the job?

As usual, a Trump-deVos push for money vouchers to be used for private schools, especially religious schools and segregation academies, in order to undercut both public (right wing nomenclature, “government”) schools and, importantly, Democratic-leaning teachers’ unions. There’s a word for this kind of reprehensible behavior, but it is not on the approved vocabulary list for the Times.

Thank God. It is time to strangle this abomination in the crib, before the industry becomes too powerful. A school that tries to be as selective as a private school, but gets my tax dollars to play with? No! My tax dollars are for traditional public schools only. You know, the ones with the elected school boards accountable to the community. Everyone has the freedom to send your kid to the private school of your choice. This is America, after all. But if you choose private school, you are responsible to pay for it, not me. I’m too busy paying for public school. If you can’t afford private school, pay for public school with your time. I was “Pencil Sharpening Dad.” My kids preschool/kindergarten teachers were peeved at the little tikes wasting too much time at the pencil sharpener, so my daughter dutifully brought home five pounds of unsharpened pencils every day in her little backpack. I bought an industrial grade sharpener and gave a half hour of my time every night. 😄

Trump knows nothing about this, he didn't really go to school.

Gee maybe if charter schools here in NYC hadn't happily accepted the role of bludgeon against public schools more people would be sympathetic to them. Another reason why Bloomberg must be stopped his malicious and dirty politics when it came to public schools and especially weaponized charter schools against public school teachers. #neverbloomberg

I am a retired public school teacher. I used to read the Los Angeles Times, and practically every week there was another scandal about a charter school. Some were about embezzlement, and others about teachers having to buy all of the supplies, even toilet paper. There was a story about one charter director of about five schools earning more than the superintendent of LA schools. I could go on. I know of two cases when the teachers were totally unqualified—the credentialed math teacher teaching U.S. history and a man with a BA in communications teaching AP European History. Basically, charters are nothing but drill and kill test factories which produce good test scores and little education. Good riddance.

You can't sustain the Trump approach to government with an educated citizenry.

Unfortunately Trump has brought out the worst in America. Instead of trying to find common ground in the middle, we have the fringes running the show. I believe that charter schools can play a role in educating American kids. Should there be restrictions on charter schools? Absolutely. I do not see the need for "for profit" charter schools. There should also be accountability such that successful ones survive and the weak are killed off. The left wants to kill off the charters because they provide competition to the public school teachers unions, and the right want to get rid of public schools all together. Unfortunately, this debate is symptomatic of the problems of our political system in general.

Used to be that conservatives favored anything that unions opposed. My, how times have changed. A couple of years ago Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly opposed lifting the cap on charter schools, even though that state supposedly has the best charter schools in the nation. Charter advocates recognized that for what it was - a major political loss. They haven't tried a ballot initiative since. Charters have failed to demonstrate that they are better than public schools. Many are worse. Both liberals and conservatives distrust the state standardized tests that charters rely on, albeit for different reasons. I think the charter goose is cooked.

As a member of a Pennsylvania school district board, I see daily the damage that unfettered support for charter schools does to the basic right to public education in America. The rules and regulations and reporting that make running a public school district so burdensome do not apply to charters. Charters handpick the best and brightest students, leaving the traditional public district with the most challenging cases. If a student misbehaves at a charter, they can expel him back to his home district. The district cannot wash its hands of that same student. Even in states where the local department of education has created formulas, charter schools get away with tuition murder in arbitrarily setting rates and sending bills for the students they take. A student in our district who has been doing just fine chooses to transfer to a charter school and suddenly becomes “diagnosed” as a special ed student, which nets the charter school an additional $20,000 in tuition. A student who sits at home, maybe in front of a laptop, attending a charter cyber school, brings to that school the full amount of tuition, as high as $50,000 a year, that a brick and mortar charter school would receive, even though the cyber school often has no building, no overhead, and uses part-time teachers who also work from home. From city to city and state to state, research shows that charter schools do NOT do a better job of educating students, no matter what they say In their slick TV advertisements.

I'm in Michigan where there's little accountabilty of charter schools, largely because of DeVos driven pressure on Republican legislators. Charters which might do some good, as in other places, have simply become an industry based on siphoning off public funds for private schools with little or no standards.

Great news. Please remember that Charter Schools were developed by libertarians as a way to weaken the public school system and dismantle teacher's unions. Charter schools here in Michigan, if they are successful at all, are very effective at "cream skimming" students from engaged families leaving poor children and kids from dysfunctional families out in the cold with a nonrepresentational population in the remaining public schools.

I am not a fan of charter schools - very few are successful and they are a threat to traditional public school funding. However, the move to allow money to go to private schools generally is a larger threat to public schools and our democracy, and is especially odious when religious schools are allowed to siphon funds away.

Those familiar with the education landscape know there is nothing “sudden” about this as those concerned about privatization in public education have been sounding alarms for at least a decade.

Trump loses nothing by abandoning charters. The children attending these schools are overwhelmingly black and brown and live in cities. He has no voters among those folks. On the one hand, I say good riddance. I have visited three charters near me and have attended their board meetings. I have dug into the data. These schools should be shut down. None were worthy of the students who attend. But this is a moment for the Democratic candidates to demonstrate and be vocal about what they would do for the families that attend public schools. My children attend a superb and well funded urban public school. But I know that many people, especially rural and working class public schools, lack funding.

If the administration is planning on ending all educational programs, why are charter schools being singled out by the Times? $4 billion overall cut, $19.4 billion block grant, $0.4 billion currently spent on this particular program. It does seem that the overall plan is to increase private-school subsidies, which is a bad policy! but is one tangentially related to federal support for the upstart costs of certain charter schools.

A significant majority of Black and Hispanic families supports charter schools. The fact that not one of the Democratic presidential candidates has come out in favor of charters shows just how divorced from reality the progressive wing of the party has become.

I'm wondering if too many low-income families were actually using the public charter program, which would be a big turnoff to DeVos and the Republicans. Much better, in their opinion, to shift funding to private schools to better reward the rich and religious zealots...and speed the decline of traditional public schools, which has always been their main goal.

There is no such thing as a "public charter school." The only thing "public " about them is that they receive taxpayer funds, in addition to the multi-million dollar donations from hedge funds and private equity which get tax breaks for the donations and foster, they believe, the weakening of their "straw men," the teacher unions. They do not accept all students (i.e. ELL's and Special Ed. students,") and they do not have the economic and academic accountability of real public schools. In N.Y., one of the major operators, Eva Moskowitz, had Governor Cuomo (he received over $400,000 from her donors) force NYC to provide free rent for her "Success Academies" even though she found $30 million to move her headquarters from Harlem to Wall Street. And, the charters, in spite of the propaganda, have empty seats and perform no better than real public schools. They are scandal ridden and close as fast as they open. One of Mayor Bloomberg's main supporters, Geoffrey Canada (Harlem Children's Zone Charters) twice kicked out an entire class because they did not achieve high enough test scores. Charters were always the intermediate step for the "reformers." The ultimate goal is the voucher system, one which will enable DeVos and he ilk to obliterate the line separating church and state This is not about educating children, it's all about political power. However, the charters can take some solace in the fact that they do have one savior running- Mayor Mike.

"Choice" is a lie. We can't have it if America doesn't invest in comprehensive public education, - including ages 0 - 3 - and does so equitably. Schools fail because of unprepared students. If they were prepared, by having quality early childhood experiences, we wouldn't need "choice", which is really only for the lucky. There's nothing special about your kid or your community that requires a specialized school. Admit it: your choice is an abandonment of another family's only option.

It's news to me that charter schools are "favored by both sides." I grew up in a red state and currently live in a blue state, and no one who actually cares about education policy in either thinks it's a good idea to give public monies to de facto private schools. Public funding should be restricted to public schools, and those charters that are receiving public funds can simply choose to operate as a public school. One wonders what the problem would be with that.

Trump and DeVos have decided to zero out the federal fund for charter schools. It's important to remember that. Also important, Trump and DeVos are devoted to reducing the money going to traditional public schools. They propose to transfer part of it to private schools, especially to for profit schools. DeVos has in the past expressed her desire to zero out public schools entirely in the federal budget, and only support private schools. I have long thought it good to support charter schools. But I'm not about to further rip funding from traditional public schools to do so.

Dylan Ratigan was talking about "the extraction" over a decade ago. It's about putting public monies in private hands with as little benefit to the general public as possible. Kids need education, just like people need clean and well-maintained streets and bridges, adequate sewerage and drainage, affordable housing, and so on.