Word: Charter schools

Popular Resistance -Charter school promoters are rightly fearful that their scorched earth approach to education may be slowing down due to growing social consciousness of the endless problems caused by charter schools. It is clear that nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are harming every aspect of public education and the public interest. Education privatization cannot be prettified or justified.

Approximately seven thousand charter schools, legal in 44 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam, currently enroll slightly more than three million students. While hundreds of nonprofit and for-profit charter schools close each year due mainly to financial malfeasance and poor academic performance, hundreds of these test-obsessed “free market” schools still keep opening every year.

Even with the unrestricted ability to routinely cherry pick their students, charter schools, 92% of which are deunionized, have never come close to offering the kind of mass quality education that public schools have offered 90% of the nation’s youth for the last 150 years. Unlike charter schools, public schools accept all students, at all times, no questions asked. Public schools also do a better job of hiring and retaining more qualified and better-paid teachers.