I read the first article, I didn't bother to read the others. The first was incoherent enough.
Profit-seeking in the banking and health care industries has victimized Americans. Now it’s beginning to happen in education, with our children as the products.
So the whole article begins with an attack on "profit-seeking." It then cites two areas where profit-seeking has supposedly victimized Americans. One of those, banking, is a profit seeking sector, but health care is mostly non-profit. It's hard to see the relevance of this. Did profit seeking by General Motors "victimize" Americans? It seems quite the reverse. The problem with General Motors wasn't that they sought a profit, the problem was that they failed to achieve it. Were Americans better off back in the good old days when General Motors made a profit or afterward when they lost money?
The recently updated CREDO study at Stanford revealed that while charters have made progress since 2009, their performance is about the same as that of public schools. The differences are, in the words of the National Education Policy Center, “so small as to be regarded, without hyperbole, as trivial.” Furthermore, the four-year improvement demonstrated by charters may have been due to the closing of schools that underperformed in the earlier study, and also by a variety of means to discourage the attendance of lower-performing students.
I've heard of studies that reached different conclusions, but we'll go with this for sake of argument. Charter schools did improve, the study concluded but only because they closed down underperforming schools. Imagine that! They actually closed down schools that were underperforming. When has a public school been closed down for underperforming?
Furthermore, they distinguish between "public schools" and charter schools but charter schools are public schools. They're simply run under contract instead of directly by public authorities.
Education funding continues to be cut largely because corporations aren’t paying their state taxes.
Untrue, all you have to do is click on the article and read it. Nowhere does it say that corporations are not filing and paying their taxes. The author merely complains that they are only paying what is legally required. He somehow concludes that if they aren't all paying the top rate then they are not paying all of their taxes. They are paying what is required by law, it has nothing do with corporations withholding any required funds as the above statement claims.
Our nation’s impulsive experiment with privatization is causing our schools to look more like boardrooms than classrooms. Charter administrators make a lot more money than their public school counterparts, and their numbers are rapidly increasing. Teachers, on the other hand, are paid less, and they have fewer years of experience and a higher turnover rate.
Totally irrelevant. If high salaries for administrators and lower salaries for teachers leads to a better education then we should go for it. Maybe it doesn't, as they imply, but that is irrelevant in itself. The schools do not exist to provide high paying jobs for teachers.
Finally, the profit motive leads to questionable ethics among school operators, if not outright fraud. After a Los Angeles charter school manager misused funds, the California Charter Schools Association insisted that charter schools areexempt from criminal laws because they are private. The same argument was used in a Chicago case. Charters employ the privatization defense to justify their generous salaries while demanding instructional space as public entities. States around the country are being attracted to the money, as, for example, in Texas and Ohio, where charter-affiliated campaign contributions have led to increased funding and licenses for charter schools.
Public school administrators have never been caught with their hand in the till? I can't cite a public high school for certain, but here in Tallahassee it seems like they are always firing an administrator at FAMU for mis-handling funds. They got fired by I'm not aware of anyone being prosecuted. But in the case referenced above, if the company was a profit making company, then mishandled funds are an offense against the stockholders of that company, not the taxpayers, and if they are a non-profit enterprise, then the "profit-seeking" argument is irrelevant.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of charter schools. Education cannot be centralized. Big bureaucracies cannot pull this off and that includes big public-school bureaucracies. But the whole reason for the rise of charter schools is because
the public schools are failing our students.
I went to a small rural school. We had exactly two full-time non-teaching personnel - the school superintendent and the janitor. (Only one janitor and he swept the floors and shoveled coal into the boiler). All other employees were either part-time i.e. bus drivers and cafeteria workers, or also taught part-time. The Commercial Arts teacher got an extra period off to type the superintendent's correspondence. The librarian taught classes part-time. Modern schools are filled with bureaucrats doing all kinds of unnecessary work that hasn't improved education a bit. A lot of that work, of course, is compliance with federal and state regulations which hamper, rather than help, the education process. The school was funded by local taxes with no federal or state aid.
Education needs to be de-centralized, not centralized more. Schools need to be smaller, not larger. If you want a national or state-wide program, it should be to fund vouchers for individuals who can force changes by withdrawing their students. Putting the money into the hands of more bureaucrats, public or private, isn't going to solve the problem.
