Old friend Sydney Sweitzer has just opened a blog, Common Sense Under The Big Sky, concerned about Montana issues, and has a lovely whack [link coming – use this for now] at private charter schools. A deduction that I missed:
Montana education funding is a around $11,000 per pupil (a little less in large districts, a little more in small districts). The public schools spend all of that. We can certainly argue about how well that is spent, but we do know it is spent. A charter school is for profit. It will get that same $11,000 but it will only spend part of it, because it has to return profit to the corporation running it. Less is spent on educating each student, AND the profit is likely leaving the state.
[Emphasis mine] This makes explicit the comparison between public and charter schools. The former are staffed by unions, and come with all the attributes (a word I choose with care), whether it be union corruption, or dedicated, well trained teachers. The latter must cut costs because there’s another hand in the pie – those who want a profit, the owners of the company. And while free enterprise boosters may be nodding with no surprise in their eyes, what they don’t see is the cost of trimming costs to the educational enterprise. Such institutions, K-12, are not built by teachers who are around for a couple of years and then move on when they realize the charter school is a deathtrap of broken morale, but by teachers who are around for decades, who can serve as mentors, who can engender the pride in profession which is necessary for a teacher to function at the top of their profession. Frederik deBoer also addressed this, which I excerpted here – I fear Frederik’s blog may be gone, leaving me with a broken link. Still, he’s far more learned on the subject.
And this fits in with my concerns on the subject in the context of the sectors of society. Based on Syd’s post, it sounds like Montana is going all out to make sure the charter schools succeed in the private sector sense by shielding them from all measures implemented for the public sector. All they have to do is show a profit for their owners, and convince their customers that they deliver the goods – at least for long enough until the public school system shuts down. Then they don’t even have to do that. (How much do you want to bet that then the charter schools will clamor at the Montana legislature that they need monopoly protection?)
Sounds like a sweet deal for short-term investors – slop at the public trough. I wonder if they could force the owners of these companies to not harvest profits for twenty years?
