What’s really behind the charter school amendment referendum?
Corporate greed.

Jeff Faux wrote for AlterNet 15 October 2012,

Education Profiteering: Wall Street’s Next Big Thing?
Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement is presented as an act of philanthropy, but it’s really about greed.
He reviews some of

the evidence that charter schools don’t improve education,
especially when forced on states.
Then he gets into why so much money is flowing into charter schools
anyway.

Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus


for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from
the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making
ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks,
derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by
a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school
construction that can double an investor’s return in seven years.
The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge
the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.

Some “liberal” privatization promoters claim that charter schools
should not be considered private. But that’s an argument the
management companies that run the schools only use when they are
asking for more government funding. At the same time they argue in
courts and to legislatures that as private enterprises they should
not be subject to government audits, labor laws and other
restrictions.

These companies rent, buy, and sell buildings; make contracts for
consulting, accounting and legal services, food concessions, and
transportation; and pay their managers far more than public school
principals earn. In cases where city governments have given land to
charter schools, for profit real estate companies have ended up
owning the subsidized land and buildings. In states where charter
schools are required to be nonprofit, profit-making companies can
still set them up and then organize a board of neighborhood
residents who will give them the right to manage the school with
little or no interference.

In 2008 Dennis Bakke, CEO of Imagine Schools, a private company that
managed 71 schools in eleven states, sent an email to the firm’s
senior staff. It reminded his managers not to give school boards the
“misconception” that they were “responsible for making decisions
about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal, and
dozens of other matters.” The memo suggested that the community
board members be required to sign undated letters of resignation.
“It is our school, our money, and our risk,” he wrote, “not theirs.”

Yet in Georgia it’s our tax money they want to use to fund those
“public” private charter schools.
That’s the “large existing flows of money” they want to divert
into their profiteering pockets.
No wonder ALEC is so big into charter schools!
And look who else:

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According to ALEC’s own website, states that score high
on ALEC’s education policies score low on education.
Remember,

ALEC is behind the Georgia charter school amendment
on the November ballot.
If you didn’t believe

Stanford Credo’s study that showed
adding a charter school authorizer, as that amendment would do,
reduces academic learning,
how about ALEC’s own data?

Bill Simon write for The Political Vine today,

Charter Schools and ALEC: The Facts ALEC Doesn’t Want You To Know,

If you take the state performance rankings and match them up to each
state’s education policy rankings, you come-up with an entirely
different picture of how little (if any at all) a state’s degree of
conservative education “policy” translates into actual
education performance.

I did this (
PDF copy available here)
and this is what the 2012 Top 10 states in Performance looks like,
and their corresponding Policy ranks:

2012 Performance/Policy Rank

1. Massachusetts / B-
2. Vermont / D+
3. New Jersey / B-
4. Colorado / B
5. Pennsylvania / C+
6. Rhode Island / C
7. North Carolina / C
8. Kansas / C-
9. New Hampshire / C+
10. New York / C-

The numbers are ALEC’s performance rankings,
and the letters are ALEC’s policy grades.

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