Lean Left

Isn’t wonderful? It gets children sold as cheap labor:

For nearly half a decade, Escambia Charter School hired out a group of students to cut roadside grass and weeds during class time for about 32 hours per week.

The privately run high school made about $200,000 by paying the children less than required under a state Department of Transportation contract. Meanwhile, it continued accepting tax money from the state Department of Education to teach the children five hours a day.

Until state prosecutors investigated complaints from teachers at the campus north of Pensacola, the falsifying of attendance records, course schedules and grade reports went unchecked.

Even after pleading no contest to grand theft, the school remains open. No more than 12ƒ|percent of its students have ever been able to read at grade level, test scores show.

The fact that this school got to stay open is just the icing on the cake. The fact that this happened at all is inexcusable. It would never have happened in a public school, but a public school is a public trust and not run to enrich the owners. This is the inevitable result of the charter movement: children used as essentially slave labor, their education and good health thrown overboard in the pursuit of profit. The moment you introduce a profit motive into education, you are condemning some children to, at best, a terrible education. At worse, you are condemning them to conditions that are actually harmful. Educating children is hard, otherwise we wouldn’t have bad schools. The easiest way to make money off of a school is to deliver substandard education in sub standard conditions. The people in this school just took it to the next obvious level.

And spare me the pieties about the free market. Since the school is still in business, it is obvious that the free market won’t fix these problems. And even if it did, then so what? The problem is that this took place in the first place. Educating children form disadvantaged background is hard. If it wasn’t, as I said before, we would not have an allegedly poor education system. But this kind of abuse is built into the charter school concept.

If the charter schools are supposed to answer only to the market, then we know for certain a subset of them will be these kinds of schools, profit mills that don’t give a damn about the kids. We can argue about the percentage of those profit mills, but is is inevitable that they will arise. The whole point of charter schools is to allow experimentation on children. And, like all experiments, it is inevitable and well known going in that many will fail. That means the charter movement is deliberately throwing away the lives of children in the vain hope that there will somehow be, amongst all the drek that they know will infest the system, a magical bullet that will solve all of our education and needs on the Mighty Market Man to be discovered. The charter school movement deliberately condemns children to programs that it knows will not work, because failure is not a source of shame, it is the entire rationale behind their movement.

Schools like this are the inevitable price of the charter movement and its proponents are counting on them and the lives they ruin. Because without their model depends on charter schools failing and thus on children’s lives being ruined. They aren’t trying to help all the children and they don’t care that they ruin lives. The school above is just an extreme example of the inevitable damage the charter movement sets out to inflict upon children.