Interesting. I, on the other hand, read this article and was left more confused than I had been in the past, and that's saying something, because I get charter schools. I get charter schools because I worked on Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman and because I read Elizabeth Warren's The Two Income Trap.

Here's the situation: Charter schools are a shitty solution to a shittier problem.

THE SHITTIER PROBLEM:

The United States, for reasons of craven capitalism, funds its schools with property taxes. This means that rich kids get a better education than poor kids no matter what. Property taxes are also regressive, which means the crazy rich can afford to throw down massive moneybombs and only gripe a little, while the guys in the projects are crushed by every nickel per $1000 that the taxes are raised. End result: if you don't really need a public education because you can afford a rippin' private school, chances are good your public school is rippin'. On the other hand, if you're bright but poor you're pretty much fucked. Chances are good there aren't even any decent private schools anywhere near you.

THE SHITTY SOLUTION:

Take some of that money and fuck with it. Say you're the LAUSD, for example. You're so goddamn big you've got your own PBS station. Your school district encompasses Beverly Hills, La Canada Flintridge, Brentwood, etc. It also encompasses Compton. It encompasses Westchester. It encompasses shitholes like Lawndale. And while local property taxes go to local schools, they also go to the USD.

So let's throw some sops to the proles. Let's open a "charter school" that will allow two or three of those benighted 2000 in Compton to go to a school that does more than raise convicts. And since even if we make it merit-based there will be ten times as many applicants as slots, let's throw it all in a "lottery" straight out of the Hunger Games. That way we give the proles "hope" and since they're barely paying attention, will take the lions' share of the money out of their funding instead of Beverly Hills'.

THE SHITTIER PROBLEM:

No Child Left Behind is abject bullshit and every educator you talk to will tell you so. Teaching to the tests has crippled education, has crippled faculty management, has essentially destroyed innovation in teaching.

THE SHITTY SOLUTION:

As a sop to the liberals, charter schools aren't necessarily bound to NCLB. This way they can use all sorts of funkalicious teaching methods to create bright-eyed, sensitive poets such as _refugee._ It also means that they can fuck off with most of the money and leave kids who barely know how to read because well-read NPR liberals aren't much checking up on, say, the charter school across the street from me, which has a 90% non-white student population within bussing distance of Compton. And which still has to pay its bills through twice-yearly bake sales and carnivals.

THE SHITTIER PROBLEM:

Shitty schools are the #1 annihilator of property values. As mentioned before, we've tied our education system to our shelter and a great neighborhood near a shitty school quickly becomes a shitty neighborhood.

THE SHITTY SOLUTION:

Charter schools can be built damn near anywhere since their students are generally bussed from far and wide. As such, property developers looking to make a killing will often buy up a bunch of properties in a wretched neighborhood and then go about building a charter school. Elizabeth Warren catalogs a neighborhood in Baltimore where the threat of an impending charter school raised real estate selling prices by 300% in the space of nine months.

Market-savvy real estate developers are the ones making money on this, by the way, not NPR liberals. NPR liberals are far too idealistic about charter schools.

THE ACTUAL PROBLEM:

Our education system isn't geared towards teaching students, it's geared towards warehousing youth. As such, the warehouses are paid for by local property taxes, creating a system that wouldn't be unfamiliar to Edwardian England.

THE ACTUAL SOLUTION:

...is too sweeping to ever happen, and it smells like socialism. That said, school needs to be paid for and administered at the federal level. You wanna reduce poverty? Have Beverly Hills pay for some of the education in rural Appalachia. You wanna increase equality? Let NoLA go to school on Manhattan money. You wanna advance education? Take the decisions away from these chuckleheads.

I went to school in New Mexico. At the time, it was ranked #49 out of 50 for worst schools in the USA (it's currently #46). But I went to school in Los Alamos, New Mexico - home of the Atom Bomb, the Human Genome Project, BEAM robotics and a whole bunch of classified shit. And all these Nobel-winning scientists and their wives weren't about to throw their kids in the 49th best schools in the United States, so in order to make the schools better, the Department of Energy doubled the funding from property taxes (which was already high). That made my high school one of the best public high schools in the United States. It was like growing up in an embassy from a foreign country - we had a few friends that went to school elsewhere and holy shit, it was like they stopped learning in 5th grade. It wasn't even funny.

Unfortunately, it'll never happen. So in the meantime, "charter schools" will still get a bye from liberals because "sensitive poet" and a bye from conservatives because "killing on property speculation." The lack of oversight also means corruption will always find a way; as with nearly every entitlement program, the people who really need it will never get it and the people who would do just fine otherwise are given free access.

So now you know.