Let’s go Michigan… follow suit!
Many of the states passed charter school enabling legislation back in the 1990s, before there was any understanding of how these privately operated schools—naively imagined as innocent incubators for innovation—might take advantage of public goodwill and access to pools of tax dollars to find ways to make a profit. By now we ought to have learned a lesson.
There are a few instances of fledgling regulation—notably last week, when California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that is supposed to ban for-profit charter management companies and for-profit “sweeps” management contracts under which for-profit management companies take over and operate charters that are formally not-for-profit.
Living in Ohio, however—where the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow stole what is now known to be well over a billion dollars over a seventeen year period while legislators and potential state regulators looked the other way as campaign contributions flowed from the school’s founder and…
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