Charter schools know their market. Increasingly, their market is low-income urban parents who are disgusted with the performance of their local public school districts:
The Minnesota Department of Education recently announced the approval of 11 new charter schools state-wide, eight of which will be opening in the Twin Cities or first-ring suburbs. This year’s crop follows a current trend in charter schools: aggressively pursuing poor and low-income families who are dissatisfied and disillusioned with public school systems, particularly in Minneapolis. Six of the eight say they will explicitly market themselves to these families.
One of eight Saint Paul families has deserted the public system; the number is higher in Minneapolis.
I used to applaud the concept of Charter Schools to offer innovative alternatives to the failures of the public school monopoly.
However, I have visited many of these schools and it didn’t take long to realize the majority of them are nothing more than scam jobs orchestrated to scam the taxpayers out of more money.
Too many of them are put together by professional “Charter School Developers” who know the right people, know how to design a charter that will get approved and know how to get maximum tax dollars to fund it.
The quality of these schools are often very questionable (how good is a charter school that preys on poor families?) and these developers move from one charter school project to the next collecting pretty fees for themselves along the way.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost control of the application approval process and the necessary follow-through that assured these charter schools were innovative, effective and an improvement.
Go figure, the government not being able to effectively manage a well-intentioned program. Another one bites the dust. I think that 1,458 for 1,460.