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Doing Good While Doing Well? How the Charter School Industry Makes Money and Challenges the Democratic Ideals of Public Education

Sat, April 6, 4:10 to 6:10pm, Fairmont Royal York Hotel, Floor: Mezzanine Level, Confederation 3

Abstract

A key claim espoused by charter school advocates is that charter schools provide more equitable, excellent, and efficient schooling for some of the least advantaged students in the United States. Although charter schools are typically granted permission to operate from authorizing bodies on a non-profit basis, there are a number of mechanisms by which charter schools and their related organizations and industry profit from operating schools. This ability to eke significant profit without meaningful state and local accountability over self-dealing, fraud, and waste has emerged as a core challenge to the claims of non-profit, social benevolence by some of the most vocal charter school advocates.
This presentation will detail the mechanisms by which charter schools profit from operating schools, and in doing so, provide an important contribution and update to Cuban’s central argument in The Blackboard and the Bottom Line (2007). I argue that the policy emphasis on deregulation, decentralization, and quantity has resulted in a distorted vision for charter schools as primarily vehicles for individual choice and market freedom to operate unfettered by democratic oversight. As a result, constructs like equity, justice, and quality are not prominent in discourse and policy making on charter schools.
I draw from the research literature, IRS 990 tax reports, and supplementary financial data to create a typology of how charter schools and their supporters profit from this growing sector in the name of broadening opportunity for poor families (Baker & Miron, 2015). These mechanisms include higher-than-average administrative costs and salaries, real estate investment and development, mandatory fees and fines, virtual schooling and proprietary online platforms, licensing and copywriting of school models, curriculum, and teacher and leadership preparation, and operation of for-profit arms of non-profit charter management organizations (Burch & Good, 2014; Warner, 2016).
There exists robust evidence demonstrating that hyper racial and socioeconomic segregation that is worse than already existing public school segregation (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley & Wang, 2011), test performance that is typically comparable and sometimes significantly worse than that of traditional public schools (CREDO, 2009; 2013), and evidence of screening, selectivity, and harsh discipline of students in order to push out students that are more costly to educate or who might produce low test scores in charter schools that are higher performing (White, 2015; Oluwole & Greene, 2018; In the Public Interest, 2016). In addition, evidence indicates that unfettered charter school growth has placed the systemic health of school systems at risk (Lafer, 2018), and this growth has been seeded with the infusion of philanthropic support (Ferrari & Settari, 2016). In light of this evidence, the ability to make a profit on charter school schooling presents core challenges to ideals of equity, democratic accountability, and the role of public education in a democratic society.

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