Shawgi Tell is the author of Charter School Report Card. In this post, he discovers unsettling news about New Hampshire’s charter sector.
Low-performing charter schools in the U.S. are nothing new, they are everywhere. Recently, for example, 25% of charter schools in Duval County, Florida received a D or F, while 70% of North Carolina’s 200+ charter schools received a C or lower. In addition, more than 50% of the 65 charter schools in New Orleans are D and F schools. This has been a common pattern across the country for decades. These numbers are especially significant given the discriminatory enrollment practices found in many charter schools.
Recently, a New Hampshire newspaper reported that 8 out of the 10 lowest-performing high schools in the state are charter schools. These are deregulated, deunionized, segregated, low-transparency schools governed by unelected private persons. They are often sold as schools that will save kids that could not be saved by their “dreadful” public schools. Clearly, though, leaving public schools set up to fail by neoliberals only to enroll in outsourced contract schools set up by the same neoliberals is not benefitting education and society. Both the public schools set up to fail by neoliberals and the charter schools created by neoliberals are leaving millions of youth behind. Private interests are the only ones gaining from such an antisocial set-up. It is imperative to keep neoliberals and privatizers out of education and other spheres of life.
You can read the complete post here.