Behind the Closed Doors of Charter Schools

Charter schools claim to be improving education but instead it is actually taking public money and affecting students negatively.

Cartoon by Rob Tornoe. This represents how charter schools are slowly taking resources from public schools and using it to fund new charter schools.

According to interviews I conducted with people who’ve experienced charter schools, I found the following observations. I talked to this teacher and she said “In Success Academy schools, staff force students to do many high curricular studies then say in commercials that they are improving the students’ education but they are actually causing students to feel overwhelmed. At first they make the students feel welcomed but when students’ grades start to slip, they realize the students are not meeting the high standards and then they start making students feel like they don’t belong and kick them out of the school for failing to meet the standards. But what is really at fault for the grade slipping is the loads of work they are forcing on the students.”

The article “Elites profit from non-profit charter schools” explains how the school privatization movement was a massive experiment that funnels money from the public sector and puts the money into the private sector through non-profit education companies, and many public-education activists don’t really understand how charter schools turn a profit. An excuse a charter school had used was they were forced to choose between public money or private management because there was a bill that blocked federal funds to any charter school that contracts with for-profit companies to operate. 

For-profit companies are often owned by one or two people or often owned by families. In some states, it is illegal for education for-profit companies to be owned by unqualified personnel, and in other states it is legal to have board members of the non-profit being owners of the for-profit. For-profit education companies have a limited amount of services. While many of them, especially companies like National Heritage Academy, only operate using “sweeps” contracts. For-profit operators sweep all the money from the public money that charter schools get and put it into for-profit management companies to run schools. 

This graph shows the amount of charter schools that are non-profit over the span of 10 years, and how for-profit education management organizations have increased in those 10 years.

For-profits contracted by charter schools manage cafeteria and other school services. Their goal is to run charter schools in a specific type of way so there is no money left over. The more money charter schools save by hiring unqualified teachers that refuse to teach students with special needs, the more money they will have saved and have left at the end of the day. 

Sometimes the owners of for-profit companies will try to contract other companies that they own and the Network for public education’s report has about fifty-six different companies that are registered to one address and seventy other companies on another address also including real estate companies, holding companies, and finance companies. This shows how for- profit companies are paying themselves with public money through different companies.

If charter schools keep taking money from public schools and taxpayers, public schools, stores, housing, etc will start closing down then soon will be replaced by more charter schools that will take more money from the public while at the same time there would be no law obligated to prevent them from doing that.