(Jacobin) — Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
A charter school regime sweeps into town with grand ambitions, lofty rhetoric, and missionary zeal, promising to save underperforming kids with the magic of markets and by getting rid of those lazy teachers and their greedy unions. What results instead is no demonstrable learning gains, serial rule breaking, underhanded tactics to attract students, a failure to provide for students with disabilities, and a total lack of real accountability.
That’s the story in Nashville. It’s not a new story.
The official narrative is that students and parents will flock to charters, given that they provide “choice,” and in so doing sprinkle students with magical capitalism dust that, somehow — the mechanism is never clear — results in sturdy learning gains. (That schools have both abundant ability to juice the numbers and direct incentive to do so usually goes undiscussed.) Yet the charters in Nashville, like those in the horrific mess in Detroit, are so driven by the need to get dollars – precisely the thing that was supposed to make charters better than public, in the neoliberal telling — that they have to resort to dirty tricks to get parents to sign their children up. And what kind of conditions do students face when they do go to these schools?