Grifters gonna grift by @BloggersRUs

Grifters gonna grift

by Tom Sullivan

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight back-to-school segment on charter schools Sunday was a welcome window into the world of education "reform" grifters. (I just found time to watch it last night.) Griftopia, as Matt Taibbi defined it:

There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

Only Taibbi's focus on financial firms was a bit narrow. That grifter philosophy has traveled far beyond Wall Street. Corruption has trickled down.

Anyone who has been reading my posts already knows what a con I think the charter school industry is. Still, it was gratifying to see Oliver give it the prime-time mistreatment it deserves.*

Ryan Reed at Rolling Stone writes:

"Charters are basically public schools that are taxpayer-funded but privately run," Oliver explained. "The first ones emerged 25 years ago as places to experiment with new educational approaches." Today, over 6,700 charter schools educate nearly 3 million students. But many of these institutions fail at an alarming rate: In 2014, Naples Daily News found that, since 2008, 119 charter schools had closed in Florida – 14 of which didn't finish their first year.

Oliver focused much of his attention on Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, three states with especially depressing charter track records – including negligence in the approval process and school executives embezzling funds.

I wrote in 2011:

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

Aside from the happy talk about experimentation and free-market competition (you may genuflect now), the smokescreen that obscures some of the worst results of lax oversight is the notion that these schools run as non-profits. But nonprofit doesn't mean no cash flow. Oliver points out (and this is not unique) how the president of the Richard Allen charter chain in Ohio contracted oversight of its schools to a nonprofit she founded and who contracted $1 million in management and consulting firms she also founded.

That is, some nonprofit charter schools operate with tax money the way Donald Trump funnels campaign expenditures back into his family-run businesses. Nearly a fifth of what the campaign spent in May, according to the New York Times.

* For the sake of the few good, parent-organized and community run charters out there, I make a distinction between charter schools and the charter school movement or industry. Oliver sets aside discussion of whether charters are a good idea in principle to examine how they operate in fact.