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from the public-money-for-private-profit dept.
Common Dreams reports
The Seattle Times reports that
The ruling--believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country--overturns the law [I-1240] voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.
Teacher and author Mercedes Schneider offers more on the Act:
As is true of charter schools nationwide, the charters in Washington State (up to the current ruling) were eligible for public funding diverted from traditional public schools. Charter schools were approved via a November 2012 ballot initiative (I-1240, the Charter Schools Act) in which charters were declared to be "common schools" despite their not being subject to local control and local accountability. And also like America's charters in general, Washington's charters are not under the authority of elected school boards.
Thus, Washington voters had approved to give public money to private entities--a one-way street that provided no means for such funds to overseen by the public.
[...] The new ruling (pdf)[1] states that charters, "devoid of local control from their inception to their daily operation", cannot be classified as "common schools," nor have "access to restricted common school funding."
[...] "The Supreme Court has affirmed what we've said all along--charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding," said Kim Mead, president of the [Washington Education Association], in a statement.
"Instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to unaccountable charter schools, it's time for the Legislature to fully fund K-12 public schools so that all of Washington's children get the quality education the Constitution guarantees them," Mead continued.
The Associated Press reports that the state had one charter school last year, and eight more have opened in the past few weeks.
I pity Ms. Schneider's students if she routinely starts sentences with conjunctions--especially consecutive, redundant conjunctions.
[1] I had trouble with the connection.
(Score: 1) by Walzmyn on Monday September 07 2015, @10:20AM
"Principles: There are some things no one should ever make money off of: grandmothers, war, education, medicine, death, but especially, education. F**king Charter School Mercenaries!"
Education and Medicine are services. Are you saying we should not pay people for their services? Both require the ones providing the service to be properly educated, in the case of medicine extensively. Are you saying they should not be able to charge for their labor and the effort they put into acquiring their skills?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday September 07 2015, @12:19PM
A close reading would show he's obviously implying a non-profit corporate structure.
Its not like the station engineer at the local PBS station gets paid any more or less than the station engineer at the local for-profit station, at the low level there's virtually no difference. You will occasionally see political axes ground WRT non-profits because many doctors donate services for free to doctors-without-borders or WTF its called exactly so no-duh the average compensation will be slightly lower because very few doctors willfully donate services to the local for-profit clinic. And going the opposite way you'll occasionally see axes ground such that the local hippie EE will spend his whole life at the PBS station so due to annual raises its possible in some cases for non-profits to have HIGHER average salaries than for-profits, but both sides are just statistical abuse and axe grinding.
Pragmatically, aside from theoretical opposition, for-profit colleges are the absolute bottom of the barrel, so its not like we'd be missing out on anything "great" if we pulled the handle and flushed them. Look at the reputation of soldier vs mercenary, or cop vs rentacop, or abusive pharmaceutical pricing (is there any other kind?).