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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 08 2015, @02:38AM
In a sense, charter schools are funded by a form of voting - the parents of children enrolled there "vote" their funding to the school, and that is a good thing.
What's not a good thing is how the charter schools discriminate. Being small, and without oversight, they become little elite oases of "like minded" families and they discriminate heavily on basis of race, religion, disability, and whatever else bugs the principal - and, being small, they get away with it - because all they have to do is make up some BS reason that sounds like it might be legal to keep out the undesirables. In the case of disability, the line is "we're not equipped." Well, when all this money is taken from the (failing) public system to fund charters, how well equipped do you think the public side is to deal with their disproportionate share of the disabled, disadvantaged, and otherwise undesirable children of the community?
Like it or not, your fellow countrymen of tomorrow aren't just going to disappear at age 18 when they graduate from a failing public school system - they're going to be out there, bagging your groceries, washing your cars, preparing your food, building your houses, and, if the school system fails them hard enough, they'll also be commiting crimes against you and your family - and you know how well the "correctional" institutions of this country function.
Better to provide ALL children of the country a decent education than to focus on only on a select few and forget the rest. The select few are going to be dealing with the forgotten ones for the rest of their lives.
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