Them good ol' Christian values!

From Daily Kos
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This week in the War on Workers: Christian voucher school cheated Louisiana out of big money

Remember the New Living Word School in Louisiana? It's a Christian school that was getting a whole bunch of vouchers from the state despite teaching straight from DVD and having no library - but a great basketball team. When we last saw New Living Word, Louisiana was expanding the number of vouchers the school could get. But now, the school has been booted from the voucher program altogether.

Louisiana law requires that a school participating in the scholarship program not charge the state more for tuition than it charges for non-scholarship students.

[Superintendent John] White said the audit revealed that the non-scholarship students at the school were not paying the $6300 tuition per student that the school was charging the state. [...]

According to White, the school now owes the state $378,000 that the audit shows the school overcharged.

More on privatizing education

I've written/posted about the cost to America as we increasingly privatize education. Here's even more proof of the inherent evils of the process.

From Daily Kos
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Nashville charter schools 'lose' problem students to public schools-just in time for testing

If all you care about are test scores, one of the big advantages charter schools have over traditional public schools is that they don't have to take every kid who shows up. Charters can push out the weak students, leaving them for someone else to deal with. That certainly looks like what's happening in Nashville, Tennessee, where the eight schools with the highest net loss of students are all charter schools, WSMV's Dennis Ferrier reports. The only schools losing more than 10 percent of their students are charters, which are losing up to 33 percent.

Educational profiteering

The wealthy are opposed to public schools for many reasons. They don't want their children associating with riff-raff, they want their own children in private schools, they don't want to pay taxes for public schools (especially if they are sending their kids to a private school and paying for that as well), and they want to be able to make a profit off of the public tax dollars that are going to public schools. They have had some problems convincing the public that public tax dollars should go to strictly private schools, so they have worked very hard to crate a middle-of-the-road school that is partly private, partly public, called the "charter" school. These schools often get to select some children over others and they are usually privately run, so some capitalist is making a profit at the expense of the educational program.

The wealthy (and conservatives who buy the whole bullshit line of reasoning) like to promote these charter schools as superior in some fashion to the public schools - not as good as the private schools mind you, but better than the average. There's just one or two problems. 

First of all, the public schools do not have to make a profit - every penny they get goes into educating the children. Charter school operators need to make a profit - and given the exact same dollar-per-student aid, 10% is taken off the top for the owners of the charter.

Secondly, there's not a lot of evidence that, on average, the charters do as good a job of educating the children as the public schools. (Go figure - 10% less money to run the program.) And so, they try to break all of the rules for reporting. Oh, there's lots of evidence of this - click the link below to read a fairly comprehensive report on this very topic.

Charter schools don't perform as advertised