Charter school profits

A former colleague has jumped into the charter school world and several of his comments caught my eye. (My ear?) Anyway, I found them interesting. His is a "traditional" or "classical" school meaning teach-to-the-test and he enjoys the 9am - 3pm, no evenings, no weekends lifestyle. The school has no special needs students, minor discipline problems and the parents are exceedinlgy supportive as they have convinced themselves that they are in a much better place than those remaining in district schools or silly enough to pay privately for education. His most interesting comment was that the non-profit charter school hires its founders through a private company to run the operation.


This is a well-documented way of making money from the public purse, and is well-discussed in that linked article, and in this. An often-cited example cited is of a public charter school paying 71% of its public funding to the privately-owned founders' management company, whose owners (coincidentally the founders of said charter school) then keep 11.75 percent. I remember a case a few years ago, (although I cannot find a link) of a charter operator losing its charter, but the owner kept the multi-million dollar facilities which had been paid for by tax dollars.

I am not opposed to private, for-profit schools and I am not opposed to private suppliers contracting with public entities. What to me is wrong is that the system is to easy to fleece, and that being so, blind eyes are being turned.

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Further reading

What the public isn’t told about high-performing charter schools in Arizona

https://pando.com/2014/06/19/the-big-money-and-profits-behind-the-push-for-charter-schools/