Free More Money Than Brains by Laura Penny Page B

when parents suckle their kids on beliefs that make them social pariahs, like the White Pride mom in Winnipeg who drew swastikas on her kid before sending her off to school – repeatedly.
    Maybe this unpleasantness could have been avoided if only there were a neo-Nazi charter school to meet her child’s unique educational needs. Studying the Second World War in a mainstream history class could be a real blow to the self-esteem of a kid raised as a fake Aryan. At the Stormfront Skool of Traditional Values (home of the Fighting Hitlers), the poor child would be spared the trauma of having her culture and her family’s choices disrespected.
    This is, admittedly, an exaggerated example of the school market’s vast potential for diversification. But it does help illustrate that school-choice-speak is often another form of anti-intellectualism, a rejection of the educational establishment and professional nerds. Charter schools are appealing because they suggest that almost anyone can open a school and run it more cheaply and cheerfully than the hidebound old bureaucracies can. They imply that the solutions to problems in the schools are really simple and that educrats suffer from elitist delusions of complexity. Charter schools alsoappeal to our preference for action, as opposed to thought. They insinuate that education profs who produce studies about charter schools are constructing castles of theory but the entrepreneurs who open charter schools are doing something that makes a difference.
    Critics of charter schools contend that the school-choice movement is just a sneaky way of permitting increased privatization and bypassing teachers’ unions. Allowing a market of specialized schools to bloom on the public dime also undermines one of the missions of public schools: the idea that public schools are common schools, social glue, institutions that provide a set of shared reference points and skills, a sense of culture and history, and basic scientific and mathematical knowledge.
    Another common argument against charters is that they shred the commonality of the school system in another way, by cherry-picking the best students and most concerned parents from communities and dumping special needs and high-risk kids back into the public system. Some jurisdictions have even made charter schools admit students via lotteries, to prevent them from skimming the student and parental cream from every district. But that doesn’t entirely dispel the selection bias here, as the parents who apply for the lotto are obviously more motivated than the ones who do not.
    The jury is still out on whether charter schools perform better than their public counterparts. Advocates claim that they do, but a recent study, released by Stanford University in 2009, found that only 17 per cent of charter schools were performing better than their public counterparts. More thana third – 37 per cent – fared worse than public schools, and 46 per cent did not differ in any significant way, for better or for worse. 6
    As the Stanford researchers note, one of the problems with rating charter-school performance is that there are many kinds, with different missions, subject to varying state and provincial requirements. And even when they do work as schools, it remains to be seen whether charters can work as businesses. Several charter schools have collapsed because of fiscal mismanagement. A 2009 study conducted in Minnesota found that only 24 of the state’s 145 charter schools had clean books; the other 121 had some fiscal irregularities. 7
    The most high-profile example of charter schools failing to fulfil their promise of improved efficiency is the chain formerly known as Edison Schools Inc. The Edison chain, much hyped in the 1990s, was the brainchild of businessman and edupreneur Chris Whittle. You can also thank Whittle for Channel One, the network he started in 1989, which loaned schools AV equipment in exchange for broadcasting its infoad-vertainment