La Gaceta Newspaper

By Patricia W. Hall

This is the fifth in a series of seven articles regarding Charter schools and their changing relationship to our community.

Although charter schools must, by Florida law, be overseen by a non-profit board of directors, there are many ways in which for-profit organizations have begun to highjack the charter school movement. For-profit management companies frequently provide everything from back office operations, including payroll, contracting with vendors for food services, textbooks, etc., to hiring principals and teachers and curriculum control. So what was sold to parents and children as a local public education innovation now looks more like national charter-chains, the “Walmart-ization” of public education. According to education expert Diane Ravitch, “nearly half of all charter school students are enrolled in a charter chain school” in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »