Nobody goes into public school education to get rich in the monetary sense.
But if your lust is for personal economic gain, you may be in luck as a charter school operator. As a bonus, if you finesse the jargon and optics, you may pass as a child advocate and free-enterprise philanthropist while indulging your appetite as a profit-hungry tycoon.
Ah, a nefarious folly devoutly pursued and lamentably too often realized!
Raiding the public treasury to feed your empire-building cravings makes you, in a white-collar sort of way, a smash and grabber and identity thief. And if you preside over a New York-base charter syndicate, you may rake in millions of dollars every year for your shady efforts.
Not every heist is illegal. Not every entrepreneur is an embezzler. No need to scour the Internet to find an astonishing quantity and variety of vetted stories of charter school corruption, scandal and criminality nationwide, including but not limited to misappropriations, tolerance of abuses to students and staff and exclusionary practices of bigotry.
Government oversight provides some protection against straightforward ethics violations, but they are more pro-actively enforced with public than with charter schools. Charter schools like to carry on under the radar of scrutiny and regulation and feel that as non-government schools, that is their prerogative.
But they also demand the privilege of tapping into taxpayer funds public schools” and self-identify as “public charter schools” to perpetuate that ruse.
If “government schools” and “public schools” are interchangeable terms, how can the charter schools attach to one category and not the other? Because they get away with the curious sin of wordplay.
Investing in charter schools means sinking your assets into a sales product . Investing in public schools means dedicating your soul to the advancement of the next generation. Not all dividends get the same return.
Charter schools get copious drafts of slick and well-heeled backup from some of the most ruthless and demagogic think-tank, foundations and faux-philanthropists in America. The Internet is crawling with them. Many of them use blogs as vessels of indoctrination.
To maximize recruitment, they pretend to be all things to all people. They couch their spiel in appeals to equity, using imagery and the language of progressivism while using verbal coding and subliminal messages that appeal to the seamier side of traditionalism.
It is partisanship, not partnership.
It’s like a dictator who unites a nation by making false assurances to industrialists and laborers, forging a makeshift, doomed apparition of unity of purpose and commitment, when in fact their differences are irreconcilable.
Not all dictators are flesh and blood. A tyrant can beguile in the form of a package of lies.
Devote your career to public school education and, if you’re frugal, you may squirrel away, after a long succession of decades, sufficient resources to become a snowbird when you retire. But if luxury, extravagance and self-congratulation are your drivers, then you must become a charter school honcho.
Should faith pan out that we will all be called to account for the lives we have lived on earth, then it’s the public school petitioner who will have the highest credit score.
Ron Isaac
