The people seeking to blow up the cap on the number of charter schools here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) have turned on the afterburners in recent weeks, as we get closer to balloting in which a referendum on lifting the cap will be placed before the voters. The airwaves are thick with commercials about how lifting the cap on charter schools will provide more money to public schools, which is a dodge, because charter schools are not in any important sense public schools.

There is no public oversight. There is little public input. They are privately run and funded with public money. This is the same principle that has worked out so well with prison food.

In New York on Monday, Jonathan Chait jumps into the issue with both feet. (To his credit, Chait is quite clear that his wife works for a charter company.) He argues no less a case than that the referendum is "one of the most important tests of social justice and economic mobility of any election in America this fall." Glorioski! And, of course, he characterizes the opposition to lifting the charter cap as wholly influenced by the all-powerful teachers union, which he casts as a thoroughgoing villain, and which he comes dangerously close to accusing of enabling racism—or, at the very least, as heedless to the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged.

This is noxious garbage; the great majority of the people represented by the teachers union work in classrooms that most of us wouldn't walk into on a bet. And, anyway, as the very excellent Diane Ravitch points out, a huge number of local school boards have lined up against lifting the cap. These are not all puppets of the evil teachers union. Many of them are composed of people who have looked around the country and seen that an untrammeled charter system is an amazing entry vehicle for waste and fraud. Chait dismisses these people as the heirs to Louise Day Hicks or something. From New York:

The localism argument is correct: Charters are regulated by the state's excellent, rigorous oversight board, which has closed 17 schools it deemed ineffective or mismanaged. If you believe that schools must be managed by local communities rather than by statewide regulators, you might oppose charters. But a fetish for localism is an off principle for liberals to espouse. The "separate but equal" argument is bizarre. The defining trait of a segregated system is that people are forced into inferior systems and given no choice. It is the unions who want to deny them choice. The cap unions support is what forces urban students to attend inferior schools. Lifting the cap would give more of those students the choice to attend high-performing schools.

If Massachusetts has done charters better than, say, Ohio or Florida, it is because the state has exercised the excellent, rigorous oversight that he mentions, and the cap has been an essential part of that oversight. The current campaign to eliminate the cap is not being done to benefit poor children. It is being waged to benefit the charter school industry, which wants to demolish that excellent, rigorous oversight with which Chait claims to be so impressed because it stands in the way of that industry's profits.

For proof of that, go to the excellent reporting by Scott O'Connell of The Worcester Telegram. (Hometown newspaper, represent!) O'Connell went to the state office of campaign finance and came away with a good dissection of the Yes On Two campaign.

According to the OCPF's online database, there are four committees backing Question 2 this year: Great Schools Massachusetts, Expanding Educational Opportunities, Yes on Two, and the Campaign for Fair Access to Quality Public Schools. Of those, Great Schools has by far been the busiest fundraiser and biggest spender, taking in almost $8.2 million since the start of the year and spending $5.2 million. Most of those contributions came from a single source: New York-based Families For Excellent Schools Advocacy, Inc., which gave multiple donations totaling more than $5.7 million, the committee's latest report with the OCPF shows… The Campaign for Fair Access committee, the next biggest fundraiser, has only recently started receiving donations since organizing in July, but has pulled in a sizeable amount of money in that short time. Of the nearly $2.3 million the committee has gotten in contributions over that period, the biggest donation came from Arvest Bank Group president Jim Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who gave more than $1.1 million to the campaign. The committee so far has spent more than $500,000 of that haul, mostly on campaign management services. The committee dropped $450,000 alone on hiring Wellesley-based Five Corner Strategies, according to OCPF's records. Yes on Two is also a relative newcomer to the campaign, bringing in a quick $710,100 since organizing in July. Almost all of that money came from a single donor, Mr. Walton's sister, philanthropist Alice Walton, and all of it has already been spent, primarily as a nearly $704,000 donation to the Campaign for Fair Access committee.

Call me crazy, but I don't think Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family give a rat's ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan. I think they are running for-profit businesses that want to increase their profits and, in Massachusetts, they see a chance to make themselves more money, the way they have in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, and all those other places where education is considered an industry and children, essentially products. (Especially Sacramento, where Michelle Rhee, Queen of the Grifters, is married to Kevin Johnson, a truly horrible person.)

They are not campaigning for freedom of choice for Massachusetts children. They are campaigning for their own freedom to gobble more and more from the public trough. See also: Privatization, all forms of.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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