Bad Apples
Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker shines a light on some extremely shady charter industry practices—and causes my hair to literally catch on fire…
EduShyster: Your new study, about the policies that charter school operators use for financial benefit, is harshly critical of a few bad apples. But why focus on them as opposed to, say, the high-performing many?Bruce Baker: The important context for this report is to understand just who are the dominant charter managers in the landscape. You’ve got Imagine, you’ve got National Heritage, you’ve got White Hat and you’ve got Charter Schools USA. A lot of academics and charter advocates are going to think well *those aren’t the big ones like KIPP and Uncommon.* But KIPP and Uncommon aren’t the big ones. The big ones are Imagine, National Heritage, White Hat and Charter Schools USA. If we were to decide that here and now is the time to clean all this stuff up and just shut down a bunch of these operators, we’d be taking out a sizable share of charter schools in Florida and Ohio.
EduShyster: You use the term *subprime chartering* to refer to the massive amounts of debt being accumulated by charter operators. What happens when the bubble pops? And should I add this to the long list of things I lie awake at night worrying about?
Baker: If you look at the escalation of debt being taken out to finance charter facilities, we’re on the front end of that. A lot of the debt doesn’t come due until the mid 2040’s. But the debt is only part of the picture. If you look at what’s happening in many cities, we’re turning over, or *relinquishing*, all of our land and facilities in the urban core to private Bad Apples | EduShyster:
