NY Times Front Page Story Says Charters "No Better, And In Many Cases, Worse" Than Traditional Public Schools

The article comes the day before Mayor Moneybags and Governor Sexual Harassment Is Only A Crime When It's Done By Somebody Other Than My Chief Aide try and get the charter cap lifted from 200 to 465:

For all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.

But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition: raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and often expensive.

And yet - despite the mixed record at best of charters (and actually miserable record in many cases), Obama, Moneybags, Paterson, Duncan, Klein et al. are pushing for more and more charter schools.

So are their backers in the financial and celebrity worlds (the John Legends and Stings and Katie Courics of the world.)

Clearly the push is NOT about educational quality.

It is about busting the unions and getting access to all that yummy yummy public education money for the for-profit charters school operators.

It is about deregulation and privatization of the public school system.

But, hypocrites that they are, they call it a "civil rights action."

Uh, huh.

The same people who want to lay teachers off, increase class sizes, stick kids in bathrooms that they call "classrooms," and cut after school programs, all the while hiring more deputy chancellors and adding more central bureaucracy that costs a few million bucks, do NOT care about civil rights.

No - their agenda is a corporate one.