More Damage From The Charter School Movement

The charter school movement is like cancer - it's just keeps growing and growing and destroying more and more.

The demise of the Catholic school system, for example, is directly attributed to the charter movement:

Two dozen Catholic schools in Manhattan, the Bronx and suburban counties will close at the end of the year, the Archdiocese of New York said Tuesday.

After a months-long review of 26 “at-risk” parochial schools, a group of regional boards appointed by the archdiocese decided to shutter 22 elementary schools — including Blessed Sacrament, the Bronx alma mater of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

...

“This reconfiguration process will help ensure that our schools will be financially stable, sustainable and, more importantly, open to all students,” Timothy Cardinal Dolan said in a statement. He said the archdiocese would help families find nearby Catholic schools for their children.

The schools are the latest casualties of the archdiocese’s ongoing financial woes, which have made shuttering schools and parishes a nearly annual rite. In 2011, 27 schools were shut, including 13 city schools.

This year’s closures will affect about 4,000 students, representing almost 9% of Catholic elementary school pupils.

How many of these children will end up in charter schools?

How much money that ends up in charters could have gone to keep some of these schools open?

How come the hedge fund industry and Wall Street people are writing checks to Geoffrey Canada, Eva Moskowitz and the other charter school entrepreneurs instead of helping keep some of these schools open?

The hedge fundies and Wall Streeters who bankroll the charter industry and provide political firepower for them always say they're involved in education because they care about giving kids from low income backgrounds a good education.

Many of these Catholic schools the diocese is going to kill provide an excellent education for children, but the hedge fundies and Wall Streeters and corporate media types don't seem to care.

Of course this is not to let the fat cats running the diocese off the hook either .

Maybe some less fancy stuff for the cardinal?  

 

Maybe take care of abuse problems that are brought to their attention immediately instead of waiting until they turn into things that have to be settled for $25 million bucks?

 

Still, the major problem here is the charter school cancer.

 

It's killing not just the public school system - it's killing the Catholic school system too.