Florida's education commisioner Gerald Robinson says, it doesn't matter if charter schools suck, he wants more

Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson recently said the state application for opening charter schools doesn’t need to address performance and that the application doesn’t take into account whether a charter organization already has schools open and how those schools are performing.

Let that sink in for a second.

He is saying it doesn’t matter if charter schools are terrible or not, if they are effective or not or if they are educating our children or not. And where he doesn’t say it directly, it has become readily apparent the only thing that matters to him and the Florida legislature is how fast they can line the pockets of their cronies and how fast they can dismantle public education.

There has been one scandal after another over the last few months involving charter schools, whether it’s bringing in strippers, paying the owners extravagant rents, mismanagement of finances or just being closed because they are bad. On top of that charter schools here in Florida, despite the fact they don’t have to play by the same rules as public schools, as a group are very low performing, doing much worse than their public school peers.

The answer should be to fix our public schools and make them the best they can be, not to pour much needed and growing ever scarce resources into the pockets of the sycophants of politicians and businesses which are concerned about the bottom line not our children’s futures.