Are only liberals against Charter School expansion?

Lloyd Brown chided liberals for their resistance to charter schools in a sunshine state news piece and immediately I thought just like a conservative, never let the facts stand in his way.

I wonder if it occurred to Mr. Brown that the reason liberals and many conservatives too oppose charter schools is because they put out a substandard product? The Stanford Credo the definitive charter school study says children as a group that attend charter schools in Florida perform worse than their public school counterparts.

Mr. Brown goes onto criticize local school boards which if anything like mine are made up of both liberals and conservatives who have pushed back against charter schools. Mr. Brown may not acknowledge it but charter schools are an affront to democracy. Their boards are not elected and quite often they are located in different cities and even state making access to them difficult. I am not a fan of my board but at least I have a say in them being elected.

More troubling about Brown’s assertion that charter schools be allowed to expand easier is he ignores the fact over 250 charter schools have opened taken, public money and closed leaving families and communities in the lurch. The state has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on charter schools that have failed.

Then there is the case of Jonathon Hage, the CEO of charter schools USA.  He operates just 58 schools but is able to live in a 1.8 million dollar house and sends his children to an expensive private school. By comparison the super in my home town runs 161 schools, makes 275 thousand and sends his children to public schools. I don’t know how much his house is worth and where I am sure it is nice I would guess it is worth less than 1.8 million dollars.

I wonder if Mr. Brown likes to go boating. Well the CEO of charter schools USA does and routinely takes out his, 350 thousand dollar 43 foot yacht which he named Fishin-4-Schools. An ironic name if there ever was one. This is who Brown wants to make it easier for.

At the end of the day everybody should be concerned about the easy expansion of charter schools, liberals and conservatives alike as the good apples are frozen out by corporations more concerned with profits than education. 

To read Mr. Brown's rambling piece click the link: http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/dont-fall-liberal-pretense-charter-school-support