Last week was charter school appreciation week, let’s see how they did.

Two charter schools, one each in Duval and Orange County closed with barely any notice, while another in Broward County was told because of academic failures and refusing to divulge information from an audit it would be forced to close in 90 days.

Parents at a school in Alachua County bitterly complained about both nepotism and being pressured to pay fees.

The principal of a Palm Beach charter school, with a troubled past was caught with a student in her car smoking marijuana.

Then Florida virtual school took its own foundation to court over financial irregularities.

In Florida over 280 charter schools have opened, taken public money and closed leaving families and communities in a lurch, hundreds of millions of dollars wasted and children have had their educations and possibly futures harmed.

Some might be saying, but many charter schools are doing well, which quite frankly isn’t true. The Stanford Credo says Florida charter schools lag behind when compared to their public school counterparts and most of the only ones that are doing well have left the poor and mostly minority neighborhoods and fled to the suburbs where they have cherry picked children and siphoned away resources from schools there that were doing well.

In Florida, choice is just another word for privatization, and it would be one thing if charters were performing better than public schools but in truth the only thing that has improved is the bank account numbers of the operators.

Instead of outsourcing our kids’ education to for profit outfits who do a poor job, we should invest in our public schools because despite their problems, many of which were created by charter loving Tallahassee, they are by far the best thing we have going.