NYC charter schools get funding increases while public schools take cuts

[Hannah Bell]

HERE'S HOW IT WORKS:

•The Governor and the Legislature intended to freeze 2010 aid payment to charter schools at 2008 levels, and such a freeze was actually in the Governor’s budget and in the relevant Assembly and Senate bills (that seems eminently fair and just, given what they've done to "regular" public schools in the same period).

•Somehow, those provisions were not enacted into law.

•Therefore, charter schools now will now get increased funding by operation of law (a statutory formula found in §2856 of the Education Law, according to the White Osterman memo and I’ll take their word for it)

•Charter schools have a mechanism, kindly provided by the State Education Department on a handy form, for “intercepting” from school districts money due to them under the funding formula, which apparently inexorably “mov forward” to ever increasing levels of funding unless stopped by vigilant legislators...

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2010/09/charter-schools-mysteriously-survive.html

[Lasher]

1. Reminds me of Medicare Advantage.

"Let us do it in the private sector, where everything is done more efficiently," said the neoliberals. So we got Medicare Part C, where the government sent to private companies a monthly subsidy that was equal to the traditional Medicare cost. So they got the level playing field that they said they wanted, so that they could work their magic in the private sector much more efficiently than the government-run agency.

But privatization didn't work and the Part C companies started going belly up. See, that's how free enterprise sorts inefficiencies out of the economy. But not really. Along came The Worst President in Living Memory and his Bush league GOP lapdog Congress to increase the monthly per capita subsidy 14 percent to private companies, but not for traditional Medicare beneficiaries. And they started calling this form of privatization Medicare Advantage instead of Part C.

Health insurance reform will rectify this, at least partially. I don't want to highjack your thread more than I already have, so I'll leave it at that - except to finally get to my point: School privatization appears to be going down the same path.