Why and how Charter schools are so wrong

New Jersey is learning what people in the Kansas City area should when it comes to Charter schools:

Christie's charter school nightmare: “White flight..."

"We are creating separate but equal school systems,"  --Hoboken school board president.

From the article:

While New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie deals with burgeoning scandals surrounding accusations he used the Port Authority and development deals for political ends, he now finds himself in a flap surrounding charter schools in Hoboken.

As charters in the city have exploded in number and size, “they’re fostering white flight, and they’re bankrupting us,” the city’s school board head charged in a Wednesday interview. “We are creating separate but equal school systems,” warned Hoboken Board of Education president Leon Gold. (As Salon has reported, Christie-style ed reform has also sparked controversy in Newark.)

It's what I've said all along.

Charter schools do two things. First they drain funds away from the public school system, when there's already far too little for the schools, shamefully.  And second, they do what the Hoboken school board president points out above. That is, they set up a second set of schools, virtually always for the more wealthy--read: white--students. Truly, yet another separate and unequal group of schools for the more fortunate, the wealthier population.

It's not just unequal and/or unfair, either. 

It's unjust

It's obscene.

It's grossly immoral.

It's not what any good, fair country or society should be about.

Least of all America.

Kansas Citians would do well to learn from all this.  And shut down the entire Charter school program.