So far, this can’t happen in Kansas because we have stricter rules on charters. Kansas’ ALEC legislators and their supporters would like to change that. And now we have corporate tax credit scholarships that will also funnel money to private schools that would otherwise go to the state general fund with absolutely no requirements for fiscal or academic accountability. Is this what we want for Kansas school children?
“‘It clicked for me. Aha! This is self-dealing. That’s why we are massively overpaying for the lease,’ says Sinoff, who resigned with the other board members this summer. He adds, ‘Imagine is perfectly happy cranking out low-quality schools and profiting off them. They don’t care particularly about the quality of the kids’ education.’…
“[T]he [charter school] model began to change in the late 1990s, when, according to National Education Policy Center researcher Gary Miron, people from the business sector decided they wanted to test market theories on education.
“Ohio’s charter law went into effect in 1998, and corporate interests were all over the state’s school-choice blueprint. ‘It was a political movement, not an education movement,’ says Dyer. ‘You have big political contributors who have really driven the school-choice movement in Ohio for a long time.'”
Read more here: http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/ohio-charter-schools-john-kasich-imagine