Burnt Orange Report

Better late than never

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

Last week the Trib ran this story about Rep. Jim Dunnam going before the Sunset Commission and arguing that Texas doesn't need any more charter schools, especially since most of them don't work.

Besides a few notable exceptions, charter schools have not lived up to the hype that Republicans voiced early in their takeover of local and state governments. They argued that the market would create competition and thus improve education for students in both public and private schools. Perfectly reasonable argument to make, but it turns out that it doesn't work that way. Most of the people running these charter schools are more interested in the money to be made in private education than in improving education all around; the conflict of greed getting in the way of a noble pursuit.

I didn't write this post to just talk about education, though. I'm going to make a bit of a leap so try to follow me, but if we shouldn't privatize education why on earth would we want to do it with our retirement? I know, apples and oranges. And why do I have to keep bringing up Social Security?

There is a free market rinciple that lies beneath both of these conservative pet causes. You see, the people who are most ardently in favor of charter schools are those who stand to profit from them. The people most in favor of privatization are... the people who stand to profit from millions of naive newbies investing in the stock market. Imagine all those fund managers having trillions of dollars invested at their direction of the next few decades, the commissions alone for some stock brokers will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Just like with the charter schools, results don't matter. They don't care if you quadruple your money in a year or lose it all in a day, as long as they get their cut. The only real "ownership society" they care about is the one where they have the money to literally own everything.

This is a guest post by Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk for the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. he can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com