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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you in New York, utilities were compelled to divest from power production. Your state may vary.

Similar to the charter school scam, the scrappy upstarts bonded out lots of debt to buy up power plants and subsequently became a powerful lobby to keep their cartel tight.

Some of the remaining municipal energy co-op utilities were exempted from deregulation, and all of them have lower cost structures.

I know Massachusetts is a similar story, not sure about others.

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Charter schools aren't a scam. They improve the ability of children to learn.

What is the charter school scam? Kids actually learning to read and do math? Giving parents a choice?

Take the money from public education and fund vouchers. Those vouchers aren't going to get you into the good private school, you'll need money on top of the voucher for that. They get you in the school that prepares your for life in prison. https://time.com/101440/new-orleans-charter-schools-shouldnt...

This is in stark contrast to the charter schools in NYC which are far better than all but the best regular public schools.

If you look at the economic backgrounds and general location of students you will find that is the true predictor of educational outcomes (on average) rather than whether that child is at a charter or public school.

That doesn’t really hold for the success academies or the charters in Harlem. A lot of these charter schools mainly serve low income families.

Floating tax exempt bonds, skimming the cream with building construction/rehab and fees, and then using the different vehicles to monetize building deprecation. Then you hire young and dumb teachers as cheaply as possible and keep costs down with turnover.

Most of them are structured like real estate syndicates. It’s basically like building a strip mall or franchise hotel, except you have a captive customer and can leave the local taxpayer holding the bag. The educational mission is mostly a secondary concern. There are exceptions.

What do you mean by captive customer? My understanding was that they were all about “parent choice”, so parents can choose to send their kids to either charter schools or public schools, and the schools only get federal money proportionate to the number enrolled. Presumably parents would not tend to keep their kids in a school with high teacher turnover.

N.b. I don’t have kids, so this is mostly academic for me, no pun intended

Charter schools are private and per child offer no education advantages over public school. There are -plenty- public schools that achieve better results. The idea that there is something inherently wrong with public education is a myth pursued by the elite (read top 0.1%) to persuade the general public to do away with the public education system so that only private schools will exist and they can prevent the public from becoming too educated and questioning the status quo and with the added advantage of lowering their tax bills.

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