From Peter:

Let’s pretend Ohio has its own reality show on TV. We’ll call it “Buckeye Survivor.” It starts with 30 kids trapped on a desert island. Their only hope for escape is a raft - and it can’t carry more than three or four at a time.

So naturally, the governor of Ohio burns the raft, because letting anyone escape would be “undemocratic.”

If that sounds vaguely familiar, maybe it’s because we’ve seen it in reruns of the debate over charter schools and vouchers. Gov. Ted Strickland wants to sink them both because letting a few students escape appallingly bad public schools is “undemocratic.”

So how bad are those public schools?

According to Ohio Department of Education reports, in Cincinnati Public Schools, 15,000 students are trapped in 34 schools that are failing at a cost of more than $76 million, not including local property taxes.

Cleveland has schools with graduation rates as low as 10 percent and 32 percent. Columbus has more 25,717 students in failing schools.

Statewide, the average cost per student is $8,000. In big cities, it’s as high as $13,000.

But if a family takes their child to a charter school or uses vouchers to pay private tuition, that costs far less - about $5,000.

The failing schools they leave get to keep the local property taxes - about 30 percent more, or $3,000 to $8,000 per student. In other words, they are paid like subsidized farmers to not teach a child - which means they can spend even more on the students that stay behind.

But to hear school officials and teachers’ unions tell it, they’re being robbed. Charters and vouchers “take money” away from public schools, Ohio’s two big teacher unions claim.

Read the rest of his column here.

Peter makes two excellent points about charter schools that the MSM likes to ignore: 1) Charter schools perform better than their public counterparts. 2) If they didn’t, then parents can hold them accountable by NOT SENDING THEIR CHILDREN TO THAT SCHOOL.

Charter school teachers should not trust the American Federation of Teachers’ efforts to unionize them - THE AFT is the same group that will argue charter schools are harmful and unconstitutional, so how could they possibly have charter school teachers’ best interest in mind? �