Quick! Get On The Waiting List!

The unsupervised public debt factory that is UNO recently opened a branch office in Rogers Park, and today I noticed that the waiting list to get into the 9th grade there was so long that the school decided to flyer door to door down as far as the 6500 block. I didn't check farther south than that.

As you know, the funding for all of these extra charter schools comes right out of the funding for the regular schools that serve everyone, including special education students and ELLs. It's not like there's some separate funding source.  Our local alderman is okay with this doomed-to-create-chaos model of funding because his whole thing is, evidently, "people are voting with their feet."

I'm trying to reconcile the urgent need the Alderman felt for this campus with the fact that they're putting out glossies to fill a single grade level on August 28. And that the marketing slogan around the flyers appears to have been, "Surround Sullivan."

God only knows why a Latino-focused charter school would target a high school where the Black/Latino split is something near 60-40.  It's a complete mystery to me. And god forbid kids all go to school together. In America.

One thing that isn't commonly known the way the charter bubble is creating a massive deficit that will have to be paid off by people in the future. The UNO chain is based on the idea that if you open enough campuses, you will generate enough money to make payments on debt already accrued. Sooner or later, the thing has just got to get bailed out, or fail and create chaos.

It's called "too big to fail," and it's part of why this charter campus is scrambling to fill seats in a grade level a few days before school starts, because they have to keep filling seats and opening campuses before the chits come due.

So, we're getting this dreadful privatized-segregation-based race to the bottom, and the people a generation from now, who may very well have finally figured out what is going on, will be stuck with the capital costs of it.

Here's a clip of Byron Sigcho talking about the UNO debt situation last August at the Rogers Park branch library. But really, go watch the whole thing; it's fascinating.