Just like the subprime mortgage crisis slammed poorer African-American neighborhoods, so could the growing increase in charter schools, claims a UConn professor in a new report.
Insufficient regulation could result in the formation of charter school “bubbles”: a concentration of poorly performing schools in urban African-American communities, according to Preston Green III, UConn professor of educational leadership and law.
In a recent paper that is receiving national attention, Green and three co-authors outline the many parallels they see between today’s charter school systems and the early days of the subprime mortgage crisis, where aggressive business practices and unchecked growth created a national housing “bubble” that threw the country into deep recession.
Green said the housing bubble was particularly devastating to urban African-American families, many of whom relied on subprime mortgages to purchase their first homes. Without sufficient regulatory safeguards in place to protect them, he said these vulnerable families would later lose their properties to foreclosure when the bubble burst and they were unable to meet the terms of their loans.
In his research article, Green and his co-authors said more than $200 million in charter school fraud, abuse, and mismanagement has been identified in 15 states.“If we’re going to have private entities involved in public education, we need to have sufficient regulation, because without those regulations, without that oversight, there could be systemic abuse,” he said.
