For context, take a look at the NYT list of “right wingnut” conspiracies circa 2020 or so:

- The border is not secure.
- Inflation is significant and not “temporary”.
- The Steele Report is not credible.
- The laptop is not a Russian plant.
- The lab leak theory is credible.
- Long term lockdowns aren’t helpful.
- Biden isn’t fully mentally competent.
- Defunding police isn’t a great idea.
- Y chromosomes in women’s sports? Not scientifically justifiable.
- The GF riots weren’t “mostly peaceful”.
- Judging by identity instead of merit isn’t democratic.
- Extremely adult books in grades schools? It’s sane to question this.
- Hormonal and surgical transitions for children? They are irreversible and not often scientifically justified, per Germany, UK, France, Sweden, etc.
- Eliminating the following degrades schools: phonics, advanced classes, standardized testing, high school graduation requirements, grouping kids by learning level, and merit based hiring.
- Biden restarting Nord Stream 2 and refusing to arm Ukrainians? Probably not great ideas.
- Funding Hamas and Iran? Not smart.
- Removing Houthis from terrorist watch lists? Not smart.
- The Afghanistan withdrawal? Not at all smooth, and Biden’s top military advisers were against it.
- Defunding police, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, and support illegal immigration? Not great ideas. Supported by progressives - perhaps 20% of the population - but opposed by the vast majority of Black Americans and the vast majority of the general population.

So liberals consider “trans” to be an insult, and aren’t happy with less feminine females. Huh.

> Students are randomly assigned to the charter schools? The answer is no.

100% wrong. The answer is YES. For example, most (all?) of NYC’s Success Academies are lottery based and required to admit any student, just like a public school. There’s even an NYC study that compares siblings split between public and those lucky enough to get into a charter.

> You are comparing apples and oranges.

You asked me to compare charter to public costs. I did, and you provide little response except a wandering polemic and, “mysteriously” ZERO cost data of your own.

> My favorite charter school story is Duluth MN where the school board determined that they only needed to high schools so they closed Duluth Central which, as its name implies, was centrally located. They kept two high schools, one on the east end of Duluth and the other on the west end. A charter school wanted to open a high school in the closed school. That would have resulted in the city continuing to pay for operating three high schools even though the elected school board had determined the city only needed two to serve all the students. With reduced enrollment the two other high schools would have to cut back on the variety of classes they offered. Not only would the education of students be more expensive, but it would be lower quality. All to give a small number of parents a choice at public expense.

This proves less than nothing.

1 - It’s NORMAL for a public school with fewer students to get less money - regardless of whether the competition is public, a charter, home schooling, or private.

2 - In your example, the charter in fact offered to run the school and its buildings for LESS money per student - offering to pay 14 million dollars outright for the facility! Theoretically leaving MORE money per student available to the public schools.

> Its the same misleading bs that is being used to strip profitable students out of the public schools system.

Notice something? As usual, charter school haters (a) fail to provide hard data, and (b) resort to polemics like “misleading bs” to downplay research by Harvard, Stanford, and the NYT. Brilliant, eh?

> NPR's own news is absolutely middle and balanced

Exhibit A ^^^. NPR lovingly treats Heather Cox Richardson, for example, as a centrist academic historian, and NPR listeners swallow this misinformation hook, line, and sinker. NPR avoids quoting her juicy “letters”, which are read by two million progressives and also Rachel Maddow’s bedtime reading. These “absolutely middle and balanced” “letters” freely demonize anyone even slightly conservative as fascist or “Christian Nationalist”, cherry pick history, and cherry pick modern sources that are distinctly left leaning. By the way, HCR now publicly claims there’s little proven evidence that Kirk’s assassin was a leftist driven by leftist philosophy.

Receipts: The article https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2023%2F10%2F06... pretends HCR is a well respected academic centrist, yet here are excerpts from a very typical HCR letter: “MAGA Christian nationalists” “patriarchal” “attacked” “ far-right”, “radical right”, “culture war”, “align with Putin”, all while quoting The Bulwark, NBC, The Guardian as centrist. . . These excerpts aren’t cherry picked - practically every other sentence is obviously a polemical far left framing.

There’s little middle ground to treating Critical Theory - which is now rife throughout academia's liberal arts and soft sciences - either as “trust me bro” indoctrination or as disproven bunk. After all, CT originated in the 1930s as a way to give Marxism a patina of academia, and hasn’t changed significantly since - except for postmodern twists like swapping out class for race, and declaring empirical reasoning itself to be a tool of bigotry. It might not be such a problem except that its core longstanding tenets similarly characterizes bedrock western enlightenment concepts like blind justice, property rights, decentralized judiciaries, decentralized policing, or free speech as “racist fascist colonialism”.

If it stayed in advanced academia, that might have kept it in check. But it’s metastasized considerably. Our colleges for K-12 teachers, for example, heavily winnow and wean based on CT, with “equitably” lowered admissions standards (the SAT median is now lowered to the 42nd percentile!), diversity statements, and pap like “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Another example is BLM’s founders plus teachers union leadership have fully bought into it.

> What does that mean? Do they receive less per pupil from the city?

Significantly less, as is common throughout the country. In NYC, as of 2024-2025 it’s around 19k per student this year of city money per year going to charters - in comparison to about 40k spent in public schools. Note that is just a city funding number, as it’s hard to get an accurate number of total per pupil funding including federal grants, special Ed renumeration, or private charity fundraising.

> Which simply confirms that they aren't actually educating the same population as public schools.

Huh? Didn’t bother reading the articles, eh? Most NYC charters teach to essentially the exact same demographics as their public school counterparts, without selective admissions, as required by law. Sometimes they’re housed in the same building.

And yet NYC charters cost less per student, are EXTREMELY popular among minorities, plus are doing an excellent job. This success is arguably mainly due to: (a) not being beholden to teachers unions, (b) free to hire and fire teachers based on their teaching qualities, and (c) can be shut down when caught doing a poor job. Only white “progressive” democrats - like NY Governor Hochul or NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani - and, of course, teachers unions, oppose charters. Receipts:

NYT Nov 2022: “As NYC Schools Face a Crisis Charter Schools Gain Students” https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2022%2F1...

- Charters “typically outperform district schools in math and reading on state standardized tests,”
- “the vast majority of students in charters are Black and Latino”
- “families in New York have clamored for more access to charters.”
- “Most Democratic lawmakers remain firmly opposed to allowing any expansion of the schools,”
- teachers’ unions, as “major political players,” are a key stumbling block.

NYPost, June 2023, “Charter schools outperform public schools in US, with NY results ‘among the best in the country’” https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnypost.com%2F2023%2F06%2F11%2F...

- quotes Stanford “National Charter School Study 2023“ study https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fncss3.stanford.edu%2Fwp-...
- Big Apple charter-school kids gained an additional 80 days in math compared to their local districts’ peers, while upstate charter students out-learned their counterparts by 73 days.
- In reading, New York City outpaced their counterparts by 42 days, while upstate charter students also exceeded the learning of traditional public-school students by a staggering 75 days.
- Students at the city’s 49-charter-school Success Academy network achieved a staggering 206 additional days of learning in math and 107 days in reading compared to surrounding TPS peers.

NYPost, 2025, “The Bronx is learning! Charter kids excel on NY math and reading tests, surpassing public school students’ scores by whopping 25%” https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnypost.com%2F2025%2F08%2F17%2F...

- “Students from charter schools in the borough’s poorest neighborhoods, including the South Bronx, excelled on state reading and math exams — with pass rates exceeding 90% in some classrooms, according to new data.”

Harvard Graduate School of Education EdNext Poll, 2019: “Democrats Divided Over School Choice” https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gse.harvard.edu%2Fid...

- “School choice divides the Democratic Party along racial and ethnic lines. African American Democrats support targeted school vouchers, universal vouchers, and charter schools at 70%, 60%, and 55%, respectively. Among Hispanic Democrats, support for the three policies is at 67%, 60%, and 47%. On the other hand, just 40% of non-Hispanic White Democrats support targeted vouchers, 46% support universal vouchers, and 33% support charters.”

It’s interesting how this ^^^ is slowly getting voted down (from a 5).

Must have hit REALLY close to the mark to be worth several days of revisionist negative mods.

Great! A safe space!

I’m quite looking forward to the land acknowledgments, masks, pronoun lessons, denouncing JK Rowling, and snarking about illiterate deplorables.

But wait! That never happens! Right?

Wink. Wink.

Got it! Can I join your book club now?

Don’t you get it?

The Guardian, Washington Post, NPR, New York Times, Wikipedia, CNN, and MSNBC?

They’ve collectively convinced 10% of the population to support violence against conservatives.

That’s apparently not enough in the mind of the OP.

Still don’t get it?

Report to the nearest teachers’ lounge for retraining.

Yet, “mysteriously”, pick virtually any top issue, and NPR is guaranteed to be on the left side of it. It even aired an interview defending looting. Don’t bother responding. It’ll surely be a useless response like “that’s because reality has a liberal bias”.

Some of my favorite metrics for “reality has a liberal bias” are the hypocritical issues: school choice, voter ID, fully funded policing, and limited immigration. Each of which prominent liberals have opposed, yet the vast majority of Black Americans - a constituency liberals claim to represent - support all of them.

We’re at the “that never happened” stage, eh? Brilliant!

Antifa doesn’t exist either, right?

. . . folks are figuring out that top media’s official positions were more than a little off:

- The border is secure.
- The inflation is “temporary” and “small”.
- The Steele Report is credible.
- The laptop is a Russian plant.
- The lab leak theory is propaganda.
- Opposing long term lockdowns is unscientific.
- Biden is fully mentally competent.
- Defunding police is a great idea.
- The GF riots were “mostly peaceful”.
- Judging by identity instead of merit is democratic.
- Extremely adult books in grades schools are appropriate.
- Hormonal and surgical transitions for children are scientific and moral.
- Eliminating the following “equitably” improves schools: phonics, advanced classes, standardized testing, high school graduation requirements, grouping kids by learning level, and merit based hiring.
- Restarting Nord Stream 2 and refusing to arm Ukrainians was a great idea.
- Funding Hamas and Iran was smart, and it was great that the Houthis were removed from terrorist watch lists. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a success, and Biden’s top military advisers weren’t against it.
- Harris and Biden didn’t begin office with a myriad of restrictions on fossil fuel pipelines, permits, and financing. Stopping PennEast, Keystone XL, etc were helpful actions.
- Support defunding, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, and support illegal immigration.

. . . be aware that there’s a LOT more going on behind the scenes.

While hospitals generally view their emergency services as a financial drain, they view their oncology treatment as a rather lucrative profit center, and pad their billing accordingly.

They’re robbing Peter (insurance companies) to pay Paul (federally mandated emergency care services).

So it’s arguably “the system” that deserves blame.