They can leave your child struggling to catch up:
In spring 2014 with about a month left in the school year, StudentFirst was in debt by more than $600,000 and shut its doors, giving only a week’s notice. Rochelle scrambled to get her children into a public magnet school operated by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.
A few weeks later at the new school, her eldest son, CJ, a third-grader, failed the end-of-year reading test—and Rochelle fully realized that StudentFirst’s shortcomings were not just financial, but academic as well. “It became clear that CJ had learned virtually nothing. He fell behind in all subject areas. He went to summer school after that to begin catching up.”
This whole idea of "competition" improving results all around in education is faulty, and the product of an equally faulty economic model. Competition in the retail sector brings focus to prices, driving them down. Which encourages stocking even cheaper products, very often imports slapped together in foreign sweatshops. The overall quality of goods deteriorates, and the same thing happens in the education sector. Charters and vouchers siphon off funding that should go to traditional schools, and these new private-sector "competitors" can employ non-certified teachers, some of them with no formal training in educating children. Instead of demanding quality, we're crossing our fingers and hoping quality magically appears out of thin air. That's not responsible leadership, it's the exact opposite: The complete abrogation of responsibility.
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