For the Students?

Today I attended our monthly "leave us alone"/center-right coalition meeting for Minnesota. This is the core group I am building to lead nothing shore of a political revolution to move us away from our high tax structure status.

Our guest speaker at the meeting was the Executive Director of a charter school -- which is still a public, no tuition school in Minnesota but the school has some freedoms such as being an "at will employer" meaning they can actually fire bad teachers!! Wow, I definitely learned something today. But what really stood out for me during this presentation was that this school has a current waiting list of over 300 students. This fact, coupled with my own local charter school's waiting list of about 320 applicants for their 24 annual kindergarten slots tells me that market demand for these alternative schools is not being met.

Sadly, many of our current state legislators - who swear they do what they do because they are doing it "for the students/kids" - have no idea what market forces are or simply refuse to acknowledge such consumer demand. The perfect example is the legislation introduced by a state representative that would have capped the number of charter schools in Minnesota. There is absolutely NO way such legislation would help the students and parents who clearly want charter schools based on the hard evidence of waiting lists/applicants for open slots.

So forget it students and parents -- you will go to the school we tell you to attend because we are spending your money for you because this is a perfect way to help the teacher unions grow in power while keeping you (our future workers!!) down on the economic ladder.

Markets not Marxists,

Todd