>Reports and stories about charter schools are in the media every day. The majority of these stories praise charters, while often demeaning public schools. Int

>Reports and stories about charter schools are in the media every day. The majority of these stories praise charters, while often demeaning public schools. Interesting. My experience with how the media presents charter schools is quite the opposite. It seems like every few weeks there is a story about a corrupt charter school management team embezzling funds or over-enrolling of students or suspect academic results. Of course with stories on actual events, such as an investigation into missing funds, it's difficult if not downright impossible, if a media outlet so desired, to spin the story into something positive. But I don't recollect reading anything within the past few years that actually praised charter schools, and that's not to mean the traditional public school system is squeaky clean and a model of best practices. I suspect there is an equivalent level of corruption there. I've wondered if it's because I live in Philadelphia where this a strong teachers union and a traditional public school system that is, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt. However, I would expect that these conditions would lead to the opposite in how charter schools are portrayed, if only for the sake that they are an alternative to the current system that is failing miserably. The charter school debate is a sub-segment of a larger issue, which is this push towards the privatization of everything that is consumed by the public and paid for by tax dollars, from public school systems to prisons to health care programs, such as Medicaid. Personally, I disagree with this push. It creates perverse incentives and from a political economy point of view, I think there are some goods which can't and should not be privatized, but that discussion is for another time.