For one reason or another the U.S. public school system has been under constant attack since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the American people have been well primed to believe that public schools are cesspools of ignorance and depravity. Except for the schools their own kids go to, of course. It’s all those other schools that are rotten.

The first taxpayer-supported charter schools were set up after Brown so that taxpayer dollars could follow white children into what amounted to private all-white academies. But what started out as a reaction to desegregation soon turned into Opportunity! in the form of the charter school scam.

As conservatives continued to gripe about those awful public schools, charter schools were marketed as a way to empower parents to make better public schools. And on paper, it sounds like a grand idea. However, it’s also turned into a way to siphon taxpayer dollars into a for-profit education industry. Even officially non-profit charter schools turn to for-profit companies to manage them sometimes. See “Education for Profit: The Darker Side of Charter Schools.”

And what’s happening out in Real World Land is that many of these charters have become less accountable to parents and the communities than traditional public schools used to be. The charter school activists saw Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to force New Orleans to accept a mostly charter school system. And today residents complain the New Orleans system is more like colonialism than reform. With no elected school board, schools are answerable only to the state chartering bureaucracy, not to communities and parents.

Having an elected school board created ways for the public to participate. When Katrina hit, I was serving on the search committee for a new superintendent. For years I served on the disciplinary review committee. It was much different from the dictatorial charter school environment.

The charters purport to give parents and teachers greater power, right? But you have little real voice. In the charter school world they say, “We don’t even want a PTA in our school, but we’ll survey our parents about satisfaction.” Well, goddamn it, we’re not consumers!

Now the grifters have hit a glitch. Last week, the Washington state Supreme Court decided that privately operated charter schools do not qualify as public institutions and do not qualify to receive tax support.

In the lead opinion, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen said the case wasn’t about the merits of charter schools, simply whether they were eligible for public funds. Citing state Supreme Court precedent from 1909, she said they are not eligible because they are not under the control of local voters. Washington charters are run by private nonprofit organizations that appoint their own boards. Most, including Tacoma’s charters, are also under the oversight of the appointed Washington State Charter School Commission.

Regarding quality of education, if you google for information you can find articles extolling the virtues of charter schools, and others complaining they’re teaching kids that cave men rode dinosaurs. (Forbes magazine loves them, which ought to make us suspicious right there.) The rules and regulations governing charters as well as how performances are measured vary from state to state, so it’s hard to make any general claims. But there are news stories telling us that in some states and school systems — Ohio, Chicago, and Arizona, for example — the charter schools are lagging behind public schools. See also Separating fact from fiction in 21 claims about charter schools.

Weirdly, both supporters and detractors of charter schools pull data from the same study to support their positions, so here is the study. It takes a while to load, and I haven’t had time to look at it in detail, but it appears to say that charter school performance can be better than public schools in some ways but are worse in others.

As I understand it: House GOP leadership had scheduled a procedural vote today to begin debate on the Iran deal. The whackjob fringe scuttled the vote.

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus are demanding that the Obama administration send side deals between Iran and international nuclear inspectors to Congress as part of the Iran deal now under consideration. Opponents of the deal have argued that the clock on congressional consideration of the deal has not even begun until these side deals are submitted.

Under legislation approved earlier this year, Congress has 60 days to review the deal before the White House can begin lifting sanctions on Tehran, as required under the nuclear deal.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) has offered a resolution that would prevent a vote on the Iran deal until all of the documents of the international agreement — including the deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are provided to Congress for review.

The 60 days are up on September 17. Also, there are enough Democrats committed to supporting the deal (42) that they could stop the delaying measure from being voted on in the Senate.

Ted Cruz is in on this:

Ed Kilgore has some Labor Day posts up that deserve reading. Among other things, the last Union coal mine in Kentucky just shut down. See especially An Exceptional Hostility to Labor.

The third Republican presidential nomination debate is coming up in about ten days. It is one of 16 debates the GOP has scheduled, down from 20 last time.

How many Dem debates have been scheduled? Four. Maybe two more. The first one won’t be until October.

The story is that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has decided to limit the debates to protect Hillary Clinton. I think this is a mistake for the Dems, and even a mistake for Hillary Clinton. She’s being portrayed as a criminal bitch queen in news media; she needs to get herself out in front of the public as often as possible so that people can see she doesn’t really have horns and a forked tail. She can be a compelling campaigner when she tries; we saw that in 2008.

Meanwhile, most of the public knows nothing about Bernie Sanders except (according to news media) that he’s some kind of crazy radical socialist and/or the left-wing equivalent of Donald Trump. And Matin O’Malley who?

This is no time to play defense. Yes, the Right is stepping all over itself putting on a clown show, but as far as most of the public is concerned the Republicans are the only candidates who actually appear to be running.  I think America needs to see the Dem field, direct and unfiltered, to be reassured they aren’t crazy, too. And they need to see it a lot.

I honestly think the Dem debates will go a long way toward making the Republicans look even crazier and showing America what serious candidates look like, before they forget. And this needs to happen sooner rather than later, so that the Dems don’t find themselves playing catch up in 2016.

How much of the Wasserman Schultz strategy is at Hillary Clinton’s request? I don’t know, of course, but it seems Clinton is playing a defensive strategy rather than trying to take on her rivals directly. We read in the New York Times that she’s trying to build up a “firewall” in the southern states in hopes of locking up the nomination in March.

In interviews, advisers said the campaign was increasingly devoting staff members and money to win the South Carolina primary on Feb. 27 while laying the groundwork to sweep Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia on March 1. Those Super Tuesday states are highlighted in red on maps in the offices of Mrs. Clinton’s senior aides in Brooklyn.

The eight primaries will deliver several hundred delegates for Mrs. Clinton, advisers believe, toward the goal of more than 2,200 needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign is barraging superdelegates in the South with requests for support — sometimes even jumping the gun by sending pledge forms prematurely — in hopes of adding scores of these party leaders who can bring their votes to the Clinton column at the Democratic National Convention.

The Southern firewall also includes Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina, which vote through mid-March. If Mrs. Clinton wins big in the Michigan and Ohio primaries that month, her advisers and supporters believe, the nomination will essentially be hers (though crossing the total delegate threshold takes time).

She’s hoping that minority voters will give her the votes in the South, and maybe they will. But how smart is it to base your nomination strategy on picking up delegates in states you have little hope of winning in the general election?

I agree with David Atkins:

This strategy may or may not be successful in the long run, but it’s terrible politics. Losing support among young progressive activists, white liberals and first-timers to politics, Clinton’s strategy isn’t to aggressively fight to win back the hearts and souls of those voters, but rather to build a firewall around her support among minority voters in the South.

First, there’s no guarantee that strategy will work. Contrary to the claims of some observers, Sanders’ low level of support among minority voters has far more to do with name recognition than with actual policy concerns or inside-the-tent scuffles with Black Lives Matter protesters. Nor is it possible to fully predict what might happen if Joe Biden were to enter the race. If Sanders or Biden do, shockingly, win in Iowa and New Hampshire, that event combined with a series of debates would almost certainly make an impact on minority Southern voters as well.

Second, it would have a crushing effect on Democratic activist enthusiasm. Barack Obama’s support among minority base voters was obviously a net benefit for the Party, but the Obama moment was driven equally much by the passionate activism of young people, liberal activists and political neophytes. If Clinton holds onto a win in spite of opposition from these groups, it will leave her in a weakened state and have depressive effects on Democratic turnout for every race down the ballot.

It would also have a depressive effect on the Democratic Party in the future, I believe. Instead of playing defense, she needs to be trying to win the votes of  young people, liberal activists and political neophytes, or at least some of  ’em, and she’d better hurry up about it.

It might help to sign the petition. Can’t hurt.

No thanks to Chuckles.