Republican Ohio Governor, John Kasich, must be craving pizza.
That is the only logical explanation for his analogy where he compared the competition of charter schools to pizza shops.
On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver took Governor Kasich to task for his silly comments by remarking that some pizzerias are actually better managed than a lot of charter schools here in the United States. He said:
“The problem with letting the free market decide when it comes to kids is that kids change faster than the market. And by the time it’s obvious that a school is failing, futures may have been ruined. So if we are going to treat charter schools like “pizza shops,” we should monitor them at least as well as we do pizzerias. It’s like the old saying, ‘Give a kid a shitty pizza, you fuck up their day; treat a kid like a shitty pizza, you could fuck up their entire life.'”
Oliver’s words for Governor Kasich came during a segment where he attempted to expose some shocking problems that exist in charter schools throughout the nation. He focused mainly on Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, because they have a history of depressing charter school records.
All three of these states have had a negative outcome with charter schools because of negligence in the approval process, school executives stealing funds, and lackadaisical attendance recording methods. Oliver takes on these charter school’s failing attendance policies by saying:
“You’re basically giving kids a box that contains video games, pornography and long division and claiming 100 percent of them chose the right one. One major study found that compared to students in traditional schools, students in online charters lost the equivalent of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year. And 180 minus 180 is, as those kids might put it, three.”
Oliver recognizes that there are over 6,700 charter schools across the country that teach over three million students. These students, most people assume, are supposed to be getting better education than students who are in public school.
But, like we learned with the financial industry, when the government deregulates and assumes that things are running smoothly, people start to abuse the system. We are slowly starting to discover that, in many instances, students aren’t being properly educated and are having resources stripped from them by greedy administrators.
This is something Oliver hopes to help change by shining a light on the harmful activity that is affecting our nation’s children.
Here is the video of John Oliver on Last Week Tonight talking about the charter school crisis that is affecting millions of students in the United States:
