Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure By Paul Buchheit

The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by many recent studies. Even CREDO [3], which is part of a conservative think tank funded by the pro-privatization Walton Foundation, recently found that in comparison to traditional public schools “students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics.” Another recent CREDO study [4] of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher …

How Wall Street Used Swaps to Get Rich at the Expense of Cities

Yves here. This post by Ed Walker provides a detailed description of how badly municipalities have been fleeced when they bought interest rate swaps from Wall Street as part of financings. It isn’t simply that these borrowers were exploited, but that the degree of pilfering was so extreme that the financiers clearly knew they were dealing with rubes and took …