Ms. deFaria proves to be totally off the mark when she is “taken aback by the state Supreme Court’s decision to simply render them illegal,” the “them” meaning charter schools.

Consider the history of this country and the meaning of a republic. This country rose to greatness with free education provided by public funds. The purpose was to give a common American experience to all its citizens, i.e. to make Americans of us all.

Yes, there have always been private schools — “the better schools” — but they were and are privately funded. A true democracy cannot be based upon schools run by private people using public funds to push their own private ideology and/or agenda (taking their share out of the public pool there by defunding public schools and at the same time contributing to their failure). They divide the people: the smart from the average, the rich from the poor, the religious from the non-religious, the science from the arts. They are like firewalls keeping out competing ideas.

With charter schools, so much can go wrong. The teachers do not have to be as qualified as teachers in public schools, and are usually even more poorly paid. These schools are frequently selective in the students they accept or reject, preferring the higher achievers while discipline problems are out and right back in public schools. For all their claims to higher achievement, their test scores have rarely exceed those of public schools and are actually more often worse.

Charter schools are usually an industry with too many of them profit driven and an agenda pushed by the corporate-industrial complex that would like to control the thinking of the citizens.

We do not need to privatize education. What we need is an informed electorate that is a product of free public education.

Elizabeth Russell
Kingston