Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our "failing public schools." To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren't thriving in traditional educational settings. 

But that's not what's happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I've developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it's now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.

Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they're free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.

Moreover, they do not have publicly elected school boards. In other words, we have no say on how our tax dollars are spent in charter schools because oversight is lax. Yet a charter school principal, a charter school founder and members of Moms For Liberty (which has direct ties to the school privatization movement) can sit on our school board.

Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy. 

What I didn't realize was that we were being sabotaged by the very people selling taxpayers the solutions. 

According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there's a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada's education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite "historic education funding" being passed in 2023?

Because you can't pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn't enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward "private alternatives" such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, "Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand."

The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan's administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with "apocalyptic rhetoric" and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity." 

What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson's paradox. Students weren't actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush's own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.

Rather than addressing systemic poverty, which we know affects educational outcomes, politicians and corporate philanthropists wasted billions of dollars micromanaging teachers and student learning with policies and programs such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core.

And when public schools didn't crumble under those "reforms" as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.

The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.

But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of "school choice," and "save" Americans from the crisis they created.

In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to "free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice." This "Education Reform Report" became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025. 

And while we haven't seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing "lax classroom discipline" and "poorly performing public schools." One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents' concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child. 

And where are those tax dollars going? To Academica-managed schools, and more ideologically driven ones such as Founders Classical Academy, run by Hillsdale College, whose leadership has ties to the CNP network that wrote the privatization blueprint. 

The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicates that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide. 

This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren't charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight? 

That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It's in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities. 

Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.

The paradoxes of "school choice" can't be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the "choice schools" didn't have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services. 

Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don't blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let's not repeat the same mistake with our children's education.

Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.