By Shawgi Tell
North Carolina is home to many low-performing highly-segregated charter schools (see here, here, and here). Yet despite lagging academic performance, racial inequalities, and low enrollment numbers, North Carolina continues to create more charter schools, proving once again that charter schools are pay-the-rich schemes created in the name of “choice,” “competition,” and “rescuing kids from failing public schools.”
Recently we learned that North Carolina is increasing the number of failing virtual charter schools in particular. According to a March 20, 2026, article from NC Newsline, “For years, North Carolina has had two virtual charter pilot programs operating entirely online. Both have failed to meet performance expectations since they opened a decade ago. The [state’s Charter Schools Review] board has [now] approved two additional standalone virtual schools in recent weeks.” This academic failure exists despite the fact that the state’s two original virtual charter schools together hold $25 million in cash reserves.
This top-down move is so irresponsible that “North Carolina Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, a Wake County Democrat, called the state’s expansion of virtual charter schools ‘educational malpractice’ and said it cheats both students and taxpayers.”
Chaudhuri posed the question, “How on earth are you allowing parents to send their kids to virtual charter schools that have consistently received a D as far as annual school performance?”…. This would be like educational malpractice for them to continue to do this.” The dictionary gives “abuse” and “negligence” as synonyms for malpractice.
For his part, Charter Schools Review Board member Stephen Gay said, “I see it [virtual charter schools] as a money grab for a lot of schools that are doing it.” The headline from another news source literally reads: NC approves more remote charter schools. Are the virtual options a ‘money grab’? Would such a question arise if charter schools did not engage in profiteering? All of this is another way of reminding everyone that charter schools are private businesses, not schools.
It is worth noting that the federal government recently funneled $53 million to the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools to support the state's charter schools. This is public money leaving public hands to fill the pockets of private interests under the veneer of high ideals. There is no educational justification for such an arrangement. Public money belongs only to the public.
The major owners of capital who have long been behind charter schools have always been committed to a narrative about charter schools that is inconsistent with the evidence for charter schools. By all accounts, charter schools have caused great harm to education, society, and the economy. Yet, if you listen to charter school boosters, you would think that people everywhere are desperately begging for more charter schools and that charter schools are doing great in so many ways. False and misleading information about long charter school waiting lists is even floated from time to time to create the impression that these outsourced schools are in high demand.
Charter school promoters, like most politicians and the media, hope that people do not investigate anything and find out for themselves what is really going on in the charter school sector. An enlightened citizenry is not in their interest. Instead, everyone is under relentless pressure to internalize confused notions of “choice” while parents “shopping for a school” are coerced to fend-for-themselves in the name of “freedom,” “control,” and “agency.”
Myths, lies, propaganda, and disinformation of all kinds are unleashed on a non-stop frantic basis by charter school promoters in order to curate a certain image of charter schools. There is so much profit to be made from both non-profit and for-profit charter schools that not even an ounce of truth about charter schools can be tolerated by these forces. This is how greed manifests itself today, as a force for negating the truth, as intense opposition to a human-centered approach to education.
It does not matter how many charter school owners, operators, trustees, and employees go to jail nearly every day for fraud, corruption, embezzlement, sexual crimes, and more. The drive for more profits is insatiable, blinding, and addictive. It is wrecking education, culture, and society.
The fact that charter school advocates have to fight so hard every day to sell charter schools shows just how significant and fragile this fight is.
In 2025, about $1.18 billion was siphoned from underfunded public schools by about 218 charter schools in North Carolina.
To learn more about public schools and charter schools in North Carolina, visit Public Schools First NC.
Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.
