Taxpayers footing bill for millionaires' kids

by Laura ClawsonFollow for Daily Kos Labor

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When the neighborhood school in the pricey Los Altos Hills neighborhood of Los Altos, California closed, local parents were upset. So they formed the Bullis charter school, and gave residents of Los Altos Hills, where the median home value is $1 million and median household income is $219,000, a preference in admissions.

[Bullis] accepts one in six kindergarten applicants, offers Chinese and asks families to donate $5,000 per child each year. Parents include Ken Moore, son of Intel Corp.’s co-founder, and Steven Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse.

These kids are getting many of the benefits of an elite private school, while other kids in their school district, the ones who don't live in this particular wealthy neighborhood, are seeing class sizes get bigger and electives get cut. But it's all good:

Every child deserves a good education, Buffy Poon, a Bullis mother of three and former EBay Inc. (EBAY) executive and Merrill Lynch & Co. banker, said in an interview. “It takes all of us, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ (I cringe to use such blunt distinctions), to help improve the world.” Poon wrote in an e-mail to the Santa Clara County Board of Education, which oversees the school.

Apparently Buffy Poon just thinks that while every child deserves a good education, hers deserve a very specific good education of her choosing, and that local taxpayers should make that available to her kids even as it's not available to other people's kids. I guess that's just what her "have" kids require to "help improve the world." They just couldn't do it with the same education any old person can get.
While Bullis may be an extreme case, it's not alone among charter schools in serving upper-middle-class suburban kids:

One out of five of the country’s 5,200 charter schools is in a suburb, including affluent communities like Los Altos, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In Minnesota, where the charter school movement began in 1992, charters in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region initially focused on black, urban neighborhoods and have since spread into wealthy suburbs, where schools are often predominantly white, according to research from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty. A quarter of U.S. charter schools don’t participate in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program, compared with 2 percent at conventional public schools, according to a 2010 study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the Los Altos school district, 11 percent of kids speak English as a second language, but just 2 percent of kids at Bullis do—not surprising when you learn that the school doesn't offer Spanish-language materials. Apparently just offering preference to kids from the rich neighborhood doesn't go far enough in keeping the riff-raff out.
But hey, anything for Buffy Poon's little darlings.