Charter school nonsense

I saw this article in the City Pages today about the Minnesota Business Academy, a charter school in St. Paul, and it ticked me off. I am a pragmatic person. I support trying new things, and that's why I have no problems with charter schools. Experimenting is the only path to progress, so trying new things in education is not a bad thing.

However, when you try new things, the odds are that you are going to fail more often than not. It sounds like this school definitely deserves to fail. Shuttering the school does not mean that nothing was gained; hopefully, people have learned something from this, and learning from failures can be as important as learning from successes. But no, for some reason the city is going to keep this school going, forgiving a city loan to do so.

How many times has this happened in government? How many times has something started, outlived its usefulness, and kept on going merely because politicians want to buy influence? Pork is bad no matter what party is dealing it out, and this sounds like pork to me.