John Oliver Explains Why Charter Schools Are Not Like Pizza Shops on ‘Last Week Tonight’

Here’s a clip from last night’s Last Week Tonight, where John Oliver takes a closer look at charter schools in the US, which are privately run but funded by taxpayer dollars and were once compared to “pizza shops� by Ohio governor John Kasich. Between the extremely lax approval process for charter school administrators, how many have been caught using their funding fraudulently, and fake attendance records, Oliver finds plenty of examples showing how badly the charter school system needs an overhaul with much more oversight. “The problem with letting the free market decide when it comes to kids is that kids change faster than the market, and by the time it’s obvious a school is failing, futures may have been ruined,� Oliver says. “So if we are going to treat charter schools like ‘pizza shops,’ we should monitor them at least as well as we do pizzerias. It’s like the old saying: ‘Give a kid a shitty pizza, you fuck up their day. Treat a kid like a shitty pizza, you could fuck up their entire life.’�