Charter school advocates see the infusion of market competition into the educational sector as a means to achieving greater efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. Within this framework, consumer demand is understood to regulate the charter sector. This article challenges the adequacy of this premise, arguing that the structure of the financing of charter schools plays a decisive, if not determining, role in directing growth. Drawing on an analysis of the financing that enabled the dramatic growth of the UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) in Chicago during the 2000s, the article explores the implications of speculative borrowing and spiraling debt burdens on charter schools and on the functioning of the charter sector more broadly. The analysis reveals that (1) new debt was increasingly used to retire existing debt, (2) the structure of new financing assumed continued growth, and (3) schools within the network were yoked together as revenue from existing—and anticipated—schools was pledged to repay new debt.
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