More than $200 million in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry have been documented.
But the government has done so without requiring any accountability from the states and schools that receive the money, as
CMD revealed earlier this year.
Throwing good money after bad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan
called for a 48 percent increase in federal charter funding earlier this year, and the House and Senate budget proposals also call for an increase—
albeit a more modest one—while at the same time slashing education programs for immigrants and language learners.
The clamor for charter expansion comes despite the fact that there are
federal probes underway into suspected waste and mismanagement within the program, not to mention ongoing and
recently completed state audits of fraud perpetrated by charter school operators.
Earlier this year, the Center for Popular Democracy documented more than
$200 million
in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry in 15
states alone, a number that is likely to be just the tip of the
iceberg.
Is now really the right time to plow more tax money into charters?
Insiders Deliberate Far from the Public Eye
The
Department of Education is currently deciding what states to award $116
million this year, and more than half a billion during the five-year
grant cycle.
So who is in the running and what are their track records?
Which
states have applied for a grant designed to eviscerate the public
school system in the name of “flexibility?” (CMD's review of state
applications and reviewers' comments from the previous grant cycle
exposed “flexibility” as
a term of art
used by the industry for state laws that allow charter schools to:
operate independently from locally elected school boards, employ people
to teach without adequate training or certification, and avoid
collective bargaining that helps ensure that teacher-student ratios are
good so that each kid gets the attention he or she deserves.)
There is no way of knowing.
The
U.S Department of Education has repeatedly refused to honor a CMD
request under the Freedom of Information Act for the grant applications,
even though public information about which states have applied would
not chill deliberation and might even help better assess which
applicants should receive federal money.
The agency has even declined to provide a list with states that have applied:
“We cannot release a list of states that have applied while it is in the midst of competition."
The
upshot of this reticence is that states will land grants—possibly to
the tune of a hundred million dollars or more in some cases—all at the
discretion of
charter school interests
contracted to evaluate the applications, but without any input from
ordinary citizens and advocates concerned about public schools and
troubled by charter school secrecy and fraud.
But, if
people in a state know that a state is applying they can weigh in so
that the agency is not just hearing from an applicant who wants the
money, regardless of the history of fraud and waste in that state.
Charter Millions by Hook or by Crook: The Case of Ohio
Despite
ED’s unwillingness to put all the cards on the table, state reports
tell us that Ohio has once again applied for a grant under the program.
The state, whose lax-to-non-existing charter school laws
are an embarrassment even to the industry, has previously been awarded at least $49 million in CSP money—money that went to schools overseen
by a rightwing think-tank, and, more worryingly, to schools overseen by an authorizer that had its performance rating boosted this year
by top education officials who removed the failing virtual schools from the statistics so as not to stop the flow of state and federal funds.
As
The Plain Dealer
put it in an exposé: “It turns out that Ohio’s grand plan to stop the
national ridicule of its charter school system is giving overseers of
many of the lowest-performing schools a pass from taking heat for some
of their worst problems.”
Another component of this plan,
it turns out, was to apply for more federal millions to the failing
schools that—by a miraculous sleight of hand—are no longer failing.
The director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice, David Hansen,
fell on the sword and announced his resignation in June. But
Democratic lawmakers suspect that this goes higher up in the chain of command, and have called on State Superintendent Richard Ross to resign.
Did
the scrubbed statistics touting the success of Ohio’s charters find its
way into the state application for federal millions, signed by
Superintendent Ross?
What about other states,
such as Indiana, with a similar history of doctoring data to turn failing charter schools into resounding success stories?
After Abysmal Results, States Re-apply for More Money
While the known unknowns are troubling, the known knowns—to
paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—are also equally disturbing.
For example,
Colorado applied for grant renewal this year.
But, the last time around, in 2010, the state landed a $46 million CSP grant thanks in no small part to the lax “
hiring and firing”
rules and the lack of certification requirements for charter school
teachers--a reviewer contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to
score the application noted.
Look at California.
Through
meeting minutes
from the California State Board of Education we also know that the
Golden State submitted an application this year. In 2010, California was
awarded
$254 million over five years in CSP money, but as the Inspector General discovered
in a 2012 audit,
the state department of education did not adequately monitor any of the
schools that received sub-grants. Some schools even received federal
money “without ever opening to students.” A review by CMD revealed that a
staggering 9 out of the 41 schools that shuttered in the 2014-'15
school year were created by federal money under CSP.
How about Wisconsin?
Wisconsin
received $69.6 million between 2010 and 2015, but out of the charter
schools awarded sub-grants during the first two years of the cycle,
one-fifth (16 out of 85) have closed since, as CMD discovered.
Then there’s Indiana.
Indiana
was awarded $31.3 million over the same period, partly because of the
fact that charter schools in the state are exempt from democratic
oversight by elected school boards. “[C]harter schools are accountable
solely to authorizers under Indiana law,”
one reviewer enthused, awarding the application 30/30 under the rubric “flexibility offered by state law.”
This “flexibility” has been a
recipe for disaster
in the Hoosier state with countless examples of schools pocketing the
grant money and then converting to private schools, as CMD discovered by
taking a closer look at grantees under the previous cycle:
- The
Indiana Cyber Charter School opened in 2012 with $420,000 in seed money
from the federal program. Dogged by financial scandals and plummeting
student results the charter was revoked in 2015 and the school last
month leaving 1,100 students in the lurch.
- Padua Academy
lost its charter in 2014 and converted to a private religious school,
but not before receiving $702,000 in federal seed money.
Have They Learned Anything?
Secretary Duncan has previously called for “
absolute transparency”
when it comes to school performance, but that’s just a talking point
unless he releases the applications, or even a list of the states that
are in the running, before they are given the final stamp of approval.
As it stands, there is no way of knowing if the state departments of education seeking millions in tax dollars:
- Have
supplied actual performance data that reflect the reality for students
enrolled in charter schools rather than “scrubbed” or doctored numbers;
- Try
to outbid each other in “flexibility” by explaining, say, how charter
schools in X can hire teachers without a license and fire them without
cause. In its 2010 application,
the Colorado Department of Education, for example, boasted of how
charter school teachers are “employed at will by the school”;
- Have
corrective action plans so as to avoid repeating the costly waste and
mistakes from the previous grant cycle (such as schools created by
federal seed money closing within a few years or never even opening).
Because
the federal charter schools program is designed to foster charter
school growth, which in turn means that money will be diverted from
traditional public schools to an industry that resists government
enforcement of basic standards for financial controls, accountability,
and democratic oversight, the public has a big stake in this and a right
to know more, before their money disappears down black holes.
