Allie Gross has been reporting on the misadventures of the charter industry in Detroit in the Metro Times.
This week, she wrote about a charter school, University Academy, that fired eight teachers without any explanation or cause. When teachers have no union, the school doesn’t need to give any explanation about why teachers are fired.
Last fall, Allie wrote about the $3.5 million that Michigan doled out to charter applicants who never opened a school.
The latter article includes a useful summary of the U.S. Department of Education’s very costly investment in the charter industry:
In 1995, four years after the first charter school law was enacted, the U.S. Department of Education started its Charter Schools Program grant. The general gist of the initiative was state education agencies could vie for funding and then host their own competitions for sub-grantees who wanted to create or expand charter schools.
The goal of the grant is two-pronged: 1. It aims to expand the number of “high-quality” charter schools across the nation and, 2. It seeks to evaluate the effects of charter schools. The first aim is achieved through three types of grants that the U.S. Department of Education asks state education agencies to offer: planning grants, implementation grants, and, lastly, dissemination grants.
That first year the department gave out just over $4 million; today it doles out upward of $125 million. According to the Department of Education, the federal government has spent more than $3 billion on the charter sector in the past 20 years.
Michigan received $23 million from the program in 2007 and in 2010 decided to apply again, this time asking for $44 million. By this point the state had 240 charter schools, and as the application explained, there was an expectation of growth. Just a few months earlier lawmakers decided to lift the cap on the number of charter schools university-authorizers could sponsor.
This predicted expansion was highlighted in MDE’s application, as was the goal of ensuring authorizers would have high quality operators to choose from when they weren’t burdened with a cap.
In 1995, the same year that the Charter Schools Program grants started, Michigan opened its first charter school, a National Heritage Academy in Grand Rapids. Today, NHA, which was started by billionaire J.C. Huizenga, is the state’s largest charter school operator, with 48 different schools across Michigan. This multi-site, for-profit model has proliferated in Michigan — currently, 79 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit charter management organizations — and cracking this monopoly was a stated goal in MDE’s application. Specifically Michigan explained how “planning funds” could help level the playing field and empower grassroots community groups with charter school ideas.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent analysis of USDE’s funding pipelines, with an indication of the consequences in only one state.
There is too little reporting on the well-funded charter industry–funds from local, state,and federal dollars plus the mega-bucks from major foundations, Walton, Gates etc, as well as local/regional foundations that are more difficult to track. There is also too little attention to the authorization process that permits charter contractors to take public money with little public oversight, compliance with sunshine laws and the rest. The whining abut being “underfunded” is totally misplaced.
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I don’t believe there is much intention to enable people to understand all the funding and misuse of funding in charters. They want a quiet invasion, a sneaky transition, and they want the public to believe the charter is another public school. By the time the public catches on that they have lost an important piece of democracy, it is gone. As far as employees go, they are getting cheap, at will employees that can be dropped at a moment’s notice. That is also how corporations and billionaires want it.
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Perhaps the rheephorm mantra of “doing more with less” should be changed to “getting away with more by doing less of what’s ethical.”
Today’s LATIMES has a piece entitled “The cost of L.A. Unified’s digital student tracking system rises to $189 million.” For readers unfamiliar with LAUSD’s rheephorm fiascos, this is the MISIS train wreck hatched and carried out under John Deasy; during his interregnum the LATIMES was all in for whatever he wanted, but that was before they threw him under the bus…
It begins:
[start]
About two years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District unveiled its new student records system. The rollout was widely described as disastrous.
Students were assigned to the wrong classes or none at all for weeks, college applicants worried they wouldn’t get accurate transcripts to schools in time and the district identified hundreds of technological problems.
Last week, the school board approved $40.3 million for what the technology division says will be the last of six large chunks of bond money needed to fix the problems. The money will be used to incorporate independent charter schools into the system, allow schools to customize their reports and give parents access.
That brings the district’s total spending on the program to $189 million since 2013.
[end]
Rheephorm always gives a new twist to every good, as in “all’s bad that ends bad.”
The piece ends:
[start]
The spending isn’t over yet. It’ll cost the district about $12 million in general fund dollars to maintain the records system every year, from 2018 to 2019 onward, Pappas said. That expenditure would include a vendor to oversee the system, and it’s an estimate based on how much it costs to maintain a different district system, which is about the same size as My Integrated Student Information System.
During last week’s school board meeting, board member Monica Ratliff wondered aloud whether anyone had thought about where that $12 million was going to come from every year.
“It’s problematic in my view because $12 million is a lot of money,” Ratliff said in an interview. She didn’t realize that even after the fixes were completed, the records system would still require spending that much in maintenance every year.
[end]
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-misis-spending-20160414-snap-story.html
So it’s not surprising to read in the posting about $3.5 million dollars going out to charter applicants that didn’t even open a school.
Why should anyone expect the heavyweights and beneficiaries and enforcers of corporate education reform to be any more scrupulous and careful about hiring & firing than they are about spending & accounting for that spending?
😎
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It’s called retaliation, and it is all too common in education.
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