Jonathan Pelto, writing at thehill.com, warns of the fiscal burden that charter school pose to states, school districts, and public education.
In most states, charters have little or no oversight, even though they are funded by taxpayers. Charters have gone to court to fight public audits.
It is time for charters to demand accountability and fiscal oversight, lest they be overcome by scandals in their own backyard.
While the subprime mortgage crisis remains the epitome of what occurs when greed and corruption go unchecked, a growing number of experts and observers are warning that a new economic scandal is taking shape in the United States.
In an article published earlier this month, Business Insider observed: “We just got even more evidence supporting the theory that charter schools are America’s new subprime mortgages.” The magazine wrote: The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released the results of a damning audit of the charter school industry which found that charter schools’ relationships with their management organizations pose a significant risk to the aim of the Department of Education.
The findings in the audit, specifically in regard to charter school relationships with CMOs, echo the findings of a 2015 study that warned of an impending bubble similar to that of the subprime-mortgage crisis one of the authors, Preston C. Green III, told Business Insider.
With more than 6,700 charter schools spread across 42 states and the District of Columbia, fraudulent activities associated with the publicly funded, but privately owned, charter school industry have become the fodder for almost daily news stories.
According to an October 2015 investigation conducted by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the federal government has spent more than $3.3 billion over the past two decades on the creation and maintenance of the charter school industry.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I saw this in a newspaper article about a company selling a theme park – interesting that a holding company’s investment portfolio includes movie theaters, theme parks and public charter schools.
“EPR, which owns more than 100 movie theaters, theme parks and public charter schools across North America, did not respond to a request for comment.”
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Charter school debt returns 10-18% to Wall Street. In other words, taxpayer money, intended for students, funds the industry that drags down GDP, by an estimated 2%.
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Example- Ohioans are paying $500,000 in legal fees to recover $60,000,000 from a charter school that the Ohio Dept. of Education describes as having “mostly truant students”.
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The depressing thing is posing a fiscal risk to public education seems to be one of the main goals of the people pushing charters.
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Quite correct NYCpsp!
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NYCPSParent says: “The depressing thing is posing a fiscal risk to public education seems to be one of the main goals of the people pushing charters.”
Not everyone, nor all millionaires, I am sure; but it seems to me that some, perhaps many, think that everything “public” (aka providing for the general “welfare” of the people) is tantamount to “giveaways” taken from the rightful owners and given to the undeserving. Note the negative meaning that has accrued to the term “welfare.”
This is a political view that goes back a very long time and has its roots in many philosophical and political writings, especially in the last century. Many who hold this view reside in what has become the republican or “libertarian” party.
From this view, and it has been expressed here before, “posing a fiscal risk to public education” is just one step in making public schools less qualified, squeezing their funding and resources so that they look bad to all and so that they cannot do what they need to do to remain qualified and even excellent schools–as public. Teacher-bashing is a diversionary part of this effort.
The next step is to provide private schools so that “choice” of private schools–some of which are excellent on the face of it–becomes if not secure, at least the probable parents who just want a good education for their children. For people who don’t understand the assault on all-things-public that’s going on, the argument for private and charter schools for their children is clear.
For people whose corporate ideas and identities set themselves against several threads of democratic institutions and their ideals, e.g., a good education for all is good, even essential, for the whole country, the polemics and power-plays become obvious.
The other view, expressed here in many forms, centers around the idea of commons, commonwealth, truly cultural rather than merely social and, most important in my view, is secure in the understanding of the central relationship between public schooling and the democracy where we all live–such as it presently is.
So at present, public education is at the crux of the extremes of THAT view; and now it will be at the crux of the extreme intentions of the “white-lash” that is coming.
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Charter expansion in Pennsylvania has resulted in school districts on the verge of bankruptcy while charters and cyber charters have a surplus. Taxpayers are at the mercy of a complicit legislature with a strong relationship to the charter lobby. Other states should regard Pennsylvania as a cautionary tale. It is inefficient and ineffective management to operate parallel school systems, especially when student outcomes are no better and many are worse. http://thenotebook.org/articles/2016/06/06/lots-of-complaints-but-few-solutions
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Cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Loosely-regulated-charter-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Corruption_Economic_Evidence-161115-78.html
with this comment below the article — which, if you go to the comment itself at the address above, has links:
if you ‘get’ed young’ you can raise an ignorant citizenry.
“Cashing in On Kids” reports that ALEC education legislation is quietly spreading across the nation. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, a secretive far-right organization that is funded by major corporations and whose members are state legislators. Its goal is privatization and deregulation. It writes model laws, then its members introduce them into their state legislature as their own. To learn all about ALEC, go to Alec Exposed.
* Edward F. Berger reports that districts across the state–all but a handful of small rural ones–voted to adopt school bond issues, despite a campaign by the Koch brothers, ALEC, and other forces intent on killing public schools. With no oversight the Koch Brothers write the curriculum and re-write history, in North Carolina where ALEC and the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX run the show,
Sen. Jerry Tillman, R- Randolph County and the Majority Whip in the NC State Senate. writes about his concerns re amendment to House Bill 334 to remove oversight of charter schools:” Your crusade to create a lucrative charter school industry at the hands of public schools again has reached new heights of irrationality and hubris, and it is indicative of an exclusionary attitude when it comes to serving the people of North Carolina.”
*Wayne Au, a professor at the University of Washington, explains why the Washington Supreme Court declared charter schools unconstitutional and why this decision has national implications. The Court’s decision, he writes, was a “major rebuke” to the charter industry (and to Seattle’s richest resident, Bill Gates, who plunked millions into the 2012 referendum allowing charter schools, which passed by 50.69% of the vote).
In this article, Paul Buchheit describes the dark role that charter schools now play on behalf of corporate elites and their determination to privatize public education for fun and profit.
Wendy Lecker, a civil rights attorney who lives in Connecticut, writes here about the hypocritical claim by charter schools that they are a part of the civil rights movement of our day. She points out that charter schools in Connecticut are hyper segregated and are setting back the clock on civil rights.
To learn more about the fraud of the charter industry and the speed of privatization, go to my series here on the privatization of our schools, so the legislatures could hand the schools over to the educational industrial complex., or click here for links to charter school fraud and privatization for reports from Diane Ravitch at her amazing site.
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Susan Lee Schwsartz says: “Wendy Lecker, a civil rights attorney who lives in Connecticut, writes here about the hypocritical claim by charter schools that they are a part of the civil rights movement of our day. She points out that charter schools in Connecticut are hyper segregated and are setting back the clock on civil rights.”
The irony is that, in some sense, privatization and charter schools are analogous to the civil rights movement. That is, charters are to public education what White nationalism and the KKK are to civil rights in America.
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Give up on DC. They’re ga-ga for charters. All the action is at the state level.
The divergence between national ed reform and state and local is getting wider and wider. As far as public schools go, the DC ed reform contingent are all but irrelevant.
You can see it in Ohio. There’s been a genuine move away from the state promoting charters and vouchers and bashing public schools. The Ohio Department of Education employees now actually go into public schools and try to help. We haven’t seen that in years. A decade at least.
DC will literally be the last to know. The shellacking they just took in Massachusetts and Georgia didn’t even penetrate the ed reform echo chamber. They’re still busily promoting charters and vouchers and bashing public schools.
Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue about US public schools in these states. He’s a NYC real estate developer. He’ll pour federal money into charters and vouchers and pull it from public schools but that in no way reflects the people in these states, anymore than Obama’s ed policy did.
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Trump will probably turn most of education over to the states, and it may be a positive. We has said he wants to eliminate the DOE.
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Correction: He
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Reblogged this on Mark's Text Terminal.
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Michelle Rhee is up for Secretary of Education. Good luck with any accountability.
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Go to greatagain.gov and put in your 2¢ worth.
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Maybe I should apologize for my one horse rant about st. Louis. But this morning…a reasonably good editorial praising 3 county districts for following the example of St. Louis City schools in stopping suspension for k-2 because of the difficulties they face at home in the first place….a good editorial…..except—they will not say whether the slps rules apply to charter schools….close to 45 percent of the student population. I looked it up in the KIPP handbook……they have ten pages dedicated to policies regarding suspensions…I ran just one of them. My bet is that the k-2 policies apply only to non charter schools. No way to find out….because no one in St. Louis knows wtf I am talking about. Some do realize that charter schools are good….they are not subjected to restrictions.
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Maybe I should apologize for my one horse rant about st. Louis. But this morning…a reasonably good editorial praising 3 county districts for following the example of St. Louis City schools in stopping suspension for k-2 because of the difficulties they face at home in the first place….a good editorial…..except—they will not say whether the slps rules apply to charter schools….close to 45 percent of the student population. I looked it up in the KIPP handbook……they have ten pages dedicated to policies regarding suspensions…I ran just one of them. My bet is that the k-2 policies apply only to non charter schools. No way to find out….because no one in St. Louis knows what I am talking about. Some do realize that charter schools are good….they are not subjected to restrictions.
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