Donald Cohen, executive director of the anti-privatization organization “In the Public Interest” calls for audits of charter school finances in California, especially the charter chain run by Ref Rodriguez, former president of the Los Angeles Unfied School District Board and still a member of the board, even though he is under indictment for financial crimes.
Millions of public dollars have been allocated to privately run charter schools with little or no oversight.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Finally! Took people long enough.
Thanks, Diane.
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Here’s a study on how cutting public school budgets after the crash of the financial services system harmed public school families:
https://works.bepress.com/c_kirabo_jackson/35/
Odd that none of the thousands of paid ed reform advocates cared about this, since the study purports to show reduced test scores. Odd how some factors are important and others are completely ignored. Almost seems…political. Ideological.
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I wish we could get a critical look at these platforms:
“Inspired by Summit Public Schools, a charter network based in Silicon Valley, Achievement First built its own online platform to teach humanities, math and science, along with vocabulary and grammar. Students are expected to complete online units by certain dates and get weekly progress reports sent home.”
My son has a science teacher who is using this approach and I’m not at all impressed. That wouldn’t matter much if my son was impressed, but I’m watching him slog thru these online units and take test after test after test and I don’t see any “independent learning” going on. He’s checking boxes. I think he’s gaming the tests, too, because they’re given credit for how many minutes and seconds they spend and he’s doing something hinky there. I don’t understand it well enough to tell him to cut it out, but I do know him and I know when he’s gaming something.
I feel ripped off, like he’s taking an online course and we’re also paying a teacher. If they’re going to push cheap junk it should at least be CHEAP. This is expensive cheap junk.
Why is everyone in education swallowing the premise that this is somehow “thinking for themselves”? They’re monitored and measured every minute. It’s LESS free form than ordinary classroom instruction.
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This type of comprehensive look at the financials of Arizona Charters was done for a recent paper published by Grand Canyon Institute. This paper, Following the Money, will be followed up by a second and third paper describing, Red Flags in the data and an in depth look at how teachers are faring in the charter systems. Legislative solutions to the problem are now in the works (with a small chance of passing in the Republican dominated legislature)
A book regarding the findings of these reports in laymen’s terms is now available, The Carpetbagging America’s Public Schools, the Radical Reconstruction of Public Education is now available Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Curt Cardine, the author of the papers and the book.
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What will it take to get our California senators and assemblymen to demand that charters are transparent and accountable for how they spend public money? The law is 25 years old and has not been updated.
I keep thinking about the history of credit cards. How many changes have been made over the years to take into account how thieves have figured out how to compromise the system? I’ll guess dozens. But, when it comes to charter finances, nothing has changed except for the fact that thieves have discovered new ways to game the system as in creating LLC’s to take control of school property. Sadly, the thieves are the charter school operators themselves and their umbrella organization and partners in crime, the California Charter School Association
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This is long overdue. Every day we read about another charter scandal. We see schools that are under the scrutiny of the FBI. Conservatives keep acting like regulation is a dirty word; it isn’t. Anyone receiving public money should be subject to an independent audit. Too many states are writing blank checks to charter operators. This reckless practice needs to stop.
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The one my child went to was three rooms in an old office building with the heat turned down. Million dollar budgets and high admin pay for the kids to teach themselves online in a computer lab where they were not allowed to speak to each other.
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