Carol Burris writes:
Advocates of school choice claim that charters need to be free of regulation and oversight so that they can be innovative. That lack of regulation and oversight has resulted in a sector that has a substantial share of financial mismanagement, failure and fraud.
Conflicts of interest by board members and employees are allowed in most states. Educators are too often not sufficiently credentialed or screened. There are frequent instances of theft.
None of the above is a prerequisite for innovation.
For the past several months, the Network for Public Education has been logging instances when they come to our attention.
Visit our website here to see what we found. Let us know what we have missed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The word ‘innovation’ is constantly abused by the Destroyers of Public Education. Being different is not always an improvement.
LikeLike
If you want another story from before 2017, here is a link to the Juan Rangel UNO Charter story: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/former-uno-boss-juan-rangel-broke-securities-law-sec-says/
Proof that charters are fully plugged in to a new era of big city patronage. And as recounted in an earlier post today about Rahm, real estate developers and gentrification are a related part of this rotten scheme. This is a very ugly and underreported aspect of the Democratic party. In my view this corruption adds to the fodder for the right to turn working people against their own self interests. What will it take for the Democratic party to reject these destructive tactics?
LikeLike
Is there a state with sufficient (acceptably strong) regulations for charter schools?
LikeLike
“Regulations” over-simplifies it. If you’re “regulating” after the fact then you’ve already lost. Exempting charter schools from all regulations and then adding some back in when there’s a disaster is a recipe for corruption because ANY additional oversight is frantically lobbied against. Then private companies are writing their own regulations because there’s no overall framework and it’s easy to exploit.
There are states with stronger governance systems but that has to start at the state law level- the top. Tweaking here and there won’t work. Massachusetts has a strong state law so Massachusetts doesn’t end up with lousy charters because lousy charters go elsewhere, to states like Ohio and Michigan.
What ed reformers did is much more profound than “remove regulations”. They created governance systems on the fly because they were started with such weak state law that nearly anything goes.
Charter schools are STATE schools. Take them out of the district and local governance frame that we’re accustomed to and think about them as schools that are governed at the state level, if they’re governed at all. If the state law is lousy or weak or drafted by ideologues who are opposed to regulation then any tweaking you do on “regulations” will be just frantically plugging holes.
LikeLike
So, Chiara, what you are saying is that weak charter oversight is necessarily the reflection of the (general) state’s laws where the charter school operates, and hence unruly charter schools can be regulated only if the state laws are changed.
So we then come back to a question I raised 2 days ago for another post: Isn’t it easier to fight to reverse laws that allow charters or vouchers to exist than fight for charter regulations? In case of trying to reverse charter laws, you just have to deal with a few specific bills while trying to regulate charters, you may have to fight for changing the whole political culture and general laws of the state.
LikeLike
The original argument was charter schools couldn’t be governed like public schools because “the status quo” would fight against “competition” so therefore ed reformers had to write governance systems that got around local systems.
That was the justification for making them state schools. The assumption of bad faith by local people. The “innovation” argument came later, after they got the weak state law they wanted.
They was really amazingly cynical in Ohio, the original arguments, and also amusing if one is familiar with STATE governance in Ohio which (shockingly!) is not pure and selfless and immune to pressure as has become clear with the ECOT debacle.
LikeLike
DeVos and her huge entourage of publicly-paid employees are out stumping for charter and private schools again this week.
They repeat the familiar ed reform talking points over and over- indistinguishable from any charter lobbyist- and one of them is “3 million children attend charter schools”.
There are about 50 million school children in the US. What you won’t hear about in the federal government anymore are the 45 million they ignore in the public schools they disfavor and denigrate.
If you want to be included in this charmed circle adopt a gimmick- put your school on a barge or call it a “single sex blended learning STEM academy” or make it selective- reject most students and get the “magnet” designation. Ordinary public schools need not apply.
There are 45 million public school families who have no effective and committed representatives at the federal level. They get the ed reform brush off- in the last paragraph of any press release promoting charters and vouchers someone will remember to add- “and traditional public schools”. 45 million families and they get a throw-away line at the end of the daily charter/voucher promotions.
We should vote them out. They don’t work for us.
LikeLike
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report which finds that, because of their lack of financial accountability to the public “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets, especially hedge fund pockets.
If nothing else is required of charter schools, one thing must be required so that charter schools are accountable to taxpayers and inform taxpayers as to how taxpayer money is actually being spent; that one key thing is: Charter schools must be required to file the SAME detailed, public domain financial reports under penalty of perjury that public schools file.
Charter schools will cry out that this is “too burdensome” — yet public schools file such reports. What would the outcry be if public schools were “freed” of this “burden”? Why, the outcry would rattle the very heavens! So, why is it that private charter schools are allowed to get away with taking public tax money and not have to tell the public on an annual basis how those public tax dollars are spent?
Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money.
LikeLike