Just in case you thought that charter schools were very well funded by the Walton Family (the richest family in the world, at nearly $200 billion), the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, John Arnold, Philip Anschutz, and a slew of other billionaires, think again.
The U.S. Department of Education will award nearly $500 million to expand charter chains this year.
Here are the list of grantees, all of them already overflowing with private and state funding.
Why, you might ask, is the Department of Education (and Congress) funding already well-funded privately managed charter schools?
Why give this kind of money to schools that don’t need it, when there are so many underfunded public schools?
Ask the Republican party. Ask Betsy DeVos. Ask Arne Duncan. Ask Corey Booker. Ask Hakeem Jeffries.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Easy answer: giving more money to them that’s got is the reason the Republican Party (and some Democrats) exists. Almost every piece of legislation follows that ethos. The rest, e.g, voter suppression, riling people against immigrants, are about holding on to power to enrich the already rich (see fossil fuel companies, drug companies, hedge fund managers, the real estate industry, etc.)
We have one set of laws for “favored friends” and others for the non-wealthy. Just look at how long the Sacklers were able to peddle poison without consequence.
and it looks like even with public outcry they are still peddling away
After viewing how our federal government works is it any surprise that they have listed a department as “Office of Non-Public Education”.
OMG just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse or incompetent.
I don’t want my tax dollars spend on charter schools!
I don’t want my tax dollars spent on charter schools!
This is a GRAB for power. This GRAB is a LONG-TERM project by the oligarchs who really need slaves, because they can’t do anything for themselves.
As Diane and many others who have commented, Charters suck.
These grants have been awarded since 2010.
Here is a suggestion for the curious. Send an email asking for the opportunity to review ALL of the peer reviews for these grants.
Some time ago (Obama administration) I looked at some of peer reviews for Charter Replication/Expansion Grants.
The overall system of review gave more points for rudimentary compliance in the application than for judgments about the quality of evidence for claims about merit and attention to detail in plans for expansion, including feasibility.
These are among the persons who should be able you find and look at the peer reviews for each of these grants. There are usually three peer reviewers for every applicant.
Eddie Moat Eddie.Moat@ed.gov
Brian Martin Brian.Martin@ed.gov
Kathryn Meeley Kathryn.Meeley@ed.gov
Erin Pfeltz Erin.Pfeltz@ed.gov
Posted at
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Federal-Government-Dishes-in-General_News-Billionaires_Dept-Of-Education-ED-gov_Education-Curriculum_Education-Funding-190122-946.html
with a link to my series of links to: CHARTER Schools –the school CHOICE fraud and chaos
https://www.opednews.com/populum/seriespage.php?r=440
“Why give this kind of money to schools that don’t need it, when there are so many underfunded public schools?”
Bird of a feather flock together and Trump’s flock is probably the most crooked and corrupt flock on the planet. Betsy DeVos is one deplorable bird in Trump’s flock.
$500 million? A year? For the whole country? Neither the government nor the schools will even notice this. In any case, aren’t school financed and controlled by states, with fed only helping from time to time? Isn’t fed NOT allowed to control the curricula nor tests? I cannot get all this outcry about the USED because its primary function is collection of statistics, and that is it. It is not a Ministry of Education, it just a sinkhole for data, or at least this is its intended function. It did not even exist until 1979. Why people even talk about USED and Betsy DeVos? They are as nominal as the British Queen.
Congress appropriates nearly $500 million to charter schools annually. Betsy gives it to her favorite charter chains, which are already well funded
Fed are not supposed to fund nor manage schools; schools are managed by states. Hmm…
I see a pattern how several billionaires, who effectively control the government by ways of campaign donations, lobbying and outright bribery, set up to create a centrally-controlled education system. They need to create it, to provide the curricula, to hire teachers, all the while avoiding unions. Thus, Common Core is a roundabout way to impose national curriculum, charters are roundabout way to create a federally-funded school system (because billionaires do not want to spend THEIR money on schools), TFA is a roundabout way to create a breed of teachers free of unionization.
In the end, instead of having national schools and curricula the country will have kinda-sorta national schools (as national as Coca-Cola or Amazon are national), where the billionaires will provide the curricula and the government — that is, all of us — will provide funding.