Jeff Bryant was co-author of the Report by the Network for Public Education’s on waste, fraud, and abuse in the $440 million federal Charter Schools Program. It is titled “Asleep At the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride.”
The report found that nearly $1 billion had been wasted in the past 25 years on charter schools that never opened or closed soon after opening.
Jeff summarized the report in this article, which has been widely reprinted in regional newspapers.
The article is a condensation of one that Jeff wrote in “The Progressive.”
“In California, the state with the most charter schools, between 2004 and 2014, 306 schools that received direct or indirect federal funding closed or never opened, 111 closed within a year, and 75 never opened at all — a 39 percent failure rate. The cost to taxpayers was more than $108 million.
“Of the charter schools in Michigan that received federal money, at least 27 never opened. Many more opened and quickly closed, and of the schools that managed to stay open, we found troubling results, including a grant recipient that received $110,000 in federal funds but is actually a Baptist Church.
“In Idaho, federal grants totaling more than $21.6 million included more than $2.3 million going to schools that never opened or closed after brief periods of service. A state commission imposed a range of academic sanctions on 13 of the 25 charter schools up for renewal in the state. Of those 13 schools, nine had received federal grants.
“At the root of these problems is the slipshod process used by the Department of Education to review charter school grant applications. We often found contradictions between the information provided by applicants and publicly available data. Numerous applications cherry-picked or massaged achievement and/or demographic data that reviewers never bothered to fact-check.”
Public money must be accompanied by public accountability. In the federal Charter Schools Program, $4 Billion has been handed out with no accountability. It’s just free money for entrepreneurs, for-profit management organizations, and grifters.
This program must be eliminated. Let the Waltons and the Koch brothers and John Arnold and Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates and other billionaires pay for their own hobby.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/DON-T-MISS–Asleep-at-the-in-General_News-Education_Education-Costs_Education-Funding_Education-Laws-190412-562.html#comment730454
As always, I post comments with inks taken from my file of Diane’s bogs.
I posted 3: There are embedded links at the above address:
Comment 1:
Charter schools are what happens when there is not a shred of accountability for the grand theft of taxpayer money.
Did you know that Some 31% of charter schools authorized by the state of California, between Jan. 2002 and May 2018 are no longer open.
Would you put more money into a failing business? If you were in charge of the charter industry, the answer is yes.The charter industry in Ohio is lobbying for a 22% increase in tuition,even though 2/3 of the state’s charter schools are rated either D or F.If they were public schools, most would have been closed by now.
Did you realize that In Utah “plenty of legislators are cashing in on charter schools/” State Sen. Lincoln Fillmore (Dist. 10) is one of the foremost experts on charter schools in the state legislature. That makes sense given that he runs Charter Solutions, a company that from 2015 to 2018 has collected $5.7 million in fees from charter schools.
That is taxpayer money given to those charter schools. As many as 23 different charter schools have hired Fillmore’s company to help them administer their curriculum and take care of back office activities like payroll and human resources.
Fillmore says although he does field questions from lawmakers regarding charter schools, he never sponsors legislation that affects them.
Comment 2
Read about California: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Charter Sector https://dianeravitch.net/2019/03/10/california-waste-fraud-and-abuse-in-the-charter-sector/
This is so easily accomplished. You see, there are almost SIXTEEN THOUSAND separate school systems in FIFTY states, and most folks I meet do not know what is afoot in the district next door, let alone the schools in their own districts!” Here is a link to my series at OEN Maligned in the media as ‘failing,’ so many school systems are ripe for conquering with ‘policies’ issued by legislatures, with not an educator on board
The corruption is mindboggling. A Layman’s Guide to the Destroy Public Education Movement
https://tultican.com/2018/09/09/a-laymans-guide-to-the-destroy-public-education-movement/
Get the NPE Newsletter and follow the GRAND THEFT of taxpayer money and the utter demolition of public education in
America.http://networkforpubliceducation.org/topics/newsletters/
Comment 3 The charter operator gets a free ride for failing. https://dianeravitch.net/2019/03/25/philadelphia-it-takes-years-and-millions-to-close-failing-charter-schools-and-the-public-pays-for-everything/
Only the taxpayers and students lose.Why is it easy to close a public school but hard to close a charter school? One guess: charter lobbyists wrote the state law. This is an unbelievable story about what it takes to shut down a failing charter in Pennsylvania. The public must pay the cost of challenging the charter and pay the cost of defending the charter.
Submitted on Friday, Apr 12, 2019 at 3:47:09 PM
I am thrilled that the mainstream media has picked up on the $1 billion dollars wasted on privatization. Otherwise, there is no one doing the research and digging that can reveal the massive policy blunder that has been made. All we hear is the great value of “choice” from the echo chamber surrounding most of the policy makers. Thank goodness for the research skills of Jeff Bryant and Carol Burris and all their hard work to complete and publish the research. Their valuable work is being put to good use. They are breaking through the gag order on truth surrounding privatization. $1 billion is a huge number that should capture the attention of most tax payers. I hope there is massive backlash to reckless, failed privatization.
An important rule in getting rich is to know how to use other people’s money so if you fail, you don’t lose a dime, the people you “used” do. Trump has used this tactic his entire life. Even when he fails, he walks away with money and he seldom if ever uses his own money for any of his ventures.
The Waltons know this – their daddy taught them
The Koch brothers know this – their daddy taught them
John Arnold knows this because he learned it at Enron where he made his fortune before Enron collapsed.
Michael Bloomberg knows this — his wealth came from other people. He provided high-quality business information delivered fast. He didn’t print the money.
Bill Gates knows this – did he use his own money to stark Microsoft? No – I’ve read that his daddy loaned him the money and later when Microsoft went public, he became wealthy because of the stock he held that he never paid for because he started Microsoft with his daddy’s money.
Often we read articles about charter school mismanagement attached to the claim that the government is being “scammed” — in fact, it is the government itself with NCLB and then RttT /ESSA which has overwhelmingly pushed charter school creation where no charter schools are needed: THAT is the devastating scam spawning all of the ongoing corruption.
The tax payers are being scammed because the government is being bribed to open up the flood gates to endless profiteering. Privatization is a festering pay to play scheme.
True, they are just following the rules they paid for.
The federal government does a lot more than finance charter schools. They’re yet another marketing arm of the ed reform “movement”, except this one is publicly funded.
Completely and utterly captured. It is 100% cheerleading. They’re indistinguishable from the ed reform lobby, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because the political appointees come directly from the ed reform lobby and return there after their “public service” is completed.
If you came from another country and listened to the US Department of Education you would conclude 90% of US students must attend charter and private schools. Public schools, and public school students, are rarely mentioned other than to depict them as low performing, drug addicted “problems” to be “solved”. It’s appalling we’re all paying for this.
The corporate Charter Schools’ propaganda of lies and misinformation also pops up in novels written by popular authors.
I have seen it happen a few times in more than one of James Patterson’s novels where the children of one or more of his characters attend corporate charter schools after their “great” parents did their homework to find the best school around.
And I just finished a recent J.A. Jance book where the only K-12 school mentioned in the novel is a charter school and how that school was so kind to allow their award-winning chorus to sing at the character’s wedding.
Every time I run into a “great” charter school mentioned in a novel (without every mentioning a real public school), I curse that author for the fool they are and decide to never read anything they write again.
Patterson lost me a long time ago and now J.A. Jance joins the list.