Dr. Carol Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that works to strengthen and improve public schools. Nearly 400,000 people in every state support its activities. Burris was a teacher and an award-winning principal in New York State.
This summer, the Network for Public Education reported that charter schools had received between one and two billion dollars in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Small Business Administration loans. In most cases, these low-interest loans will not have to be paid back, resulting in a windfall for recipients.
PPP amounts were initially reported in ranges and excluded any grantees that received below $150,000. Thanks to reporters’ persistence, however, we now know the exact amount and the smaller grantees who received PPP.
We matched the amounts with our previously identified group of charter schools and charter chain recipients. In total, those charters received an astounding $1,279,455,958. You can find a complete list of the charter schools and what they got here.
In addition to schools, charter support and advocacy organizations got PPP. You can find that list here. It includes the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, which bragged that it made sure charter schools were included in PPP. NAPCS took $672,800, while the billionaire-funded California Charter Schools Association cashed in at $1,028,200.
We also scanned the new lists of small grants for charter school entries. Because there were so many entries, we did a simple search on the words “charter school.” This resulted in the identification (see here) of an additional $7 million going to charter schools. There is no doubt that a full search would uncover at least four times that amount.
How did the charter sector do? When you add the pieces together, it adds up to nearly $1.3 billion.
Here are some highlights.
The largest amount ($8,377,100.00) given to a charter school went to Granada Hills High School, once a highly-regarded public school in an affluent area outside of Los Angeles that converted to a charter school.
The second-largest amount went to Antelope Valley High School, which is “powered by” Learn4Life. Learn4Life is a charter school chain that operates by giving at-risk students worksheets they complete and return to Learn4Life centers often located in strip malls and shopping plazas. Learn4Life is now led by Caprice Young, who previously led the California Charter Schools Association and Magnolia charter schools, connected to the Gulen school chain. The entire Learn4Life chain received over $32 million.
Finally, schools and nonprofits managed by the for-profit Academica chain received over $28.6 million in PPP.
Charter schools claim to be public schools. They received public school funding via the CARES Act. Unlike the small businesses that shut down during the pandemic, thus losing their revenue stream, charter schools moved to remote learning, and their public tax dollar income stream continued.
It appears a new round of CARES Act funding is imminent. We will be watching to see if charter schools use their “private” status to cash in again.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Thank you, Dr. Burris! And yes, I used the “Dr.” LOL. Sorry, Mr. Epstein!
On a totally unrelated note, happy birthday, Ludwig!
An oldie but goodie. I love these flash mob videos.
If you are likewise a Beethoven buff, I highly, highly recommend these videos. Andras Schiff discusses each of the Beethoven piano sonatas and then plays it. These are magnificent! https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/podcasts/andras-schiff-beethoven-lecture-recitals
These are amazing databases.Thank You.
I would love to have been able to extract only the information on Ohio, but none of my moves and software could do that.
Another round of funds may be distributed before Congress adjourns. I imagine that the charter industry is ready to get those funds.
“ready” and likely even warned up front about exactly what is coming and when it is coming
I can do that for you, Laura. I will email it to you.
Please email it to me, too. I’m interested especially in Georgia and in all of KIPP. Thanks!
Also, it seems Lake Oconee Academy Charter School, in Georgia, is missing. It was included in the initial SBA report on ranges, as I recall.
It seems the PPP loans were designed to go to just about any business or nonprofit, so I don’t object to charters taking advantage of them.
But- I do think it’s wildly unfair that charters got so much funding that public schools did not get, especially because both the federal and state governments did so little to assist public schools in the pandemic.
Public school students were (once again) the big losers when these deals were struck, which in my opinion is due to anti-public school ed reformers so dominating DC and many states.
Public school students need committed, effective advocates in the federal government and state governments. When we hire anti-public school ed reformers for these positions we are ensuring public school students are the last priority.
Over and over we see this- no one in government can be bothered to lift a finger on behalf of the schools 90% of kids attend, because they’re captured by the ed reform “movement” and the ed reform movement work EXCLUSIVELY on behalf of charter and private school students.
How did 90% of US students become an afterthought in Congress and so many state legislatures? It’s ludicrous.
When ed reformers launched their war on public schools 30 years ago, wasn’t it inevitable that public school STUDENTS would be the collateral damage in that ideological war?
Of course it was. They can’t attack our schools without hitting our students.
This “movement” has produced NOT ONE improvement or benefit to any child who attends a public school in the last 30 years. Ed reform is ALL downside for public school students. They lavish funding and attention on charters and private schools and return no value at all the 90% of students who attend the public schools they oppose.
What did public schools get out of ed reform? They got more and more and more standardized testing- that’s it.
Even now, amid the pandemic, the one and only thing the ed reform “movement” offers public school students and families is testing. They are all lock step lobbying to test our kids this spring- once again a grim, joyless, wholly negative agenda of test and punish is all they offer our kids.
We need advocates for public school students in government. We don’t have any.
Charter schools insist they are public schools, unless there is a windfall like this, then they are businesses like any other.
I’m worried that we’re going to see a giant marketing push for “online learning” out of the ed reform echo chamber.
Pushing for cheap online replacements for teachers and schools has been a goal of the “movement” for a long time, and I fear they see the pandemic as a way to cut education costs by replacing schools and teachers with screens and canned junk churned out by the ed tech industry.
This will only happen in low and middle income schools. Higher income schools will retain live classes and small class sizes.
Once again, public school students will get screwed.
The cheerleading for “remote learning” has already begun and as usual there are no dissenters and no real debate.
If we lose live teachers we won’t get them back. Obviously the ed reform plan for giant remote classes is cheaper. They’ll make teachers gig employees with some low hourly wage and save billions on public education, which will surely please their billionaire backers.
We need to demand that we retain live teachers and actual public schools. They’re getting ready to pull off another bait and switch and replace our schools with Kahn Academy junk.
I don’t have high hopes for the Biden Administration either. I think DC is so dominated by the ed reform echo chamber it’s impossible to hire an education policy person who doesn’t march lockstep with “reform”.
We’re going to end up with another anti-public school education secretary. It’s all the ed reform pipeline produces.
Biden will be the fourth US President in a row who adopts Jeb Bush’s education agenda.
It’s an echo chamber and there’s no real debate and no dissenters.
No matter who you vote for as President you get Jeb Bush’s education agenda.
Charter school and management companies excel at dipping their paws into the public till. The objective is to socialize the risk of investing while they privatize the profit.
A new charter school is under construction in a neighboring county. With recent changes in Florida’s laws the construction is funded by selling municipal bonds. The blurred line between public and private has the public paying for the real estate that will belong to the LLC that owns the building as well as the business it will operate in the building. My guess is that the school will serve most of white children of military contractors that live in the large waterfront homes in the area. All this change will come at a cost and a loss to the public schools. The public schools will likely serve the poor white and minority students as well as those that are problematic or expensive to educate, but they will have a lot less money to spend due to charter drain. Charter schools are no more than a modern way to implement Jim Crow. It is pathetic that public dollars are being spent to revive the Jim Crow era, and the public remains largely unaware.
Florida manipulated statistics on Covid:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-ss-prem-covid-deaths-florida-election-20201216-f4kgezjf4rf75ppumt4omxfsxy-story.html
People who are genuinely interested in “data” would now question all the stats Florida releases, including education stats.
If they falsified data for covid for political reasons they would do the same for education.
Florida statistics are no longer reliable.
DeSantis has used Trump’s playbook. He wants everyone back to work, and his strategy has been to ignore the problem and minimize the risk of the pandemic. When the statistics do not match the plan, in true right wing authoritarian style, try to suppress information to the public, even if it means raiding the home of a fired data scientist.
And what did these charter school crooks do with that windfall from the taxpayers?
Bought property for pennies on the dollar from families evicted from homes they lost because they could not make the payments. They were out of work.
Bought bigger mansions.
Bought their own corporate jets.
Bought a superyacht or a bigger one if they already had one.
Chiara and all: The severe imbalance of support reveals that those who hold governmental power and who don’t support public education wholeheartedly, don’t know public education as a DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION that is intimate with and DIRECTLY related to the foundational quality of the government they work for. OR they know it, and are dead set on changing our political grounds.
But if those in power just need another powerful lobby group to support public education, then they reveal to us that they don’t have even a basic education about how their government is structured or, again, they are subversive to our democratic government.
Under that stunted view, however, private, semi-private, or any school establishment that is deeply connected with private organizations, power, and money, and who do not admit a high level of governmental oversight, are seen as equivalent cultural entities that, in this case, can “perform” much better than public schools (though they really don’t) and, BTW, shouldn’t have to compete with public schools on a “different playing field.”
Laughably, the argument in some camps is that public schools are privileged because they are not businesses. But they are not businesses because government institutions are not governed by the profit motive–try as they do, charters, etc., cannot cover that motive over.
The great difference at the political level is between democracy, on the one hand, and oligarchy, autocracy, and/or fascism, on the other.
Ironically, if public education has failed, it has done so precisely because it hasn’t secured, in the young to-be-polity over the last 50 years, a clear and conscious knowledge of those political differences.
The polity cannot choose democracy if they don’t know what it is or the difference between it and other forms of government. <–In our present time, I don’t think anything can be more obvious than that. CBK
Nicely put. I really liked the “not governed by the profit motive” explanation.
The Charter movement makes Pandora’s box look like a toy chest. Somehow there has to be a democratic movement that breaks up the influence of corporate welfare and gets money back into public schools. The fact that Republican representatives, especially Mitch McConnell, refuse to support states and localities through this pandemic while paying off wealthy foundations and backers is evidence that US corruption is absolute and devastating the American people. Yes, I am against welfare…of the corporate kind.
We should remind ourselves what it’s like to live under a repressive government:
Cuba cracks down on artists who demanded creative freedoms after ‘unprecedented’ government negotiations
https://theconversation.com/cuba-cracks-down-on-artists-who-demanded-creative-freedoms-after-unprecedented-government-negotiations-152073?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20newssletter%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%2017%202020%20-%201814817643&utm_content=Daily%20newssletter%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%2017%202020%20-%201814817643+CID_541752b39864041c40fe09cad02cd4f7&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=Cuba%20cracks%20down%20on%20artists%20who%20demanded%20creative%20freedoms%20after%20unprecedented%20government%20negotiations
CBK
Time to end the charter school “experiment” – this has led to segregation and fails the majority of students. We should be encouraging collaboration, not competition in education. The business model DOES NOT WORK IN EDUCATION (too many student factors that educators don’t/can’t control – housing, nutrition, sleep patterns, parental support, socio-economic, etc.) The focus should be on adequate funding for strong public schools FOR ALL – all schools meeting the same accountability measures, etc.