Ohio knows charter schools. A lobbyist for the charter school industry wrote the law. Charter schools are mistakenly called “community schools.” Most charter schools in the state are failing schools, but that does not dim the enthusiasm of the GOP legislature for them. Ohio welcomes for-profit charter schools. Charters drain money from public schools.
For the first time in the history of the federal Charter Schools Program, which started in 1994, the federal U.S. Department of Education has proposed regulations to exclude for-profit management of charters that seek federal funding to expand and to require charters seeking federal funding to present a summary of their charter on the locality where they plan to open.
Jan Resseger, who lives in Ohio, sent the following appeal to her followers.
Please Support the Proposed USDOE Rule Changes for the Federal Charter Schools Program
Submit a comment supporting the Department’s new stronger regulations. You can submit your comment HERE, and you must submit the comment before April 13, 2022.
Please read Ohio Public Education Partners’ explanation of an urgently important development that requires our immediate attention. The U.S. Department of Education has published a notice in the Federal Register proposing new rules to strengthen oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). It is urgently important for each one of us to write and submit a formal comment expressing support for stronger oversight of the Charter Schools Program.
First, even though the Elementary and Secondary Education Act forbids the allocation of federal dollars to for-profit charter schools, the owners of for-profit charter management organizations (CMOs) have learned how to get around the law. The U.S. Department of Education has proposed to stop the misallocation of federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) dollars to for-profit charter school management companies that hide behind the nonprofit charter schools they manage under sweeps contracts.
Second, when a charter school asks for Charter Schools Program startup funds, the Department has declared its intention to require a community impact statement to ensure that there is a need for a new charter school in the community and that the school won’t promote racial segregation. Neither should rapid expansion of charter schools undermine urban neighborhoods. The most serious consequence of out-of-control charter school expansion has been evident in large cities, where charter schools advertise lavishly to attract families from public schools.
Here is the language of the two urgently important rules the U.S. Department of Education proposes to add:
First — “Each charter school receiving CSP funding must provide an assurance that it has not and will not enter into a contract with a for-profit management organization, including a non-profit management organization operated by or on behalf of a for-profit entity, under which the management organization exercises full or substantial administrative control over the charter school and, thereby, the CSP project.”
Second — “Each applicant must provide a community impact analysis that demonstrates that there is sufficient demand for the proposed project and that the proposed project would serve the interests and meet the needs of students and families in the community or communities from which students are, or will be, drawn to attend the charter school, and that includes the following: (a) Descriptions of the community support and unmet demand for the charter school, including any over-enrollment of existing public schools or other information that demonstrates demand for the charter school, such as evidence of demand for specialized instructional approaches. (b) Descriptions of the targeted student and staff demographics and how the applicant plans to establish and maintain racially and socio-economically diverse student and staff populations, including proposed strategies (that are consistent with applicable legal requirements) to recruit, enroll, and retain a diverse student body and to recruit, hire, develop, and retain a diverse staff and talent pipeline at all levels (including leadership positions).”
Please submit a comment supporting the Department’s new stronger regulations. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the complicated language and presentation of the new rules in the Federal Register. Begin your comment by thanking the Department of Education for strengthening long-needed accountability in this program. In simple prose, explain your support for each of the proposed new rules for the Charter Schools Program. In your comment, if you like, you may quote the language (above) of each rule followed by your reason for believing the new regulation is so important. Your comment may be as long or as short as you like—a few sentences or several paragraphs. Longer comments must be submitted as attached documents.
You can submit your comment HERE, and you must submit the comment before April 13, 2022.
If you are not planning to write your own comment, you may send the Network for Public Education’s action alert letter, but I urge you to personalize your letter by adding a few sentences of your own.
Jan Resseger
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why do “we” (including me) keep referring to Trump’s political party as Republican or GOP? Let’s call it what it is: the MAGA Fascist Party.
Yes, the maga/fascist/Putinesque party. Recently Trump was on some far right wing show and called on Putin to release any damaging information he has about the Biden family! This amounts to treason. He did the same during the 2016 political campaign asking Putin to get dirt on Hillary and yet he won. Trump and the other far right crazies make Romney and Cheney look like saints.
The far right and the far left join in solidarity with Putin and defend his barbaric aggression.
Following below is the Comment I sent. Feel free to cut and paste all or any portion with no need to attribute:
CHARTER SCHOOL FRAUD: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate charter school operators that the IG investigation declared that: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets.
There is NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because they fail to pass the minimum test for being genuine public schools: They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools. And yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools. Moreover, CREDO reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars.
The racial resegregation of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.” The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. Public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64
Nevada Charters are failing academically, financially, and in diversity.
For-profit Academica and others are laughing all the way to the bank.
It would be lovely to know what happens to $950 million in charter school money – the tax payer deserves answers.
The FBI should follow the money trails of Senator Scott Hammond, Senator Carrie Buck, Assemblywoman Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod, Mayor Carolyn Goodman, all the Henderson Mayors, Nevada State School Board Member Tonia Holmes-Sutton. Greasy hands. And more I am sure. Unethical at least but millions are passing hands as they pass money around.
Michael Petrilli
Washington Post editorial page: The Biden administration’s sneak attack on charter schools
Bloomberg editorial: Biden’s New Charter-School Rules Are a Mistake
Ed reform echo chamber in lockstep as usual. 100% oppose regulations on charter schools, but we knew it would be 100% even before they all started churning out the identical editorial.
It’s always 100%. If it says “charter” or “voucher” the cheerleaders all take the field.
If this were about addditional regulations on PUBLIC schools all of these same people would be enthusiastically backing it.
No dissent permitted in the echo chamber. 100% positive for charters, 100% negative for public schools. Always. I can’t figure out why anyone needs more than ONE full time ed reformer. They’re interchangeable. Hire one you get the whole echo chamber.