Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina offered a resolution to overturn the Biden administration’s new regulations on federal funding of charter schools. The vote was 49-49, strictly on party lines. Even charter school supporters like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado voted to sustain the new rules.
Every Republican voted to reject the rules. The charter lobby was not at all pleased.
The Network for Public Education has worked very hard to persuade the Department of Education and Congress to regulate the federal Charter Schools Program. When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, there was no chance that the Department would try to regulate the $440 million handed out to new charter schools every year. The federal government was the single biggest contributor to new charter schools.
NPE published reports about the large number of charter schools that closed or never opened. It wrote about for-profit charters that were enjoying federal largesse. It drew attention to charter school scandals, including white flight academies subsidized by federal funds.
Not until the Biden administration took office did anyone in the Department take seriously its responsibility to oversee federal funding of charters.
What do the new regulations require? What did every single Republican Senator try to block? We’re they upset about the limits on for-profit operators? Or did they object to transparency and accountability for federally funded charters?
NPE executive director Carol Burris explained in this article published at Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog:
For those who have long advocated for overhauling the CSP program, here are the significant gains.
Schools managed by for-profits will have a difficult time securing CSP grants and, in some cases, will be excluded from funding.
If an applicant has or will have a contract with a for-profit management company (or a “nonprofit management organization operated by or on behalf of a for-profit entity”), they must provide extensive information, including a copy or description of the contract, comprehensive leadership personnel reporting and the identification of possible related party transactions. Real estate contracts must be reported, and “evergreen contracts” in which there is automatic contract renewal are prohibited.
The school cannot share legal, accounting or auditing services with the for-profit. The state entity that awards the grant must publish the for-profit management contract between the awardee and the school.
The final regulations also include the reporting and exposure of the for-profit’s related entities. The Network for Public Education recommended the addition of “related entities” in its comments to the department. Our report, “Chartered for Profit,” explains how for-profit owners create separate corporations with different names to mask the complete control of the for-profit over operations of the school.
Finally, the applicant must assure that “the [for-profit] management company does not exercise full or substantial control over the charter school,” thereby barring any charter school operated by a for-profit with a “sweeps contract” from obtaining CSP funds.
There will be greater transparency and accountability for charter schools, State Entities, and CMOs that apply for grants.
This is probably the most underreported win for those who support charter school reform.
Transparency gains include:
• An assurance that the grantee holds a public hearing on the proposed or expanded charter school. These hearings must be well advertised and include information on how the school will increase diversity and not promote segregation. Schools are obligated to reach out to the community to encourage attendance and then provide a summary of the hearing as part of the application. These public hearings are required of direct grantees and subgrantees — both SE and CMO.
• The publication of for-profit management contracts.
• The publication of the names of awardee schools and their peer-reviewed applications by states and CMOs.
• A requirement that the school publish information for prospective parents, including fees, uniform requirements, disciplinary practices, transportation plans, and whether the school participates in the national free or reduced-price lunch program.
Accountability gains include:
• More substantial supervision by state entities of the schools that are awarded grants, including in-depth descriptions of how they will review applications, the peer review process they will use, and how they will select grantees for in-depth monitoring.
• Restrictions regarding the spending of grants by unauthorized schools. Charter schools not yet approved by an authorizer will be eligible to use planning grant funds; however, they cannot dip into any implementation funds until they are approved and have secured a facility. This new regulation will limit, though not prevent, all funding that goes to charter schools that never open.
Regulations to stop White-flight charters from receiving CSP funding and ensure the charter is needed in the community.
The final regulations are good, but not as strong as initially proposed.
One of the more controversial aspects of the new regulations was the need for the school to conduct a community impact analysis. The charter lobby focused on one example by which a school could show need (district over-enrollment) and used it as a rallying cry to garner opposition to the regulations. In the new regulations, the department clarifies that there are other ways to demonstrate need, including wait lists and offering a unique program. It also eliminated the need for the applicant to provide a district enrollment projection.
The community impact analysis is now called a needs analysis. That analysis must include evidence of community desire for the school; documentation of the school’s enrollment projection and how it was derived; a comparison of the demographics of the school with the area where the students are likely to be drawn; the projected impact of the school on racial and socio-economic district diversity; and an assurance that the school would not “hamper, delay or negatively affect” district desegregation efforts. Applicants would also have to submit their plan to ensure that the charter school does not increase racial segregation and isolation in the school district from which the charter would draw its students.
The department went to great pains to reassure applicants that schools in racially isolated districts would not need to show diversity (this straw man argument had been used by the charter lobby and even some editorial boards to fight the regulations, although the original rules had made that clear). Those schools that are unlikely to be diverse due to the school’s special mission would also have to submit an explanation.
Still, there are some concerns about unintended consequences of the regulations.
With the additional caveat regarding “special mission,” the department is trying to preserve grants to schools that are themed to promote, for example, Native American culture in an area where Native American students are a minority population in the district. That is understandable.
However, White-flight charter schools could skirt the regulation by arguing that their mission is to provide a Eurocentric, classical curriculum.
For example, charter schools opened by Hillsdale College — a small Christian college in Michigan that promotes a “classical” curriculum — are disproportionately White. These schools could claim that their mission appeals to students with European backgrounds and that the strong “anti-CRT” message in their “1776 curriculum” does not appeal to Black families. Although Hillsdale College does not take federal funds, Hillsdale charter schools do. We have identified nearly $7 million awarded to Hillsdale member charter schools up to April 2021. Newer schools have likely secured CSP grants as well.
Priority 2 — which encouraged charter/public school cooperation — was retained but categorized as “invitational” for the 2022 cycle.
The second straw man argument the National Alliance for Public Charters used to fuel their #backoff campaign on the regulations was the claim that charter/public school district cooperative projects were required. They were not. They were a priority, and priorities can be mandated, competitive (assigned a few points), or invitational (looked up favorably but no point value).
As I explained here, it is rare for a priority to be mandated. For example, of the six priorities for the 2022 State Entities grants, only one is required, which is that authorizers use best practices. The department now makes it clear that it is unlikely that charter/district cooperative activity will ever be a mandated priority while leaving the door open to it becoming a competitive priority after the 2022 award cycle.
All regulations, priorities and assurances go into effect for this 2022 grant cycle with one exception: Developer grant applicants, a small program in which individual schools apply, do not have to submit a needs analysis in 2022 only. That is because applications are due shortly.
Summary
Since 2019 when the Network for Public Education issued its reports on the federal Charter School Program, the program has come under increased congressional scrutiny. We have followed up by submitting letters to the department, often co-signed by other groups, demanding reform and exposing abuses of the program.
These new regulations are an essential first step in making sure that fewer tax dollars go to schools that never open, schools that quickly close, and for-profit operators. Unscrupulous individuals who used the program for their enrichment will find it more difficult to do so. State Entities that have pushed money out the door will now be forced to provide more oversight and supervision. And so they should. State Entities get 10 percent of every grant, representing millions of federal dollars, to use for such supervision.
We do not doubt that some applicants will still provide false information, as we found time and time again, but now as all peer-reviewed applications go online, groups such as ours will serve as watchdogs and report falsehoods and misrepresentations to the Office of the Inspector General.
And for all of the charter schools that are fronts for for-profit organizations, the Education Department just put a big sign on the door that says “you need not apply.”
The re-election of Raphael Warnock means this policy can stay in place at least until 2024. The battle against dark money continues…
👍🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👍🏽👍🏽🙏🏽
Here is one of many reasons to support the Network for Public Education, folks.
Thanks for the tip. Donated and shared on my FB page.
Thank you, Mark. Our hard work paid off.
Many thanks to Carol Burris and NPE for their tireless efforts to research, document problems and advocate for regulation of the federal CPS program. The publication of “Asleep at the Wheel” awakened the sleeping federal giant. It was the first time there was any discussion about all the waste, fraud, sweeps contracts, crooked CMOs and schools that never opened or those that closed shortly after opening in the federal CPS program. The report was an eye opener for key members of Congress. But the for profit game will still be afoot and looking for ways to work around regulations. Public school advocates will have to be vigilant and keep a watchful eye on implementation of these new rules as the federal government has a bad habit of non-enforcement of its own policies and regulations.
This is a great read and a step in the right direction and congress and the must do more to Ensure charters can not ever be a “Monopoly”, where it takes over a traditional public School district guided by the Constitution since they are legislatively created.
Hello Diane, Bob, and FYI Linda: The below is relevant to this discussion . . . deep background, so to speak, . . . with a long quote from a link in the online Commonweal Magazine a Catholic publication (see end of article for that link).
In the abstracted quotes below, you will see why Linda’s arguments . . . against movements by powerful Catholics . . . are correctly drawn (AS so drawn), but also how, as I have tried to convey here many times, what’s going on in those powerful circles is in direct opposition to the Church’s long-held social doctrine and, more broadly, our intellectual tradition.
The quote, however, also captures two scholars’ work on these points (and some from Jane Meyers). In brief, that powerful and power-mongering group are in fact anti-Catholic, while Catholic is only the thin loincloth that covers their host of totalitarian ambitions.
The article also shows how “conspiracy” really works over time, in this case, of the wealthy and powerful few who think they do no evil, while actually deeply involved in its’ very workings. Like so many of their ilk (not much different from Elon Musk, only more hidden and with a more acceptable brand), they have confused their having wealth, their own biases, and their subsequent political leanings with “God’s purpose,” and the secularity that is embodied in the U.S. Constitution (freedom of religion a political distinction between State and religious institutions) with “secularism” defined as all things evil about the people and the freedoms we enjoy.
Leo Leonard, a particular mention here along with Koch, and his wealthy ultra conservative groupies are as much a danger to democracy and to the U.S. Constitution (and so to the laws) as any racist, sexist, white nationalist that was every born. Through their meddling with laws, law schools, lawyers, and the U.S. Supreme Court, they cherry pick their way through the Constitution as well as The Bible towards destroying the ground for the very legitimacy of those laws at the service of their version of a totalitarian state.
The below is ALL QUOTED from the article which is linked below, and the videos mentioned are linked in the online article. CBK
QUOTED/abstracted from article:
Subject: Leonard Leo
In October, the Opus Dei-affiliated Catholic Information Center — a K Street hub that describes itself on its website as “the closest tabernacle to the White House” — gave Leo a John Paul II New Evangelization Award, honoring him as a “champion of the rule of law, advocate of global religious freedom, and committed leader of many Catholic organizations in Washington, D.C. and around the country.” Leo sits on the center’s board.
The awards dinner at the Mayflower Hotel was closed to the press. The center did not respond to several requests from NCR to comment for this article.
In a video of his speech released by the Catholic Information Center a month after the award’s dinner, Leo described the work of Catholic evangelization as involving “every facet of life, including law, public policy and politics, which are the areas that I know best.” He warned that this evangelization “faces extraordinary threats and hurdles” because “our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives. It despises who we are, what we profess, and how we act.”
“Catholicism faces vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots,” Leo said. “These barbarians can be known by their signs. They vandalized and burned our churches after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. They show up at events like this one, trying to frighten and muzzle us. From coast to coast they are conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate. … Our opponents are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.”
“I can’t think of anyone who has lived his faith more powerfully than Leonard Leo,” former Attorney General William Barr, a past board member at the Catholic Information Center, said in a video tribute produced by the organization. “He does it quietly and unassumingly but with inhuman energy. … It’s particularly fitting that the very year in which Dobbs was decided we are honoring Leonard Leo because no one has done more to advance traditional values, and especially the right to life, than Leonard.”
But John Sniegocki, a professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, called the decision to honor Leo with an award named for the late pope “deeply concerning.”
“Many of the projects that Leo has been involved with support goals that run directly counter to the teachings of John Paul II,” he told NCR. “These projects have worked to undermine voting rights, hinder action on climate change and foster deregulation of corporate activities, whereas John Paul II called for the expansion of democracy, spoke of climate change as one of the most pressing ethical issues facing the modern world and supported strong regulation on behalf of the common good. The granting of this award appears to be another attempt by certain segments of the Catholic Church in the United States to hijack the name and reputation of Pope John Paul II to support a political agenda that runs deeply contrary to the actual teachings of John Paul II and the broader tradition of Catholic social teaching.” .. .
‘The long game’
Leo’s three-decade effort to build the Federalist Society into a powerful pipeline for conservative legal talent and his influence on shaping law schools is part of a broader organizing effort on the right.
“Leonard Leo is fully integrated within a political infrastructure that seeks to radically transform the laws, the lawyers that litigate them, and the judges that interpret them,” said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and author of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War.
“Leo and the Koch network know that political ideas get legitimized in higher education so they have a sophisticated funding strategy for creating academic centers, influencing law schools and producing these ideologies and legal theories that are then used to justify policies like deregulation of corporations and denying climate science.”
In a 2020 speech at the Manhattan Institute, Leo explained the Federalist Society’s impact promoting originalist interpretations of the Constitution — a philosophy of judicial interpretation shared by several of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. “We have built the infrastructure on the law school campus and in the legal culture generally to revive the ideal of limited constitutional government,” he said. “The ideas that were for sometime far outside the legal mainstream — ideas like originalism, textualism, and judicial enforcement of the separation of powers — are now on the cusp of becoming the legal mainstream.”
Cathleen Kaveny, a Boston College scholar who is an expert on the relationship between law and religion, said Leo uses the Federalist Society to build a “coherent movement that stands for a certain view of constitutional interpretation that wants to enshrine conservative Christian values.”
But she argues that wasn’t the intent of the founders and doesn’t align with a traditionally Catholic understanding of law and politics.
“It’s an approach that is far more evangelical and fundamentalist than Catholic,” Kaveny said. “If Catholics approached the Bible the way these originalists view the Constitution, we would be fundamentalists.”
A former law professor at the University of Notre Dame, Kaveny watched as the school transformed and she glimpses a potential similar effort at Catholic University with Leo’s influence.
“At Notre Dame Law School, they narrowed the notion of Catholic hiring to mean hiring a certain kind of Catholic who is committed to the culture wars,” Kaveny said. “They hired very committed and talented people, and the money followed. It took 30 years, but they played the long game. And it was successful.” END QUOTED MATERIAL
https://www.ncronline.org/news/leonard-leo-has-reshaped-supreme-court-he-reshaping-catholic-university-too?utm_source=Main+Reader+List&utm_campaign=dbb7fefb45-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_16_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_407bf353a2-dbb7fefb45-92562883
Hooray! 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
And thank you to NPE and all who contributed.
I am not entirely but more impressed with the Democratic Party this week than I was last week. Of course, I could not possibly be more impressed with Carol and NPE than I was last week or last year.