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Federal Audit of Federal Charter Schools Program Finds Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2022 //
11

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an in-depth audit of the federal Charter Schools Program, which was initiated in 1994 with a few million dollars by the Clinton administration. Thanks to astute lobbying by the charter industry, the modest program grew to $440 million a year with little or no accountability. Betsy DeVos pushed it aggressively to large charter chains, including for-profit chains.

You will be interested in this account of the audit, written by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post, introducing an analysis by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education.

This audit demonstrates the power and persistence of the Network for Public Education, a small but smart advocate for public schools. NPE operates with one full-time employee and a small number of part-time employees. Our work is motivated not by greed but by idealism and a passionate commitment to the common good. We believe in well-funded schools with experienced teachers for all children.

The introduction by by Strauss and the analysis by Burris has many links, but none transferred when I copied it. I copied some, but not all of them. I urge you to open the original and find the links.

Strauss begins:

The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General has released a new audit of the federal Charter School Program that found some alarming results about how charter school networks have used millions of dollars in funding. Among other things, the audit found that charter school networks and for-profit charter management organizations did not open anywhere near the number of charters they promised to open with federal funding. This piece looks at the new audit and what it tells us.


The reason this is not surprising is that investigations into the Charter School Programs by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that opposes the growth of charter schools, found that same problem, as well as others and reported it a few years ago. You can read my stories about their “Asleep at the Wheel” here and here. (The second report noted that the state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who has pushed to expand charter schools for decades.)


Charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed. The federal charter program, which began in 1994 with the aim of expanding high-quality charters, had bipartisan support for years, but many Democrats have pulled back from the movement, citing the fiscal impact on school districts and repeated scandals in the sector. The Biden administration is making some changes to the program in an effort to stop waste and fraud and provide more transparency to the operation of charters.


This piece was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning principal in New York. She has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years. The Network for Public Education is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and sees charter schools as part of a movement to privatize public education.


By Carol Burris


A new report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) entitled “The Effectiveness of Charter School Programs in Increasing the Number of Charter Schools” documents how states, charter management organizations, and charter developers often make wildly exaggerated claims regarding the number of charter schools they will open or expand to secure large grants.

The OIG, an independent watchdog of the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), found that for grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51 percent of the schools promised by Charter School Programs (CSP) recipients opened or expanded.


The OIG audit also exposed the sloppy record keeping and weak oversight that characterize CSP operations. Since 2006, the department has paid a private corporation, WestEd, millions of dollars to compile, check and update CSP records. WestEd’s present CSP contract exceeds $12 million. In total, WestEd has active contracts with the U.S. Department of Education worth more than $27.6 million. Yet an alarming number of grant records could not be found when requested by the OIG auditors. And while the Biden administration is attempting to clean up and reform the CSP, according to the independent OIG, more work needs to be done.


What did the Office of the Inspector General audit?
The audit had three goals. The first was to describe how the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education tracked and reported the number of charter schools that opened and expanded using Charter School Program funds. A second goal was to determine whether CSP grant recipients actually delivered the number of charter schools they promised when they applied for their often multimillion dollar awards. Finally, the audit sought to determine how many schools were still open two years after CSP funding ended.


As its title stated, the audit was an attempt to measure the program’s effectiveness in fulfilling its mission. To conduct the audit, the OIG examined 2013 through 2016 CSP grant records. During that period, the department awarded 103 CSP grants to states, charter management organizations, or individual charter developers. Ninety-four were closely investigated by the OIG. The likely reason these years were chosen was that most grants are for five years. The auditors also found that the department often extends them further when grantees have not spent all of their money. Therefore, more recent grants were excluded because records were likely to be incomplete.

Incomplete and inaccurate records

The auditors noted that while the department, through WestEd, tracked spending and schools while grants were open, the tracking stopped as soon as the grant was complete. Therefore, the department had no way of knowing whether schools remained open beyond the years federal funds propped them up. This speaks to the purpose of the program — to open and expand high-quality charter schools.


When auditors asked the department to define the term high-quality, the department responded that the “CSP office does not determine whether a charter school is high-quality because state rules for determining high quality vary.”


“Additionally,” it said, “the determination of whether a charter school is a high quality is often the responsibility of charter school authorizers.” The department also told auditors that tracking a school’s existence after all money was doled out was not its job.


Even if the department wanted to do a quality check of schools as they were funding and expanding, the OIG found that there was no accurate base of information that they could rely on to determine whether they should continue what was often a multimillion-dollar grant. From the audit:


Although the CSP office created processes for tracking and reporting on charter schools that opened and expanded and charter schools that remained open through the grant performance period end date, those processes did not result in CSP grant recipients reporting precise, reliable, and timely information in their FPRs [final performance reports], APRs [annual performance reports], and data collection forms. The processes also did not result in the CSP office receiving all the necessary information to assess grant recipients’ performance or evaluate the overall effectiveness of the CSP.


Specifically, the department could not produce 13 percent of the required final reports from grantees and 43 percent of the required final data collection sheets. Auditors noted that grantees would report different numbers of schools opened or expanded among required collection forms and final reports. The accuracy of the final documents prepared by WestEd for the department was beyond the scope of the audit.

During our research for our second “Asleep at the Wheel” report, we found that the data collection sheets produced by WestEd and published in 2019 by then Education Secretary Betsy De Vos were replete with errors. Schools that had closed or never opened were reported as open or future. We also noted inaccuracies in recently submitted sheets we received from a Freedom of Information Act request, especially relating to the for-profit management status of the awardee.


But the OIG discovered a far worse problem yet. More than half of the schools that grantees committed to opening or expanding did not open or expand at all.

CSP grantees failed to meet commitments
Grant applicants asked for and received millions of dollars based on their promises to open and expand charter schools. However, when the auditors examined 94 grantee applications, they found that many grantees fell far short of their commitments.

The OIG determined that based on the commitments made in the 94 applications, state education agencies, CMOs, and developers promised to open or expand 1,570 charter schools using CSP funds.


As of July 2021, approximately 75 percent of the grant funding had been spent, yet grantees had only opened or expanded 51 percent of the charters they had promised.


This begs the question, where did millions of tax dollars go? I identified grantees by matching applications on the department website along with numbers in the data set with grant codes in the OIG report.


In its 2016 CSP application, the Florida Department of Education put forth what it called a “bold and ambitious plan to … develop a high-impact system to dramatically improve the opportunities of educationally disadvantaged students. The department said that it would use the grant to “support the creation of 200 new high-quality charter schools over the next five years.”

Florida received $70.7 million to achieve its “bold and ambitious” plan. According to the OIG report, it had only opened 33 percent — or 66 — of the schools it promised to open as of July 2021, although it had spent over 51 percent of the CSP funds.


Colorado’s 2015 application promised that it would open 72 charter schools with its over 24.2 million dollar grant. In the end, it opened fewer than half — just 33 — and expanded three schools. Nevertheless, it spent 87.5 percent of its funds.

Tennessee ambitiously promised to open 114 charter schools. It opened just 16, though it managed to spend 63 percent of its grant. These states are not outliers. The report shows a pattern.

And CMOs also failed to deliver. The KIPP charter network promised 65 schools for its jumbo $48,750,000 grant, one that well exceeded most states. It delivered 34 schools and expanded one.

Finally, there are grants to developers that the department directly provides. The Innovation Development Corporation received a $405,730 CSP grant to open The Delaware Met. It was open for just a few months before it was shut down. It also received and spent $72,000 to open DE Stem. That school was shut down before it even opened. Willow Public School, a Washington charter school, took and spent a $602,875 grant, opened, ran into trouble, changed its name, and then shut down.


The department and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools attribute the problem to authorizer reluctance and state caps on the number of schools that can open. Really? Every state that got a grant has a state board that can override local rejections of applications. State applicants and the department are also well aware of caps. Take the case of the 2018 $78,888,888 CSP grant to the New York State Department of Education, which was outside the scope of the OIG audit.

In the New York State application review, which you can find here, raters acknowledge that New York State had not even used up its previous grant which was open beyond its terms and that charter expansion would be limited by the state cap on the number of charters. Yet they gave the application high scores, and it was approved. Where did that 2018 money go? Over $10 million went to provide staff development in technology for charter schools.

Jumbo grants

Why do states and charter management organizations ask for jumbo grants knowing they cannot deliver? Because they want the money to fund their charter school operations.


States and charter management organizations get to keep 10 percent of the cut for grant administration and technical assistance to charter schools. The bigger the grant, the bigger the cut.

Therefore, KIPP was allowed to keep nearly $5 million for its charter management organization, even though it fell way short of its commitment. The Florida Department of Education secured over $7 million for administrative services on its grant.
Second, there are no guidelines about how much an individual charter school can get. We have seen grants as low as $250,000 and grants to schools of $1.5 million. When a state realizes it cannot or will not meet its commitment, it just doles out larger amounts.


Third, until President Biden, no prior administration did anything about it over the Charter School Program’s existence. Therefore, states, CMOs, and individual schools realized pretty quickly that they could create grandiose applications, sometimes including falsehoods, and there would be no real consequences if commitments were never met.

The present department has taken a terrible beating for creating modest CSP reform regulations which are still being fought by the charter trade organizations and their proxies, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a charter school authorizer. Challenges include both a lawsuit and a Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the new rules.

But as the OIG audit shows, reforms are desperately needed.

.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals, School Choice

Denver Approves Afrocentric Charter School

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2022 //
16

A controversial Afrocentric charter school for Black students was approved by the Denver school boardhttps://www.denverpost.com/2022/09/23/5280-freedom-schoool-denver-dps-charter/, after initially rejecting the proposal. The board worried that the charter would not attract enough students to be viable. Other charters in Denver have closed because of declining enrollment. If you read the comments that follow the article, the main theme of writers is shock that the Denver school board would open a racially segregated school.

The Denver Post reported:

After the state ordered Denver Public Schools to reconsider a charter school centering Black students and culture, the school board Thursday approved the school to open next fall.

But the approval comes with conditions, including that 5280 Freedom School must fill all of its open seats in its first year. The school plans to open with 52 students in kindergarten and first grade, and add grades each year up to fifth grade.

Denver schools are funded per pupil, and other new charter schools have had to delay opening because they didn’t enroll enough students. Existing charter schools have closed because their enrollment declined, and the district is considering closing some of its own schools due to low student counts.

The school board initially rejected the 5280 Freedom School for fear it would struggle to attract enough students to be financially viable….Last month, the State Board of Education ordered Denver to reconsider its decision. State Board members said it was unfair to assume that 5280 Freedom School would face the same challenges as other charters.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Denver, Education Industry, Segregation

Stephen Dyer: The Abject Failure of Charter Schools in Ohio

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2022 //
4

Stephen Dyer, a former state legislator in Ohio, writes a blog that tracks funding and privatization in Ohio. It’s called “10th Period.” He relies on state data to tell the truth about the failure of charters and vouchers. Here is the latest data on charter schools.

Dyer’s summary:

98 Percent of Ohio Charter School Graduates are Less Prepared for Post-Graduate World Than Students in Youngstown City Schools

Dayton is the lowest performing major urban district. Yet 2 out of 3 Ohio charter schools are less prepared than Dayton students

Ohio’s new report card has revealed something extremely troubling about Ohio’s Charter Schools. On a new measure called “Students in the 4-year Graduation Cohort who Completed a Pathway and are Prepared for College or Career Success”, only 9 percent of Ohio’s potential Charter School graduates met those qualifications. More than 36 percent of Ohio’s public school district students met those qualifications.

(Data Note: These data only examine students who could graduate high school, not whetherthey graduated high school. Public School Districts graduated 91.4 percent of their potential 121,968 graduates. Charter Schools only graduated 65 percent of their 4,657 potential graduates — a lower rate than any Ohio Public School District.)

Of the 43 Ohio Charter Schools with enough students to count in this College and Career Readiness measure, 18 schools had zero — that’s right, not a single student —who qualified as college or career ready. That means that 3 out of every 25 Ohio charter school graduates attended a school where not a single potential graduate was considered college or career ready.

But it gets worse.

More than 54 percent of Youngstown City School potential graduates are college or career ready. Only one Ohio Charter School — Dayton Early College Academy — has a higher rate.

That means that 98 percent of potential Ohio Charter School graduates are less prepared for post-high school lives than Youngstown City Schools’ potential graduates. Remember that Youngstown was seen as such a “failed” school district that the state created a new law to take over the district — in large part so more Charter Schools could open there.

Yet that district’s students are more likely to be prepared for post-high school lives than 98 percent of the 4,657 students potential graduating Ohio’s Charter Schools.

But wait. It gets worse.

The lowest-performing major urban school district in Ohio — Dayton — only had 5.7 percent of its students qualify as career or college ready.

Not good.

But before all you pro-charter school/voucher people scream “School Choice, Now!”, an astonishing 2 out of every 3 potential Ohio Charter School graduates attend schools with worse post-graduate preparation measures than Dayton.

Dayton is the home of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and has been a hotbed of charter and voucher activity for 25 years. It’s not like school choice hasn’t been tried in Dayton.

And it ain’t working.

More Ohio students in all schools need to be career and college ready than they currently are. Full stop.

But what’s clear is that the best place for that to happen is in Ohio’s local public schools, not in Ohio Charter Schools.

I’d also like to use some space to bring up the Ohio Virtual Academy (OHVA) — the ECOT-sized online school. OHVA was paid to educate 14,530 students last year — more students than ECOT ever was paid to educate.

Yet they are just as bad as ECOT at preparing their students for the post-graduate world. An astonishing 87 of 1,820 potential OHVA grads were considered college or career ready. That 4.8 percent rate is lower than all but one Ohio school district — New Miami Local in Butler County, which only had 1 of 44 potential graduates considered college or career ready.

There’s more. If you want to follow the terrible results of privatization in Ohio, subscribe to Stephen Dyer’s blog.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization

Kathryn Joyce of Salon: Florida Ranked #1 by Group That Wants to Eliminate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2022 //
14

Kathryn Joyce of Salon has written one dynamite article after another about the movement to destroy public education. In this post, she writes that Florida was ranked # 1 in “educational freedom” by the far-right Heritage Foundation, which wants to privatize all schools. This is a brilliant, must-read article!

Arizona, which has pushed hard to expand charters and vouchers, came in a close second.

That claim, along with the fact that the list’s top 20 states are mostly deep “red” and its bottom 10 are almost all dark “blue,” might come as a surprise to education watchers who are familiar with more traditional assessments of education performance. But in the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural “Education Freedom Report Card,” the think tank is grading according to a different metric entirely: not things like average student funding, teacher salary or classroom size, but how easily state legislatures enable students to leave public schools; how lightly private schools and homeschooling are regulated; how active and welcome conservative parent-advocacy groups are; and how frequently or loudly those groups claim that schools are indoctrinating students….

In the category of education choice, Heritage’s primary focus is on education savings accounts(ESAs), a form of school voucher that allows parents to opt out of public schools and use a set amount of state funding (sometimes delivered via debit card) on almost any educational expenses they see fit. ESAs can be used towards charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and low-cost (and typically low-quality) “voucher schools,” as well as online schools, homeschooling expenses, unregulated “microschools” (where a group of parents pool resources to hire a private teacher) or tutoring. The report’s methodology also notes that the percentage of children in a state who attend these alternatives to public schools figures into its rankings, implying that families who choose traditional public schools are not considered examples of educational “freedom.” The “choice” category also awards points based on how non-public schools are regulated, docking states that require accreditation or the same level of testing mandated for public schools.

States can lose points if they have credentialed teachers and gain points if they let anyone without any credentials teach. They also lose points if they have good pension plans and unions. They gain points by having strong bans on “critical race theory” and gain points for teaching patriotic history.

What’s especially noteworthy about this report — which Heritage says it will release on an annual basis — is how closely most of its ranking criteria track with the right’s broader education agenda. Over the last few months, almost all the issues addressed in this report have been highlighted as key action items for conservative education reformers, from the promotion of ESAs, as a preferred pathway to universal school vouchers, to alternative teacher credentialing to the expansion of the anti-CRT movement, which now encompasses anything related to “diversity, equity and inclusion…”

Framing the report by invoking the libertarian economist [Milton] Friedman — who, over the course of his controversial career, proposed eliminating Social Security, the Food and Drug Administration, the licensing of doctors and more — is a telling choice. In a foundational 1955 essay, as Heritage notes, Friedman famously argued that “government-administered schooling” was incompatible with a freedom-loving society, and that public funding of education should be severed from public administration of it — which would end public education as the country had known it for generations…

“Friedman may have been an accomplished number-cruncher, but when it came to social issues, he was a crackpot,” said Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. He claimed that “vouchers ‘would solve all of the critical problems’ faced by schools,” from discipline, to busing to segregation, Burris continued. “He presented no evidence, just claims based on his disdain for any government regulation….”

By 1980, Friedman was declaring that vouchers were merely a useful waypoint on the road to true education freedom, which would include revoking compulsory education laws. In 2006, shortly before his death, Friedman told an ALEC audience that it would be “ideal” to “abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

For Heritage to use Friedman as its ideological lodestar, public education advocates observe, makes clear what the report values most in the state education systems it’s ranking….

“The fact that the Heritage Foundation ranks Arizona second in the country, when our schools are funded nearly last in the nation, only underscores the depraved lens with which they view the world,” said Beth Lewis, director of the advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, which is currently leading a citizen ballot referendumagainst the state’s new universal ESA law. “Heritage boasting about realizing Milton Friedman’s dream reveals the agenda — to abolish public schools and put every child on a voucher in segregated schools….”

“With this report,” added Burris, “the Heritage Foundation puts its values front and forward — that schooling should be a free-for-all marketplace where states spend the least possible on educating the future generation of Americans, with no regulations to preserve quality.” It’s no accident, Burris added, that Heritage’s top two states, Florida and Arizona, were ranked as the worst on the Network for Public Education’s own report card this year.

Categories Billionaires, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Far-Right Groups That Work with the Ohio Legislature to Defund Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2022 //
3

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher and thoughtful political analyst who lives in Ohio. In this post, she has compiled a list of the far-right groups who influence the Ohio legislature as it wreaks havoc on the public schools that most children attend.

She writes:

Ohio is overrun with far-right advocates pushing the privatization of public education through the expansion of both vouchers and charter schools and with people spreading alarm about public school teaching of divisive subjects. This should not be surprising in our notoriously gerrymandered Republican state legislature. Here are some of the extremist organizations whose lobbyists counsel our legislators, help them draft legislation, and make political donations.

The Buckeye Institute

Sourcewatch describes this Ohio organization: “The Buckeye Institute… is a right-wing advocacy group based in Ohio. It is a member of the $120 million-a-year State Policy Network (SPN), a web of state pressure groups that denote themselves as “think tanks” and drive a right-wing agenda in statehouses nationwide.” Sourcewatch further describes the State Policy Network: “SPN groups operate as the policy, communications, and litigation arm of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), giving the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda a sheen of academic legitimacy and state-based support.”

On Tuesday of last week, The Buckeye Institute released a new report outlining its strategy for helping students “regain lost learning” during the pandemic: “In its new policy report… The Buckeye Institute outlines how empowering parents, funding students first, and enhancing school choice can counteract the ill effects the pandemic had on learning loss for Ohio’s K-12 students.” While The Buckeye Institute claims to focus on individual students in its response to the past two years of COVID disruption, the new report doesn’t mention students at all. There is nothing about giving students extra attention in smaller classes or more enrichments and activities to make school exciting or more counselors and mental health support. Instead the report addresses the more abstract issues of school ownership and governance. In essence universal marketplace school choice via vouchers is the solution: “The report offers four commonsense policy solutions that will improve the K-12 academic experience:

  • “Broad-Based Education Savings Accounts: Create a broad-based ESA initiative to reform Ohio’s education system and its long-standing government-run education monopoly…
  • “Universal Open Enrollment: Make it easier for all families to send students to their school of choice by requiring all Ohio public schools to participate in inter-district open enrollment.
  • “Expanded Tax Credit Scholarships: Increase the maximum tax credit from its current $750 limit to $2,500 to make it easier for grant organizations to offer larger scholarships (vouchers) to more students in need.
  • “Enhanced Spending Transparency: Require all public school districts to operate more transparently by sharing their spending data with parents in Ohio Checkbook.”

The Center for Christian Virtue

The Center for Christian Virtue recently purchased an office building across the street from the Statehouse in Columbus to bring the organization right into the center of power in Ohio. One of the Center for Christian Virtue’s new initiatives is to help locate private religious schools in churches—schools that qualify for tax-funded EdChoice vouchers. For the Statehouse News Bureau, Jo Ingles reports: “A new, private school has been commissioned in Columbus, but it’s not like many others… Inside the walls of the Memorial Baptist Church on the west side of Columbus, classrooms normally used for Sunday church services are being readied for kindergarten through second grade students who have been going to local public schools. That’s according to Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a conservative Christian organization. He said seven churches came together to create this new model school. This is a pilot project for the Center for Christian Virtue. And the group said it’s just the first of many that will use church facilities for a private Christian school.” “Children who enroll in the school this year can use state money through Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program to pay for their tuition because they will fit the income or school attendance area guidelines… Other Christian-based schools are now receiving money from the EdChoice Scholarship program.”

Ingles adds that, “Baer’s organization is leading the charge for majority Republicans state lawmakers to adopt a bill, commonly called the “backpack” bill, that would expand the Ed Choice Scholarship even more to allow any student, regardless of income or where they live, to use public money for private schools. ”

For the Ohio Capital Journal, Zurie Pope reports that the Center for Christian Virtue has gone farther than merely supporting HB 290, the Backpack Bill. Members of the Center for Christian Virtue’s staff helped write the language of the bill: “(D)ocuments obtained by the Ohio Capital Journal through a public records request reveal CCV’s involvement in HB 290 has been more extensive than previously known, and included the advice and promotion of outside groups like Heritage Action and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This past February, a legislative aide for McClain (one of the bill’s sponsors) emailed a draft of the bill to CCV legislative liaison Nilani Jawahar and CCV lobbyist and Ohio Christian Education Network Assistant Director Corine Vidales.” The Ohio Capital Journal‘s report also names so-called academic research the drafters of the Backpack Bill considered as they were drafting the bill: “Both studies were created by EdChoice, an Indiana-based think tank that advocates for school choice. Ohio’s private school voucher program is also called EdChoice.” Finally, explains Zurie Pope, of the Ohio Capital Journal, the executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network, Troy McIntosh, “sent a draft of the bill to Stephanie Kruez, a regional director for Heritage Action, the policy arm of the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation.”

The Thomas Fordham Institute

The Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben reports that the Thomas Fordham Institute has joined a lawsuit pushing to overturn reasonable and sensible new rules recently imposed by the U.S. Department of Education to improve oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program. The Fordham Institute functions not only as an Ohio think tank, but also as an approved sponsor of its own Ohio charter schools. Tebben explains: “An Ohio group that supports charter schools has joined in a lawsuit fighting against what they say is ‘hostility’ in rule-making by the U.S. Department of Education. The D.C. and Ohio-based Thomas Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, spoke as a ‘charter school sponsor’ for the state of Ohio, arguing that rules regulating enrollment and use of charter schools… will ‘disadvantage some or all of the charter schools sponsored by Fordham’… The part of the rule that charter school advocates have a problem with states charter schools would need to prove public schools are over-enrolled, and encourage but don’t require ‘community collaboration’ with fellow school districts.” The lawsuit Fordham joined claims: “The most successful charter schools are those that provide educational alternatives to under-enrolled schools, not those that simply house excess numbers of students.” Ohio’s Fordham Institute is supporting the idea that charter schools should operate in competition, not collaboration, with the public school districts in which they are located. Neither does Fordham worry about the areas in Ohio where too many low quality charter schools with fancy advertising are sucking essential dollars from the public schools that serve the majority of the community’s students.

The Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill recently published a detailed set of priorities the Fordham Institute will be advocating this winter when the legislature begins to debate Ohio’s FY 2024-2025 biennial state budget. Churchill explains that Fordham will lobby to expand the charter school funding formula, expand special targeted assistance for charter schools, raise the facilities alliance to cover building costs, and support a credit enhancement to make building restoration and construction more affordable for charter schools. Fordham will also lobby to make EdChoice vouchers available for all students living in families with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level and allow brand new private schools to receive publicly funded vouchers from students even in a private school’s first year of operation. To its credit, Fordham will push to make the academic quality of private schools accepting vouchers more transparent by requiring, for the first time, private schools to release standardized test scores. Fordham will also lobby to make interdistrict public school choice universal across all the districts in the state, removing discretion for local school boards to decide whether to participate.

Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative

In the first of an important three-part expose for SALON last spring, Kathryn Joyce outlined the fast-growing initiative of Michigan’s conservative Christian Hillsdale College to disseminate its Classical Academy curriculum—which is Christian as well as classical—nationwide by encouraging charter schools to incorporate its model curriculum: “Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular… Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board embers are clamoring to implement Hillsdale’s proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the ‘patriotic education’ premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.”

The NY Times‘ Stephanie Saul explains the Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative’s name: “Hillsdale’s charter school operation… began in 2010 with a grant from the Chicago-based Barney Family Foundation, endowed by Stephen M. Barney, a financial industry executive.  Saul continues: “The Hillsdale charter schools are neither owned nor managed by Hillsdale. Instead, the schools enter agreements to use the Hillsdale curriculum and the college provides training for faculty and staff, as well as other assistance—all free of charge.”

The number of Hillsdale Classical Charter Schools is growing in Ohio.  I currently count four either in operation already or getting set to open: the Cincinnati Classical Academy; the Northwest Ohio Classical Academy in Toledo; the Heart of Ohio Classical Academy in Columbus; and the Southeast Ohio Classical Academy in Athens.  Another Hillsdale Classical Academy is a private school, the Columbus Classical Academy, which, I’m sure, accepts vouchers which have been permitted for religious schools since 2002 under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zelman v. Simmons Harris.

Four of these schools, however, are charter schools—which Ohio considers public schools. As schools with an explicitly Christian curriculum, these charter schools, deemed public by Ohio law, raise obvious questions about church-state separation. After the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin, a Maine school voucher decision which affirmed the constitutionality of publicly funding schools that explicitly teach religion, perhaps these Ohio Hillsdale charter schools will ultimately be tested with further litigation.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio

Peter Greene: What Did the Broad Academy Accomplish?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2022 //
35

I first met a Broadie about 15-18 years ago, when I was attending the wedding of a friend’s daughter. I conversed with a bright, young woman for about 10 minutes, then asked her where she was working. I’d guess she was 30 years old. She replied that she was in training to be an urban superintendent. Oh, I said. Are you a principal? No, she said. How many years have you been a teacher, I asked. None, she said. So how can you be an urban superintendent, I innocently asked. “I’m learning the skills I need at the Eli Broad Urban Superintendents Academy.”

Since then, I’ve seen many Broadies come and go, some leaving a trail of destruction, deficits, and demoralization behind them.

Peter Greene reviews a recent study of the Broad Academy and its graduates. It sets out to determine what the graduated accomplished. The short answer is “not much” or “nothing” in terms of school reform. But where Broadies went, charters expanded.

The Broad Academy has been around since 2002. Founded by Eli Broad, it’s a demonstration of how the sheer force of will, when backed by a mountain of money, can cause qualifications to materialize out of nothing. The Broad Foundation (“entrepreneurship for the public good”) set the Academy up with none of the features of a legitimate education leadership graduate program, and yet Broad grads kept getting hired to plum positions around the country. And now a new study shows what, exactly, all these faux graduates accomplished.

Give Eli Broad credit– his personal story is not about being born into privilege. Working class parents. Public school. Working his way through college. Been married to the same woman for sixty years. Borrowed money from his in-laws for his first venture– building little boxes made of ticky tacky. Read this story about how he used business success and big brass balls to make himself a major player in LA. He was a scrapper; Broad called himself a “sore winner.”

Broad believed that education was in trouble, but he did not believe schools had an education problem. He believed they had a management problem–specifically, a management problem caused by not having enough managers who treated schools like businesses. The goal has been to create a pipeline for Broad-minded school leaders to move into and transform school systems from the inside, to more closely fit Broad’s vision of how a school system should work.

Through a residency program, Broad often sweetens the pot by paying the salary of these managers, making them a free gift to the district. A 2012 memo indicated a desire to create a group of influential leaders who could “accelerate the pace of reform.” And Broad maintained some control over his stable of faux supers. In one notable example, John Covington quit his superintendent position in Kansas abruptly, leaving stunned school leaders. Not until five years later did they learn the truth; Eli Broad had called from Spain and told Covington to take a new job in Detroit.

Broad did not particularly believe that public schools could be reformed, with his vision of privatization becoming ever more explicit (leading to the 2015 plan to simply take over LAUSD schools). The Broad Academy offered an actual manual for how to close schools in order to trim budgets. The process was simple enough, and many folks will recognize it:

1) Starve school by shutting off resources
2) Declare that schools is failing (Try to look shocked/surprised)
3) Close school, shunt students to charterland

Anecdotally, the record for Broad Faux Supers is not great. Robert Bobb had a lackluster showing in Detroit. Jean-Claude Brizard received a 95% no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers, then went on to a disastrous term of office in Chicago. Oakland, CA, has seen a string of Broad superintendents, all with a short and unhappy tenure. Christopher Cerf created a steady drumbeat of controversy in New Jersey. Chris Barbic was put in charge of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, and resigned with all of his goals unfulfilled(and recommended another Broad grad as his replacement). John Deasy’s time at LA schools ended with a hugely expensive technology failure, and he’s been bouncing from failure to failure ever since..

But now a trio of researchers takes us beyond the anecdotal record. Thomas Dee (Stanford), Susanna Loeb (Brown) and Ying Shi (Syracuse) have produced “Public Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents.”

The paper starts with some history of Broad Academy, and places it in the framework of venture philanthropy, the sort of philanthropy that doesn’t just write a check, but stays engaged and demands to see data-defined results. The we start breaking down information about the Broad supers.

The Academy members themselves. They are way more diverse than the general pool of superintendents, so that’s a good thing. Slightly more than half of academy participants and about two-thirds of the Broad-trained superintendents have some teaching experience. This is way lower than actual school superintendents, and probably even lower because I will bet you dollars to donuts that the bulk of that “teaching experience” is a couple of years as a Teach for America tourist passing through a classroom so that they can stamp “teacher” on their CV like an exotic country stamped on a passport. On the other hand, one in five Broadies has experience in the military.

Open the link and read on. I can think of a few Broadies who created chaos and left deficits and demoralization behind as they left.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure

Carol Burris: Enrollments Rise in Low-Performing Virtual Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2022 //
17

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, delves into the charter lobby’s boasts about enrollment growth during the pandemic. Most of that increase, she found, was in virtual charter schools, the lowest performing of all charter schools. Her post appeared on Valerie Strauss’s blog at The Washington Post.

Burris writes:

Last October, this post examined state 2020-21 enrollment data indicating that large numbers of students had during the coronavirus pandemic moved to virtual charter schools, which are notorious for being the lowest performing schools in the charter sector. Researchers and advocacy organizations, including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, had previously been highly critical of virtual charters….

Charters operated by the for-profit online giant Stride K12 increased from 72,474 students in 2019-2020 to 110,767 in 2020-2021. Its strongest competitor, Pearson’s Connections Academy, experienced even stronger proportional growth, from 53,673 to 85,749.


Overall, the for-profit-run charter sector enrolled more than 50 percent of all students registered in virtual charters during both years…

In March 2022, the GAO issued a blistering report on virtual charter schools. The analysis showed that virtual charter students lagged behind their peers in brick-and-mortar charter schools, and even further behind students in brick-and-mortar public schools in publicly overseen districts.
When the GAO reviewed student proficiency in math and reading, they found “the national average math proficiency rate for virtual charter schools was 25 percentage points lower than the rate for brick-and-mortar traditional schools” and “the average reading proficiency rate for virtual charter schools was 9 percentage points lower than brick-and-mortar traditional schools.”

(Government Accountability Office analysis) (The Washington Post/Government Accountability Office)


While many virtual charter operators claim that the students attending their schools are often already lagging, the GAO made sure to control for several factors that could impact these proficiency rates, including past academic performance and student mobility. Even after controlling for those factors, the GAO still found virtual students’ scores statistically significantly behind brick-and-mortar public school students’. Not only that, fewer virtual students bothered to take state tests.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Virtual Charter Schools

Charter Schools Collected $1 Billion in PPP Loans That Were Forgiven

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2022 //
14

Since President Biden announced a program to forgive $10,000-20,000 in student loan debt, new attention has been paid to the Trump administration’s Paycheck Protection Program. PPP doled out billions of dollars to businesses of all kinds, many of which didn’t need the money but took it anyway. Free money.

Among those that collected significant sums were religious schools, private schools (some of which had multi-million dollar endowments), and charter schools.

Regular public schools had a separate stream of money to help them survive COVID-19, but they were not allowed to apply for PPP money, which was only for private businesses and nonprofit.

Charter schools were allowed to double dip. Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, after all. So charter schools qualified for public school funding and for PPP.

Carol Burris wrote a brief summary:

More than 1,100 charter schools (about 1 in 7) received PPP loans and had those loans forgiven, according to an investigation by Craig Harris of U.S.A. today. Whether they ever needed the money is questionable since 93% of them were located in states that funded them at the same or higher levels than before Covid 19.

Charter schools, in total, received more than 1 billion dollars in PPP funding. Kipp alone got $28 million even though, according to Harris, they had $78 million in assets.

For-profit charter chains also collected PPP funds and public school funds, although they lost no funding.

ProPublica published a database of every organization that received a PPP loan. Go to the website and type in “charter school,” “Catholic school” or “private school,” “religious organization” and you will see the Trump administration’s extraordinary generosity. Check your own zip code. You will be stunned by the big giveaway to private and religious schools, even televangelists.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding

KIPP Leader in D.C. Steals $2.2 Million and Kills Himself

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2022 //
53

Kevin Ward, a leader at the KIPP network of charter schools in D.C. killed himself after it was revealed that he stole $2.2 million from the schools’ account, allegedly to buy technology. He was also mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland. ,

A Maryland mayor who died by suicide this year had been accused of embezzling millions of dollars from one of the largest charter networks in the District, according to a complaint filed by federal prosecutors.

During his tenure as senior director of technology for KIPP DC, Kevin Ward used $2.2 million of school funds to purchase cars, a camper, sports memorabilia and property in West Virginia, prosecutors alleged in a civil forfeiture complaint filed Monday. Ward worked for the charter network from 2017 until at least July 2021, according to court records, two months after he was elected mayor of Hyattsville.

The payments, approved and arranged by Ward, were supposed to go toward laptops, tablets and other technology for children, prosecutors say. However, none of the products or services for which the school system paid were ever delivered, according to court records.

Officials at KIPP DC, which enrolls about 7,000 students across eight campuses in the District, said they found irregularities with certain technology purchases during a routine internal review in December. Leaders suspected fraud and contacted the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which launched an investigation, the school said in a statement.

The school system also conducted its own review, led by outside counsel and a team of forensics accountants, which found “this was an isolated incident conducted by a single individual who took advantage of extraordinary circumstances during the pandemic and the individual’s role as head of technology.”

The lack of transparency and oversight in charter schools enables crimes.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Deregulation, Education Industry, Fraud, KIPP Charter Schools

New Study: Broad Supes Made No Difference, Other Than Increasing Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2022 //
31

A new study confirms what many critics of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents’ Academy long suspected. Despite Eli Broad’s boasting, his program had no positive effects on student performance, but the “graduates” expanded privatization by charter schools.

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Month 202X, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1 –27

DOI: 10.3102/01623737221113575

https://doi.org/10.3102/016237372211135

 

Public-Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents

Thomas S. Dee

Stanford University

Susanna Loeb

Brown University

Ying Shi

Syracuse University

 

Using a unique panel data set on the 300 larg-est school districts, we examined the impact of Broad superintendents on a broad array of dis-trict outcomes. Our results indicate that the hir-ing of a Broad superintendent had no clear effects on outcomes such as student completion rates, enrollment, the closure of traditional public schools, and per-pupil spending on instruction or on support services. However, one exception to this pattern is particularly notable. We do find evidence that the hiring of a Broad superinten-dent results in a growing charter school sector. Specifically, we find that the hiring of Broad superintendents is associated with a trend toward increased charter school enrollment and a growth in the number of charter schools that extends beyond the short tenure of the typical Broad trainee.

We view the overall implications of these findings as nuanced. On the one hand, this Broad Foundation initiative was successful in placing new leaders with distinctive characteristics and training in a substantial number of U.S. school districts. Yet, we also find that these leaders had unusually short tenures and no clear effects on a variety of district outcomes.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Research
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