Who’s minding the people who are supposed to be minding the schools?
(David Paul Morris / Bloomberg)
Who’s minding the people who are supposed to be minding the schools?
Let’s look at two debacles involving schools, one on the West Coast and one on the East, that are symptomatic of problems around the country.
My colleague Emma Brown wrote in this story that three former managers of the Options Public Charter School in Northeast Washington — the city’s oldest charter school — have been accused of enriching themselves with at least $3 million of public money that was supposed to be used to help some of the District’s most troubled teens and students with disabilities. The managers created for-profit companies that won contracts from the school and charged very high prices.
A civil lawsuit alleges that they did this with the help of a senior official at the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which is a non-elected entity that has financial oversight over charter schools in the District of Columbia. Charter schools, which operate outside of the traditional public school district, have their own administration and boards. They now enroll more than 40 percent of D.C. students and get more than $500 million in public funds every year to operate.
And it turns out, according to the lawsuit, that salary and bonuses for the chief
Stop blaming James Madison for the shutdown
Stop blaming James Madison for the shutdown
James Madison, the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and the fourth president of the United States, is suddenly getting prime-time attention over his supposed role in the current government shutdown (even though he died 177 years ago). Read full article >>
The ‘grand illusion’ in reading
This is the fourth in a series of posts I have run over the past month or so about the “reading wars,” or, how to most effectively teach students to read. The wars were long fought between proponents of direct … Continue reading →