SO YOU WANT EVIDENCE OF CHOICE AND CHARTER PROBLEMS?
So, you think that you want to expand “school choice” for parents by passing proposed legislation that would allow charters and private schools to take tax money with little of the financial or quality safeguards that publicly controlled schools now have?
And you want evidence that it’s bad? Well, the same model laws have been passed in about 40 states, some of them being on the books for about 10 years now.
There is plenty of evidence to how bad things can get with the same legislation models that are being proposed in the Oklahoma legislature right now.
The “few bad apples” argument just doesn’t hold with this much misbehavior in so many different parts of the country. The problem is with the system of unaccountable private charters that have been pushed through too many state legislatures lately.
Each of these cases are in states where the opening for these huge problems started with the exact same arguments that are being forwarded in Oklahoma and other states right now at the beginning of new legislative sessions.
This is how bad it can get.
Outright fraud
From January 23rd, we see a report from The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio about how a significant number of charters schools there have been caught in surprise inspections falsifying their attendance records to capture more tax money that the receive from the State of Ohio.
The State Auditor organized 30 surprise inspections of charter schools that receive state money per student to educate them. In just the first round, 16 of those 30 schools had discrepancies of more than 10% between how many were actually counted in the school that day and what the school was claiming as their enrollment.
The newspaper report relays this from the 56-page report:
The auditor’s report also critiqued some aspects of charter-school laws, arguing they lack segregation of duties and allow for conflicts of interest among charter-school boards, sponsors and So You Want Evidence of Choice and Charter Problems?:
