Accountability? How Overseers Let Charters Off the Hook; $3.3 Billion Spent
(Photo: Money in the garbage via Shutterstock)
Earlier in this special report series, CMD revealed how states that do not hold their charter schools and authorizers accountable have the upper hand when the US Department of Education (ED) evaluates applications to the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year charter schools program. But if the review process is deeply flawed, the oversight of the $3.3 billion disbursed within the charter schools program is not much better.
New Finding: Audits and Open Records Show Ongoing Lack of Accountability
A scathing 2012 audit from the ED Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and recent documents obtained through open records requests, show that when faced with the conflict between ED's pledges to hold the industry accountable, and the reality on the ground - the agency has often deferred entirely to the states.
Here are some details from the OIG audit and, as more recent documents obtained by CMD reveal infra, not much has changed.
- California's SEA, as of 2013, had captured "very little information about the status, progress, or fiscal responsibilities of the monitored schools."
- Additionally, the charter schools it was reviewing were chosen not based on whether the schools had problems or potential problems but "based on staff preference for geographic location."
- More than half of the staff the California SEA assigned to review charters "were unqualified to conduct onsite monitoring of charter schools" (e.g., no fiscal monitoring experience).
Similarly, email communication from 2014 between the Charter School Office at the New York State Education Department and WestEd - a company contracted by ED to monitor how states implement federal charter school grants - reveals that the problem of biased school selection is endemic. Faced with a an on-site audit, the NY state officials recommended that WestEd visit six schools, not based on any suspected problems there, but because they were "logistically friendly from a travel perspective." WestEd accepted this rationale.
In the case of closed charters the lack of financial controls for federal dollars was absurd, as exposed by the 2012 OIG audit:
- "In some cases, the closed schools received SEA grant funds without ever opening to students.
- The school files had "no follow-up documentation for any of the 12 closed schools reviewed."
- "No indication of what happened to any of the assets purchased with SEA grant funds."
- "California was able to provide the status for only 5 of the 12 closed schools' assets."
Amid concerns that ED still cannot account for where the money goes when schools close down, the OIG will complete a "Nationwide Audit of Closed Charter Schools" in 2015.
Florida also "could not provide a reliable universe of charter schools that received SEA grants nor an accurate list of charter schools that received onsite monitoring, desk audits, or closed during the grant cycle." And, like Arizona and California, the state had "[l]imited ability to ensure authorizers were approving and granting charters to quality charter schools and providing adequate monitoring to them after the opened."
- Florida "did not track how much SEA grant funds charter schools drew down and spent."
- "All funds received by charter schools were [reported as] drawn down . . . which made it impossible to track funds received and spent" nor could DOE "trace funds between the Florida SEA Charter School Division's data and the Florida SEA Grant Management and Comptroller data."
- Florida also could "not determine the SEA grant funds disbursed to closed charter schools."
- "None of the schools files had information showing what happened to any assets the school purchased with the SEA grant or if any . . . grant expenditures needed to be returned."
In sum, investigating charter school funds awarded to SEAs in Arizona, California, and Florida, and then sub-granted to individual charter schools, the OIG discovered a nearly total lack of accountability: states, as well as individual charter schools, were free to flout federal regulations without fear of losing federal grant money.
In response, ED held a training suggesting possible courses of action for SEA if no Accountability? How Overseers Let Charters Off the Hook; $3.3 Billion Spent:
