As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent | Democracy Now!

As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent | Democracy Now!:

As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent

 As the Obama administration asks Congress to increase funding for charter schools by almost 50 percent, a new report claims charter schools are spending billions of dollars with nearly no oversight, regulation, or accountability. The Center for Media and Democracy argues the federal government has spent more than $3 billion over the past two decades on the charter school industry, but there is no comprehensive database showing how these funds are spent and what results they produce. The new report analyzes materials obtained from open records requests regarding independent audits of how states interact with charter schools and their authorizers. It concludes that the anti-regulatory environment around charter schools coupled with their lack of financial transparency warrants a moratorium rather than increased charter funding. We are joined by Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. The group’s new report is "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money Is Wasted by Charter Schools."

TRANSCRIPT

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well with the Obama administration asking Congress to increase funding for charter schools by almost 50 percent, we turn to a major new report that claims charter schools are already spending billions of dollars of federal money with nearly no oversight, regulation, or accountability. The report was released by the Center for Media and Democracy and it’s called, "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money is Wasted by Charter Schools." According to the report, the federal government has spent more than $3 billion over the past two decades on the charter school industry, but there is no comprehensive database showing how those funds are spent and what results they produce.

AMY GOODMAN: The new report analyzes materials obtained from open records requests regarding independent audits of how states interact with charter schools and their authorizers. It concludes that the anti-regulatory environment around charter schools, coupled with their lack of financial transparency, warrants a moratorium, rather than increased charter funding. Well for more, we go to Denver, Colorado, to Denver Open Media, where we’re joined by Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Their new report is called, "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money is Wasted by Charter Schools." Lisa, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out the key findings of your report.

LISA GRAVES: Thank you so much. We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how much money has even been spent by the federal government fueling this industry. And it turned out the sum is $3.3 billion. And so we thought, with that much money at stake, there’d be tremendous controls on that spending. But our open records request showed time after time in which the federal government and the state governments have no idea how that money’s being spent. And that, in part, is due to the design of those schools. The design at the state level, driven by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s, policies and a number of sort of extreme policies represent a real hostility to government schools, to the idea of public schools and government oversight. And so what we saw in our records request was, time after time, in which no one really knew how much money was being spent by the schools, how much of those tax dollars was being spent on executive pay, how much money was being outsourced to for-profit corporations.As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent | Democracy Now!:

Big Education Ape: Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought | PR Watch http://bit.ly/1JUhhDp

Big Education Ape: Gonzalez: Feds failed to keep tabs on $3B in school aid to launch new charter schools - NY Daily... http://bit.ly/1cdxB3E

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