Gonzalez: Feds failed to keep tabs on $3B in school aid
The federal government shelled out $3.3 billion over the past 20 years to launch new charter schools nationwide, yet failed to monitor how that money was used, a new report has found.
Federal spending to launch charter schools zoomed from a mere $4.5 million in 1995 to more than $253 million today, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group — with President Obama now asking Congress for a whopping increase to $375 million for next year.
And that’s on top of billions of dollars state governments spend for charter school operations.
Yet the new report concludes there is “no systematic public accounting for how the federal budget allocated to charters is actually being spent,” and “major gaps in the law allowing waste and fraud.”
The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t even bother to keep a public record of which charter schools get money from more than a half-dozen federal programs, said Lisa Graves, director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Her organization had to review thousands of pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests before it could coming up with an initial tally of federal charter school spending.
This happens even as cases of fraud, waste or mismanagement by charter school operators pop up all over the country.
The Department of Education’s own inspector general has warned about the lack of accountability.
This lack of oversight is a recipe for disaster for too many American school children and for taxpayers.
In a 2012 audit, the inspector general found federal officials “did not effectively oversee and monitor (state governments) and did not have an adequate process to ensure (they) effectively oversaw and monitored their subgrantees.”
The audit found, for example, that Florida “could not provide a reliable universe of charter schools . . . that received onsite monitoring, desk audits or closed during the grant cycle.”
In California, auditors reviewed 12 charter schools that closed after receiving federal startup funds — some even before opening their doors to any students. The state “had no followup documentation” for any of the schools, nor “any indication of what happened to any assets purchased” with federal funds, the audit concluded.
Even when monitoring of charter schools showed major deficiencies, federal and state officials were slow to seek improvements, the audit found.
“This lack of oversight is a recipe for disaster for too many American school children and for taxpayers, when large chunks of the money ends up either missing in action or in corporate charter school coffers,” this latest report warns.
So who in Washington is paying attention?Gonzalez: Feds failed to keep tabs on $3B in school aid - NY Daily News:
