HOLDING CHARTER SCHOOLS ACCOUNTABLE
As the charter sector grows far faster than originally envisioned, the risks are high and growing, while the benefits are less clear.
Why Are Charters Exempt from Meaningful Oversight?
Charter enrollment has doubled three times since 2000. Today, there are an estimated 6,400 charter schools in the U.S. enrolling over 2.5 million students.[i] While charter schools were originally envisioned as small-scale, innovation incubators that encouraged risk-taking—and were therefore exempted from the majority of regulations governing the traditional public school system—the explosive growth of the industry has left the risks high and the benefits unclear.
Only minimal attention is paid to the question of management in charter schools, often leading to fraud and abuse. CPD exposed over $100 million public tax funds stolen in the charter school industry in our report, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.” The price of having inadequate charter regulations is too high, as charter mismanagement not only wastes millions of public tax payer dollars but also puts children in actual or potential danger. Without sufficient regulations to ensure true public accountability, incompetent or unethical individuals can inflict great harm on our communities.
The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) is working hand-in-hand with nearly 40 national and local partners to increase the level of charter school accountability. At the national level, CPD is working with a coalition including American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Opportunity to Learn Campaign (OTL) that comprise AROS – the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools. Together with AROS members, CPD is researching and sharing the effects of a lack of charter oversight for children and communities. CPD is also working to push for charter accountability legislation that will hold charter schools to the same standards of accountability as public schools.
[i] Source: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 2014 Report, Estimated Number of Public Charter Schools & Students, 2013-2014.www.publiccharters.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/New-and-Closed-Report-February-20141.pdf
Nearly 2,500 Bridges to Nowhere: Congress Considers Expanding Charter Program Despite Millions Wasted on Closed Schools
As both the House and the Senate consider separate bills that would reauthorize and expand the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year Charter Schools Program (CSP), the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has examined more than a decade of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as documentation from open records requests. The results are troubling.
Albany Must Keep the Charter Cap
Earlier this year, the New York City Council passed my resolution urging the state legislature to keep the cap on charter schools. That was nothing new: Council Members have long showed their opposition to raising the cap. But, with recent efforts by powerful special interests, including more than $13 million spent in lobbying and campaign ads, we need to remind New York why raising the cap is not only unnecessary, but also harmful to our public school children.
System Failure: Louisiana's Broken Charter School Law
In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina, post-storm changes to the state’s charter school law have dramatically grown the number of charter schools in the state. Since 2005, charter school enrollment in the state has grown 1,188 percent. Through this growth, the Louisiana Department of Education’s Recovery School District—created to facilitate state takeover of struggling schools—has become the first charter-only school district in the country, with other states lining up to copy its model. Louisiana taxpayers have invested heavily, paying billions of dollars to charters and state takeover schools since the storm, including over $831 million in the 2014/2015 school year alone.
Report slams Louisiana charter school oversight
The Times-Picayune - 05-08-2015 - Louisiana understaffs its charter schools oversight offices and, instead of proactively investigating these schools, relies on charters' own reports and whistleblowers to uncover problems, accord
Report: Millions of Dollars in Fraud, Waste Found in Charter School Sector
The Washington Post - April 28, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - A new report released on Tuesday details fraud and waste totaling more than $200 million of uncovered fraud and waste of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector, but says the total is impossible to know because there is not sufficient oversight over these schools. It calls on Congress to include safeguards in legislation being considered to succeed the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities To Waste, Fraud, And Abuse
Escalating Fraud Warrants Immediate Federal and State Action to Protect Public Dollars and Prevent Financial Mismanagement
Rigorous Review of Nashville Charter Schools Needed
The Tennessean - April 14, 2015, by Stephen Henry & Erick Hutch - Teachers are joining parents and local community groups to ask the Metro Nashville Public School Board to adopt tougher accountability and transparency standards to protect students and taxpayers. Here's why.
Time for a Moratorium on Charter Schools
Al Jazeera America - April 14, 2015, by Amy Dean - Charter schools are everywhere. Not long ago, these publicly funded but privately run institutions were a relative rarity. Those that existed served mostly as experimental academies whose successful lessons could be applied elsewhere in their host school districts. But in the last 15 years, swaths of the U.S. public education system have been turned over to charters. In fact, they are being used as a means to crush teachers’ unions and to pursue high-stakes testing.
