The Black Box of charter school funding and the disastrous results
From PR Watch:
“The waste of taxpayer money—none of us can feel good about,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education just last month.Yet, he is calling for a 48% increase in the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) quarter-billion-dollar-a-year ($253.2 million) program designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—an initiative repeatedly criticized by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls.
In late 2014, CMD submitted a total of 33 Freedom of Information Act requests to ED for information about how taxpayer money was being spent and monitored since 2007, covering some of the expenditures under both Republican and Democratic presidencies and congresses.
Only a handful of those FOIA requests have been fully responded to by ED, but those responses shed new light on how widespread the problems are with how charter school money is being managed—or, more accurately, mismanaged and not adequately monitored by federal and state government oversight agencies.
Notably, ED could not provide the public with a current list of all the state authorizers of charters, and it has never published a record of which charter schools received federal tax dollars, because it does not track that information at all, apparently. Its charter school rep urged CMD to contact a private organization, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA)—which has no obligation to provide such information—to obtain a list of the authorizers approved to redirect American taxes.
But NACSA is a private association that only oversees around “half of the nation’s 6,000 charter schools.” It has no governmental authority over charter school authorizers in the states that operate largely outside of control by State Education Agencies (SEAs). And The Black Box of charter school funding and the disastrous results | Seattle Education:
