Rampant Violations of State Law by Charter Schools. What Can We Do?
This excellent article in nola.com by Danielle Dreilinger exposes how charter schools continue to flaunt state law on open meetings and continue to pay extravagant salaries to administrators who have no direct education responsibilities.
Read on to find out that violations of the open meetings law is just one of the many violations of state law and BESE policy regularly perpetrated by charter operators.
Do you remember when we were assured that one of the benefits of charter schools was that they would eliminate wasteful central office bureaucracies and put more of our tax monies in the classroom? Well now we find that a charter school provider administering only 6 schools requires the funding of two bureaucracies! School taxes are used to fund the Algiers Charter Association central office staff plus the RSD central office that oversees the same charters. Is it no wonder that after all the hoopla about charters claiming to improve student performance, three of Algiers charter schools are seeing serious declines in school performance scores. One high school went from a "B" to a "D" when the charter group merged two schools.In addition to wasting taxpayer dollars, the Algiers Charter Board found it convenient to violate the state open meetings law in neglecting to announce the move to fire and replace its top administrator. That position is paid more than most district superintendents who supervise many more times the number of students than the Algiers group.
Another example of misuse of school taxes is exemplified by the Louisiana online virtual school, Connections Academy. You may recall that State Superintendent John White phased out a highly cost effective and successful state-run virtual school to provide an automatic client base for two new for-profit virtual charter schools. Those schools are funded at 90% of the per pupil allocation of true public schools even though they have no buildings to build or maintain, no school lunches to provide, no libraries, no utilities, and much lower benefits for their teachers. This automatically frees up a huge windfall of funding for advertising and company profit. Even so, a recent study by The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) from Stanford University found that nationwide, privately run virtual charter schools are some of the worst performing schools in the country. Specifically the two online charters in Louisiana are among the worst performing in that low performing category. According to CREDO, on average students in the Louisiana virtual charters actually fell behind by a whole year of instruction in each year compared to the real public schools!
So what is Connections Academy doing to improve their student Louisiana Educator: Rampant Violations of State Law by Charter Schools. What Can We Do?: