Lavish Lobbying Ensures that Washington, D.C. Charter Schools Remain Unregulated
Rachel M. Cohen is a fine investigative reporter, whose stories have appeared in The American Prospect, The Intercept, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, The Nation, and a number of other publications. Her most recent investigation explores a topic that is much in the news: the seeming impossibility of regulating charter schools more than two decades after enabling legislation across state legislatures—and Congressional legislation for Washington, D.C.—created them as an experiment in innovation.
Government oversight of charter schools makes sense to many of us. Charter schools are a form of government contracting. They are publicly funded and privately operated. As publicly funded institutions, they ought to be responsible for adhering to the laws that protect their students’ rights. And surely, charter schools ought to be regulated to protect the investment of tax dollars. But in Washington, D.C., as in many other places, charter school operators and advocates continue to push hard against even modest public oversight.
For the Washington City Paper, Cohen investigates the all the forces that have prevented public oversight of charter schools in the nation’s capital—a city where Congress is directly involved in local school district affairs: “When (Bill) Clinton signed the School Reform Act into law in the spring of 1996, it was over the strong objection of D.C.’s non-voting Congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who protested Congress’ interference in the city’s local affairs.” “In 2001, D.C.’s inspector general and its chief financial officer, Charles Maddox and Natwar Gandhi, respectively, testified before Congress asking for greater authority to oversee local charter school finances. The following year Gandhi turned to the (D.C.) Council to ask for legislative authority over the schools, saying that all charters should be assessed by a single auditing firm, selected by the D.C. government.”
Local leaders demanded additional oversight of charter schools in the District of Columbia for CONTINUE READING: Lavish Lobbying Ensures that Washington, D.C. Charter Schools Remain Unregulated | janresseger
