Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools - The Washington Post

Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools - The Washington Post

Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools

No, this isn’t about Wednesday night’s debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, which, incidentally, did not have a single substantive discussion about education. The moderators didn’t ask a single question about it, but then again, that’s happened in most of the Democratic debates too this year.

This post is about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (Mass.) recently announced her preK-12 school reform plan, or, rather, the reaction to it. Last month, candidate Warren unveiled her reform, which calls for spending hundreds of billions of dollars to improve public schools from prekindergarten through 12th grade — and getting America’s wealthiest individuals to pay for it.

Elizabeth Warren calls for billions of new dollars to reform pre-K-12 schools and fight privatization. Here’s how she plans to pay for it.

One of the features in that plan is ending federal funding for the U.S. Charter Schools Program. The program provides money to states to create new charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. In recent years, the charter movement, which once enjoyed bipartisan support, has become controversial, with many Democrats pulling back from it even as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made expanding school “choice” her top priority.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Democratic presidential candidate, also included the same feature in his expansive K-12 plan, which was released well before Warren’s. But she’s the one who became the target of tough criticism, which I wrote about here, at a time when she was rising in the polls and leading some of them.

This post looks at the problem with some of the criticism, which is being increasingly repeated as truth. It was written by Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a professor of education policy there. He was among the researchers consulted by Warren’s policy team as they drew up her education plan — but they had no involvement in, or awareness of, this commentary.

Carol Burris is the executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education, an advocacy group. A former award-winning school principal, she was the lead author of “Asleep at the Wheel,” the report about fraud in the charter school sector that was cited in Warren’s plan.

A report that detailed up to $1 billion in wasted federal funds on bad charter schools may have underestimated the problem

By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) education plan was released a few weeks ago, one part drew strident criticism from some vested interests: her proposal to end the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). Since 1995, that program has disbursed over $4.1 billion taxpayer dollars to people eager to open new charter schools or expand existing charter schools.

A shocking amount of this money was squandered, according a 2019 report released by the nonprofit advocacy group, the Network for Public Education. In her plan, Warren cites that report, saying that “the federal government has wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never even opened, or opened and then closed because of mismanagement and other reasons."

The pushback to Warren from advocates of charter schools was immediate and intense. A flurry of CONTINUE READING: Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools - The Washington Post