Teacher Says Charter Schools Should Get Zero Federal Dollars - LA Progressive

Teacher Says Charter Schools Should Get Zero Federal Dollars - LA Progressive

Teacher Says Charter Schools Should Get Zero Federal Dollars

The U.S. Department of Education’s Charter School Program (CSP) wasted more than a billion dollars on charter schools that never opened or opened for a very brief period before closing, according to two reports published by the Network for Public Education in 2019. CSP has provided close to $4 billion in seed funding to charter schools since 1995, but lax oversight of funds has resulted in a 37 percent national failure rate. The three states that wasted the most funds on charter schools are Louisiana (48 percent failure rate, $27 million lost), Florida (37 percent failure rate, $34 million lost), and, with the “most astounding loss,” California (37 percent failure rate, nearly $102 million lost).

As a former charter school teacher in Los Angeles, I saw federal dollars being wasted on dysfunctional schools that never should have been started in the first place. Westchester Secondary Charter School, the school where I taught in the 2016-2017 academic year, was launched with a $375,000 CSP grant. It opened in September 2013 and closed in June 2017. The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) cited several concerns in its detailed rejection of the school’s charter renewal petition including an “unsound educational program,” a failure to “meet its enrollment projections,” “the lack of appropriate school facilities,” “issues related to special education,” and a discipline program that may cause “physical, educational, or psychological harm to the affected pupils.”

While I was teaching at Westchester Secondary Charter School, City High School—a charter that received a $575,000 CSP grant and was also struggling with facility and enrollment issues—closed “a month into its second year,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Soon after, in September 2016, Westchester Secondary Charter School took in a few of its 116 students, and my colleagues and I embarked on the challenging task of catching them up when they’d already missed a month CONTINUE READING: Teacher Says Charter Schools Should Get Zero Federal Dollars - LA Progressive

NYC Public School Parents: More wasteful DOE spending on busing, devices, and possibly School Safety Agents to come

NYC Public School Parents: More wasteful DOE spending on busing, devices, and possibly School Safety Agents to come

More wasteful DOE spending on busing, devices, and possibly School Safety Agents to come

The Panel for Educational Policy will vote on a new batch of DOE contracts this Wed. on February 24. As an elected official wrote me over the weekend, “Am looking at PEP Contracts – some are questionable.”  I replied, “Always! Which ones now?”

Here are some:  There are retroactive contracts totaling more than $58 million for school busing, mostly for the month of January, except for a Reliant bus contract for Jan. 15 through Feb. 14 for $14.6M. 

This is despite the fact that DOE created a separate non-profit company (with less transparency) that would acquire Reliant and operate its 835 routes from January to June of this year, for a total of $59 million, according to  the contracts approved at the Dec. 4, 2020 PEP meeting. 

This new proposed contract document explains:

This emergency has risen as a result of the need to provide pupil transportation during the 2020-2021 school-year, while the DOE completes individual negotiations with Reliant for their pupil transportation services. These transportation services are necessary for the preservation of the health, safety, and general welfare of students and the school system as a whole. As such, declarations of Emergency Procurement and Emergency Implementation of contracts by the Senior Executive Director for the Division of Contracts and Purchasing and the Chancellor, respectively, were made (see attached).

Unexplained is what has caused the unanticipated extension of these negotiations with Reliant, and whether they relate to the  $142M in unpaid pension costs that the DOE insisted to the PEP and reporters they wouldn’t have to cover, but the union insisted they would. 

The proposed contract list also includes paying IBM another $5.12M to “stage” and send 55,000 new iPads, similar to the process from last year, when they paid IBM a total of CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: More wasteful DOE spending on busing, devices, and possibly School Safety Agents to come