As the Obama administration asks Congress to increase funding for charter schools by almost 50 percent, a new report claims charter schools are spending billions of dollars with nearly no oversight, regulation, or accountability. The Center for Media and Democracy argues the federal government has spent more than $3 billion over the past two decades on the charter school industry, but there is no comprehensive database showing how these funds are spent and what results they produce. The new report analyzes materials obtained from open records requests regarding independent audits of how states interact with charter schools and their authorizers. It concludes that the anti-regulatory environment around charter schools coupled with their lack of financial transparency warrants a moratorium rather than increased charter funding.
Lisa Graves talking:
We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how much money has even been spent by the federal government fueling this industry. And it turned out the sum is $3.3 billion. And so we thought, with that much money at stake, there’d be tremendous controls on that spending. But our open records request showed time after time in which the federal government and the state governments have no idea how that money’s being spent. And that, in part, is due to the design of those schools. The design at the state level, driven by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s, policies and a number of sort of extreme policies represent a real hostility to government schools, to the idea of public schools and government oversight. And so what we saw in our records request was, time after time, in which no one really knew how much money was being spent by the schools, how much of those tax dollars was being spent on executive pay, how much money was being outsourced to for-profit corporations.
But we know that the $3.3 billion have fueled an industry that now devotes millions of dollars each year to lobbying for more charter schools, and devotes millions of dollars advertising on public airways for people to send their kids to charter schools, things that public schools don’t have a chance to do. Public schools don’t have the budget to advertise their benefits. Even though these things are called public charter schools, in many respects these operate in many instances for the private sector, for the benefit of CEO’s and Wall Street.
One of the things we’ve seen over and over again are promises by the Department of Education to do more to hold charter schools accountable. But what you see on the ground based on the audits, based on the Inspector General’s report, is a real lack of controls. You basically have the Department of Education’s charter operation sort of encouraging the states to do more. Meanwhile, you have audits that show that in many instances the states have no idea where the money was spent once it went into the charter school system. They don’t know how many kids were really served. They don’t know what happened to assets that were purchased through our tax dollars. There is a recent report last week from the Center for Popular Democracy that shows through looking through federal and state criminal fraud indictments, that there have been more than $200 million worth of fraud in the charter school industry. So this sort of circumstance calls for much greater control, much greater restraint rather than the 50 percent increase that the administration has called for for charter school funding.
The studies that we have looked at—and we’ve looked at a huge range of them—show that overall the charter schools don’t perform better than the public schools, the traditional public schools. And in fact, in the worst circumstances, the charter schools perform far worse. You also can see circumstances in which in the so-called virtual public schools, where the dropout rates are higher, the failure rates in essence are higher. And so while people can point to examples here and there of success or innovations, the overall studies seem to indicate that we’re siphoning a lot of money out of our public school system to these charters and some people are getting really rich off of it. Some of these for-profit corporations are making millions—in fact, hundreds of millions of dollars out of our tax dollars, and turning around to spend that money to lobby for more tax dollars, and spending that money to advertise for more kids to come through these systems, even though they’ve had record after record after record of failure, in many instances, by these charter schools. What we’ve also seen in one of the biggest studies is that more money goes to so-called administration in charter schools than to students directly. And that’s not a surprise when you see how these things are structured. Some of the charter schools basically outsource everything to the private sector. And then the private sector is not accountable to open records requests on Ohio, Indiana, other states, where people have tried to figure out where the money went. How much money went to executive pay, how much money went to these for-profit operations, you cannot even tell.
School boards are really the only way that we have democratic-controlled, direct democracy, over our schools. For ordinary public schools, if they have want to build a new gym, a new stadium, they have to go to taxpayers to get permission to expand the school system, to get taxes to expand. And also, people can elect who is on that school board. What we see through charters and the American Legislative Exchange Council’s agenda is an effort to circumvent local democratic control. To basically remove control of these schools, these charter schools, these often for-profit enterprises that are related to them. And that’s part of the design of them. When you look back at the history of this, what you see is the year after Brown v. Board of Education, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the schools had to desegregate, Milton Friedman, the Godfather of the right on the economics, someone who has fueled and supported the American Legislative Exchange Council before he passed away, Milton Friedman suggested that the solution to segregation was that there ought to be just purely private schools. They ought to abolish public schools, and people could choose all-white schools, all colored schools, and mixed schools.
What Milton Friedman was saying was basically the goal is to abolish the public schools. This is a radical, extreme goal and it had been his goal since at least 1955. That goal has been joined by numerous billionaire families in this country, including the Koch brothers. When David Koch ran for Vice President in 1980, one of his platforms was to abolish privatized the public schools. You heard it in the last presidential cycle, the Republican candidates were competing for which agencies to abolish. They wanted to do abolish the Department of Education. I’ve heard Grover Norquist and others joke about the need to get rid of public education. This is part of that agenda. It’s also fueled by the duBois family, from the Amway fortune, by the Walmart family, the Walmart Foundation. All of them have basically wrapped their agenda in these words of “choice” that Milton Friedman suggested. That it is about choice, when, in fact, the agenda is a — hostile to the idea the that there should be public schools. The radicals, basically, in the country, for a long time, including Fred Koch, who was David and Charles Koch’s father, believed that the idea of public schools was basically communist or socialist, which is really ridiculous. Public schools are one of the basic innovations of America that has made our country strong and great, to have universal public education for all kids.
But what we have seen through ALEC is this combination of ideological right-wingers and for-profit entities and their trade groups coming together to actually vote as equals, behind closed doors, with legislators from across the country, in this effort to privatize our schools, through vouchers, through expanding charters, through charters with very few controls, charters exempted from state and federal regulations, charters exempted from local regulations, charters exempted from control by local school boards. What happens at ALEC Education Task Force meetings — and that task force has been co-chaired in the past by for-profit corporations that benefit from the agenda, as well as nonprofits that outsource money to for-profits — those task force meetings, unbelievably, legislators actually vote as equals, on those model bills, with these special interest groups, before those bills are introduced in our state houses and state legislatures across the country. And that’s one of the reasons why we work to expose ALEC.
one of the most amazing bills I read after the whistleblower gave me the bills in 2011 that were approved through this corporate voting process of ALEC with legislators was a bill called The Virtual Public Schools Act. It and other ALEC bills basically require that these so-called virtual schools that would get vouchers or tax dollars and would be paid the same per-pupil amount as schools with bricks and mortar, air-conditioning, blackboards, lunch ladies, school buses, etc. The difference is profit. So you have a situation in which some of these vouchers are going to support operations that have far fewer costs. In part because some of these vouchers, at least in the virtual arena, are supporting schools or classrooms where there is one teacher for 50, 60, or hundreds of students. And in some states like Arizona, where they, through ALEC measures and related measures have basically stripped down teacher certification rules so that you do not have to have the traditional teacher certification, you can have uncertified teachers teaching in so-called virtual classrooms, hundreds of students, getting thousands per-pupil, and meanwhile, the corporations that are involved, like K12, are making millions of dollars. K12 has gone from a Wall Street firm that was created in part by the junk bond Michael Milken, his — that felon who was convicted for those junk bond schemes. He invested in K12. It’s gone from $200 million in revenue to nearly $1 billion in revenue. That’s almost entirely supported by federal and state tax dollars. And so there’s enormous profit to be made through these vouchers.
— source democracynow.org
Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Their new report is called, “New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money Is Wasted by Charter Schools.”