The US Department of Education Gave Out Nearly One-Billion Dollars to Charter Schools That Never Even Opened

By Matt Murray, NH Labor News

16 April 19

ecently the US Department of Education released their 2020 budget with a whopping 12% decrease in funding. Many in Congress were not pleased.

“The three education budgets from this administration have proposed the largest cuts to education funding in four decades. That’s since the department was created in 1979,” said Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who chairs the Appropriations Committee’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee, at a hearing on DeVos’ proposed 2020 budget. “Madam Secretary, I have to say, and maybe it’s offensive: Shame on you,” DeLauro said.

DeVos made headlines across the country when she proposed eliminating funding for the Special Olympics. DeVos also wanted to cut funding to the 21st Century Community Learning Center, “which supports after-school and summer programs for students, particularly those who come from low-income families or attend low-performing schools.“

In spite of all of the cuts to programs for children with special needs and programs specifically aimed to help low income families, DeVos is requesting an additional $500 million dollars to expand the charter school program.

The Department of Education’s Charter School Program (CHP) is rife with controversy as explained in a new report from Our Schools and the Network for Public Education.

The report, titled “Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,” found that up to $1 billion awarded by the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program—in more than 1,000 grants—was wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud.

The report, authored by Jeff Bryant, Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow for the Independent Media Institute’s Our Schools project, and Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, show that for years people have been scamming the federal government by collecting “seed money” to start a new charter schools only to disappear shortly after.

“Regardless of whether you favor charter schools or not, you should be outraged that precious education dollars from the federal government continue to be wasted on charter school experiments that have clearly gone awry,” wrote Bryant in an email to the NH Labor News. “Not only is the money wasted on schools that never open or quickly close, but children, families and communities are deceived into chasing after education opportunities that end up being mirages and drains of time and resources.

In the report, researchers found “that as many as one-third of all charter schools receiving CSP grants never opened, or opened and shut down. In fact, the failure rates for grant-awarded charter schools in California has reached nearly four in ten.” Some of the schools received their grant money before they even received their charters.

“In 2011, the Tikum Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School was approved for a three-year $600,000 grant from the [Non-State Educational Agencies] charter school fund. Yet, the New Jersey Commissioner of Education, the state’s only charter school authorizer, had rejected the school’s application three times due, in part, to misrepresentations that the school had made.”

“In 2015, the Innovative Schools Development Corporation received a three-year federal grant totaling $609,000 to open the Delaware STEM Academy charter school.

….In June 2016, Delaware’s Charter School Accountability Committee and the State Secretary of Education both recommended that the school’s charter be revoked two months ahead of its planned opening, due to low enrollment of just 30 students and uncertain funding due to an over reliance on external grants.”

The report focused on 7 key areas of malfeasance in the Charter School Program:

1. Hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been awarded to charter schools that never opened or opened and then shut down. In some cases, schools have received federal funding even before securing their charter.


2. The CSP’s grant approval process appears to be based on the application alone, with no attempt to verify the information presented. Schools have been approved for grants despite serious concerns noted by reviewers.


3. Grants have been awarded to charter schools that establish barriers to enrollment, discouraging or denying access to certain students.


4. Recommendations by the Office of the Inspector General have been largely ignored or not sufficiently addressed.


5. The department does not conduct sufficient oversight of grants to State Entities or State Education Agencies, despite repeated indications that the states are failing to monitor outcomes or offer full transparency on their subgrants.


6. The CSP’s grants to charter management organizations are beset with problems including conflicts of interest and profiteering.


7. Under the current administration, while Congressional funding for the CSP rises, the quality of the applications and awardees has further declined.

Before any more of our tax dollars are given away in this charter school scam, Congress must take action to address these concerns.

“We cannot afford to continue to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a program whose stewards are clearly asleep at the wheel.”

“Citizens in the Granite State should tell their representatives in Congress to reject DeVos’s proposal to increase funding for the federal government’s charter school program and demand the Department of Education audit the program to account for the how money has been misspent and to claw back misspent funds,” added Bryant.

Bryant also pointed out that living in New Hampshire also provides us with a unique opportunity that people other states do not have.

“New Hampshire Democrats should question presidential hopefuls who visit the state about their views of charter schools and whether or not these schools should be as transparent and accountable as our public schools are.”

You can read and download the entire report from the Network for Public Education, here.

The Toxic Lure of “Guns and Butter”

By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

15 April 19

he current political brawl over next year’s budget is highly significant. With Democrats in a House majority for the first time in eight years, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and most other party leaders continue to support even more largesse for the Pentagon. But many progressive congressmembers are challenging the wisdom of deference to the military-industrial complex – and, so far, they’ve been able to stall the leadership’s bill that includes a $17 billion hike in military spending for 2020.

An ostensible solution is on the horizon. More funds for domestic programs could be a quid pro quo for the military increases. In other words: more guns and more butter.

“Guns and butter” is a phrase that gained wide currency during escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. Then, as now, many Democrats made political peace with vast increases in military spending on the theory that social programs at home could also gain strength.

It was a contention that Martin Luther King Jr. emphatically rejected. “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer,” he pointed out. “We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”

But today many Democrats in Congress evade such facts of life. They want to proceed as though continuing to bestow humongous budgets on the Pentagon is compatible with fortifying the kind of domestic spending that they claim to fervently desire.

Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill have reflexively promoted militarism that is out of step with the party’s base. In early 2018, after President Trump called for a huge 11 percent increase over two years for the already-bloated military budget, Pelosi declared in an email to House Democrats: “In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.” Meanwhile, the office of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer proudly announced: “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request.”

What set the stage for the latest funding battle in the House was a Budget Committee vote that approved the new measure with the $17 billion military boost. It squeaked through the committee on April 3 with a surprising pivotal “yes” vote from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who is now among the lawmakers pushing to amend the bill on the House floor to add $33 billion in domestic spending for each of the next two years.

As Common Dreams reported last week, progressives in the House “are demanding boosts in domestic social spending in line with the Pentagon’s budget increase.” But raising domestic spending in tandem with military spending is no solution, any more than spewing vastly more carcinogenic poisons into the environment would be offset by building more hospitals.

Rep. Ro Khanna and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, who both voted against the budget bill in committee, have said they won’t vote for it on the House floor. In Khanna’s words, “You can’t oppose endless wars and then vote to fund them.” Jayapal said: “We need to prioritize our communities, not our military spending. Progressives aren’t backing down from this fight.”

The New York Times described the intra-party disagreement as “an ideological gap between upstart progressives flexing their muscles and more moderate members clinging to their Republican-leaning seats.” But that description bypassed how the most powerful commitment to escalation of military spending comes from Democratic leaders representing deep blue districts – in Pelosi’s case, San Francisco. Merely backing a budget that’s not as bad as Trump’s offering is a craven and immoral approach.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ staff director, Warren Gunnels, responded cogently days ago when he tweeted: “How can we keep giving more money to the Pentagon than it needs when 40 million live in poverty, 34 million have no health insurance, half of older Americans have no retirement savings, and 140 million can’t afford basic needs without going into debt? This is insanity.”

Yet most top Democrats keep promoting the guns-and-butter fantasy while aiding and abetting what Dr. King called “the madness of militarism.”

Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.