Juan Gonzalez: No Accountability For How Charter Schools Spend Public Dollars

From the Daily News:

The federal government shelled out $3.3 billion over the past 20 years to launch new charter schools nationwide, yet failed to monitor how that money was used, a new report has found.

Federal spending to launch charter schools zoomed from a mere $4.5 million in 1995 to more than $253 million today, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group — with President Obama now asking Congress for a whopping increase to $375 million for next year.

And that’s on top of billions of dollars state governments spend for charter school operations.

Yet the new report concludes there is “no systematic public accounting for how the federal budget allocated to charters is actually being spent,” and “major gaps in the law allowing waste and fraud.”

The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t even bother to keep a public record of which charter schools get money from more than a half-dozen federal programs, said Lisa Graves, director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Her organization had to review thousands of pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests before it could coming up with an initial tally of federal charter school spending.

Hundreds of millions handed out to charter operators and entrepreneurs with no way to know how they're spending the money.

Again and again, we see that accountability is only for public schools.

Luster Coming Off Charter Schools In New Poll

The Quinnipiac poll released today is almost all good news if you're a public school student, parent or teacher.

New Yorkers support teachers unions over the governor to fix schools 55%-28%.

Cuomo has a 63% disapproval rating for his handling of education.

71%-25% oppose tying teacher pay to test scores.

65%-30% oppose tying teacher tenure to test scores.

And Cuomo's approval has dropped eight percentage points to his lowest score for a Q poll - 50% approval overall.

In December he was at 58% in the Q poll.

The one response where voters support Cuomo - lifting the charter cap:

Voters support 50 - 41 percent increasing the number of charter schools in the state.

And yet, given the money charter supporters have thrown into ads and rallies attacking public schools and promoting charter schools, it's not a positive sign for them that voters support lifting the charter cap by only nine percentage points.

I would have thought given the millions they have thrown into pro-charter and anti-public school PR in the last six months (Families For Excellent Schools, a pro-charter group, set a lobbying record in Albany last quarter), they would have higher support than this for lifting the cap.

That the numbers are this close suggests there are problems for charter proponents gonig forward.

Bloomberg Attacks Teachers In State Of The City Speech While NYPD Arrests Protesters Outside

The Mayor of the 1% continued his attacks on teachers in his State of the City speech today and his NYPD army continued their attacks on the First Amendment and the Constitution outside the venue where he gave that speech:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg put a strong focus on education Thursday in his 11th State of the City address.

Speaking at Gouverneur Morris High School in the Bronx, the mayor touted his administration's accomplishments in improving graduation rates and reducing crime in city schools.

But he says much more needs to be done, especially when it comes to attracting, rewarding and retaining top-notch educators.

"The education reforms we’ve pioneered over the past decade – no matter what the naysayers say – have been widely adopted by school systems across the nation, but this year we’ll be putting our foot on the gas and picking up the pace," said the mayor.

Bloomberg said he wants to retain the best educators by giving a $20,000 raise to those who are rated highly effective for two consecutive years.

As for teachers who don't make the grade at 33 struggling schools, the mayor wants to create "school-based committees'' to evaluate teachers.

It's a measure that would sidestep a dispute with the teachers union that is preventing the city from receiving $60 million in federal grants.

The mayor said he also wants to give parents more top-quality choices by opening 100 new schools over the next two years, including 50 charters.

...

While Bloomberg was largely met with applause Thursday, a group of protesters outside the auditorium were less thrilled.

The New York City Police Department says a total of 32 people were arrested.

All were charged with disorderly conduct.

There you have it.

Oppose Mayor 1% and his oligarchy and you'll end up in jail for disorderly conduct.

And there's a lot to oppose in this speech.

Bloomberg and his education reform backers know that there are only two more years left to finish the job of destroying the public education system in New York completely, so they've got to work overtime.

Close 25 schools.

Open 100 new ones.

Make 50 of those charter schools.

Give Eva Moskowitz and KIPP a bunch of new charters.

Place those charters in existing schools where they can act like a cancer and kill off the traditional public schools in those buildings.

Close more schools.

Open more charters.

Repeat.

Keep repeating.

And of course the one thing that stands in the way of this Education Reform Endgame is the teachers union contract.

So he's going to no longer abide by either that or state law.

He's just going to "turnaround" the SIG schools, fire half the staff and and bring in newbies to replace them.

Everybody gets evaluated by test scores and if you're found to be highly effective on that measure, you get $20,000 (no word on where that money comes from exactly - from the school itself where the teacher works? From the city? From Bloomberg himself?)

But if you're found ineffective, you're fired.

How like a Mamet play.

Only this is real life, these are real people and this evaluation system Bloomberg vows to use has real flaws.

Like a large margin of error.

Like huge swings in findings from year to year.

Nonetheless, Bloomberg is going to go through with this stuff and it is up to the UFT leadership and teachers and parents groups and community groups to push back on this charterizing and privatizing of the school system.

That's where the NYPD comes into the equation.

It's not a mistake that Bloomberg and Walcott are using riot police to quell protest of the mayor's school policies.

You can bet that as Bloomberg and Walcott put these policies in place and protest grows, they will use more and more police to quell dissent.

They want us to get the message - OBEY.

They've got lots of orange netting, pepper spray, police batons, horses and riot gear ready for the Shock and Awe Endgame coming in the next two years.

And they're going to use it.

All of it.

Get ready.

Charters Get Increase In Funding While City Schools Get Budget Cuts

Amazing:

New York City's charter schools are getting a windfall increase of 9% in funding this year, even as city public schools are forced to cope with cuts of more than 4%.

The unexpected hike for charters - from $12,443 a child to $13,527 - is the result of a legislative screw-up that Albany lawmakers failed to address before they went out of session last month.

The hike affects the entire state. That means urban districts, where most charters are located, are being forced to redirect scarce dollars they had earmarked for traditional public schools.

The city's Department of Education, for example, will need to shift more than $32 million from regular school programs to charter reimbursements.

For a typical charter school with 300 students, the increase will mean an extra $325,000.

For the first time, city charter schools - at least those that share space in public school buildings - could get more total funding per pupil from the DOE than regular public schools.

The legislative snafu was touched off in July, when former Gov. David Paterson vetoed an education spending bill that had passed the Assembly and Senate. The original bill continued a freeze on charter reimbursements, which the Legislature imposed the previous year as part of an overall public education freeze.

When Paterson struck down the spending bill, he also inadvertently lifted the charter freeze. Several months later, when the governor and the Legislature agreed on a new spending bill, they failed to restore it.

As late as December, Paterson tried to fix the problem but could not get the Senate, then under Democratic control, to agree.

Charter school lobbyists were working fiercely behind the scenes to make sure the governor didn't succeed. They believe state funding has been unfair to charters for years.

"Right now, we are on a two-year lag in our funding," said Kerri Lyon, of the New York City Charter Schools Center. "This increase only represents what public schools got in 2008-2009."

Of course, when charters were launched more than a decade ago, advocates promised they would do more with less and tap new sources of private and foundation funding.

One thing is clear, few school administrators in the state - even the unabashed charter advocates at DOE - expected the freeze to be lifted in the middle of a budget crisis.

"[We\} now owe our charter schools more money than we have to give," said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld.

Until now, the DOE has not uttered a word of public protest about the Legislature's action. When Bloomberg officials provided a budget update to City Council in November, for instance, they never mentioned the new $32 million bill the state was forcing them to pay.

The DOE "absolutely oppose[s] instituting a freeze on charter school funding," Zarin-Rosenfeld said. The agency would prefer that the state simply provide additional aid to pay the higher mandated fee.

Thanks to Albany's failure to act, charter schools get more, and regular public schools get less.

Where's Cuomo yelling about this increase in spending?

Where's Bloomberg yelling about it?

Oh, right - they're both on the charter bandwagon.

NY Times: Private Schools Dump Problem Students

I am shocked, shocked to find out that the NY Times is reporting that private schools throw problem children out of school rather than find ways to help them:

Thousands of parents trying to get their children into private schools are now busy mailing thank-you cards to admissions offices and biting their nails while waiting for word back.

But for a small number of parents who prevailed through this gantlet in the past, this time of year brings another kind of notice — that their child is on thin ice — as an even more painful process begins: the “counseling out” of students who are not succeeding.

Not discussed on schools’ tours or in their glossy pamphlets, counseling out is nonetheless a matter of practice at many private schools. Unlike the public school system, private schools are not obligated, and often not set up, to handle children having trouble keeping up.

“There are some kids that we’re not going to renew,” said Pamela J. Clarke, the head of the Trevor Day School in Manhattan, “either because they can’t do the work and we’re not serving them, or generally, that might be combined with behavior issues we can’t win.”

“That means he or she needs a different school,” Ms. Clarke said.

Schools do not publicize how many students they remove this way, but the number is generally a small portion of the enrollment. But some Web sites for parents have offered the suspicion that schools remove lagging students to protect another statistic that schools do publicize: their students’ admissions rates to top colleges.

Gee - massaging stats by getting rid of the "laggards" who will hurt the overall numbers.

That's just what the charter schools do!

Traditional public schools, on the other hand, actually try and help students even when they may be harming the overall stats of the schools:

Bennett Allen, now 28, said he was asked to leave the Dalton School a month before the end of eighth grade for disciplinary problems like buying and sharing cigarettes and for falling behind in some classes.

“I was very young, and I was testing the limits,” Mr. Allen said. At the Beacon School, the public school he ended up in, teachers took him more firmly under their wing, he said, and helped him channel his rambunctiousness. “Dalton was kind of like that parent who rather than play with their kid and encourage and grow their curiosity, brings it to the doctor and gets them Adderall instead,” he said.

Dalton, asked about its counseling-out practices, said only: “Together with families, Dalton works to serve the students’ best interests, so they may thrive and be successful.”

Mr. Allen acknowledged that he was better off having transferred to a school that met his needs, albeit in a less prestigious setting. “It was the biggest favor they ever did for me,” he said of Dalton’s move. He went on to Columbia University and is now an investigator for the United States Labor Department.

He says he bears no grudges toward the school. Well, maybe one. “I still get their letters asking for donations,” he said. “I’m not giving them a cent.”

The dishonesty of so many in the charter industry and the private school industry over "student dumping" and "counseling out" bothers me to no end.

That the media doesn't call them on the hypocrisy is the bigger problem, however.

Kudos to the Times for calling some private schools on this.

Now the Times should take a VERY close look at the Harlem Children's Zone, Harlem Village Academies, KIPP and others and expose how they massage their stats by dumping all the problems into traditional public schools (usually right around test time.)

NY Times: Chicago Charter Schools Run Deficits

President Accountability likes to point to both charter schools and the city of Chicago as the future for public education.

If that is so, it's going to be a future plagued with financial problems, financial improprieties, debt and scandal:

Even as the Obama administration promotes charter schools as a way to help raise the academic performance of the nation’s students, half of Chicago’s charter schools have been running deficits in recent years, an analysis of financial and budget documents shows, calling into question their financial viability.

On Monday, Chicago Public Schools released a bare-bones budget that included a cut of about 6 percent in per-pupil financing for charter schools — to $5,771 from $6,117 per pupil for elementary school students and to $7,213 from $7,647 per pupil for high school students. The cuts are a result of shrinking tax revenue and lagging support from the strapped state government. The city’s 71 charter schools, which enrolled 33,000 students last year and expect to enroll another 10,000 in the 2010-11 school year, stand to lose $15 million under the cuts.

It is difficult to compare the cuts with those that are being made at traditional schools because those schools do not receive money on a per-pupil basis, but district officials said they tried to make the amount of cuts comparable to those being made at traditional schools.

As a result, charters will become more dependent on private donors to provide the extras — more counselors, smaller classes, longer school days and up-to-date technology — that charter operators say set their schools apart from traditional public schools.

But even though Chicago’s charter schools brought in $21 million in private money from foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals in 2007 — the last year for which complete information is available — half have run an average of $700,000 in deficits in recent years, with some of the shortfalls reaching $4 million, according to an analysis of Chicago Public Schools data by Catalyst Chicago, an independent magazine on urban education.

The data showed that two-thirds of the schools could not cover core expenses, like salaries, facilities and overhead, without private money. A third needed private money to fill more than 20 percent of their budgets. A recent study by Ball State University found that Chicago’s charter schools depend far more on private financing than those in other big cities, including Boston, Miami and New York.

Robert Runcie, chief administrative officer for Chicago Public Schools, said the district needed to take a “serious look” at the fiscal health of charters and was developing a system for stricter oversight. Four Chicago charters have been shut down since the 1990s largely because of financial problems.

Charters DO need stricter oversight.

But President Accountability and Secretary Arne say if states try and "restrict innovation" at charters or regulate them unduly, they will risk losing federal education funds:

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, view charter schools as a way to spur innovation in public school systems that they say are too resistant to change. States that do not allow charters or restrict their replication jeopardize their chance to receive federal financing, Mr. Duncan said last year. “We want real autonomy for charters,” he said.

And "real autonomy" of course means little to no oversight,

Which for many charters means financial problems and/or financial improprieties by management.

The Charter School Scandals blog does a great job of collecting stories about all the charters plagued with financial problems, financial improprieties and other concerns.

Here are some I have chronicled here in the last few months:

Politically Connected, Scandal-Plagued NYC Charter Fires Teachers For Union Activity

Charter School Operates As Nightclub on Weekends

13 Philadelphia Charter Schools Cited For Excessive Board Salaries, Rampant Rents and Conflicts of Interest

Charter Schools Connected To Malcolm Smith, Michael Bloomberg Get Perks For Their Schools

And let's not forget the NY Times article from back in April that took a look at how for-profit operator Imagine Schools runs things:

Regulators in some states have found that Imagine has elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.

The arrangements, they say, allow Imagine to use public money with little oversight. “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions,” said Marc Dean Millot, publisher of the report K-12 Leads and a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, a trade association, now defunct, for the charter school movement.

“Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction,” he said.

And just does Imagine Schools profit from these arrangements?

Imagine is a private for-profit company that calls itself non-profit and runs schools with public money - making millions in the process.

Imagine charges exorbitant rates to its schools for "rent" - according to the Times article, a charter school in Nevada called 100 Academy pays 40% of the $3.6 million it receives from the state to Imagine Schools for rent.

That's an awful lot of rent money, isn't it?

In addition, they charge a fee to "manage" the school, leaving very little left over to actual run the school and educate the children.

How's that for leaving no for-profit charter school management company behind?

Gee - I wish I could declare myself a "non-profit," then run my business for-profit with little to no outside oversight.

Then I could charge rent and a management fee and take over 60% of the money I am given by the state to run my school just for rent and fees!

Gotta love education reform!

And as the NY Times reported earlier this week, financial scandal and impropriety is not just relegated to the charter school world. Almost all of the reforms being pushed by President Accountability and Secretary Arne are encouraging lots of and lots of problems.

Take the "school turnaround" program:

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school-turnaround experts as they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or the authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school-turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither the federal government nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools.

“This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans,” Dr. Crew said.

Indeed, the education reform movement is littered with carpetbaggers and charlatans smelling profit and little to no oversight or accountability from the people running things in Washington or the states.

Given all the problems we have ALREADY seen with charter schools and education reform groups, shouldn't the federal government encourage STRICTER oversight and accountability of them then we currently have?

The answer is of course yes - if the government officials running things actually cared about the problems.

But they do not.

Their agenda is to close traditional public schools, bust the unions, open the public school system to for-profit companies, and deprofessionalize the teacher corps into a bunch of McTeachers who work for five years before moving on to their "real jobs" (i.e., just like at Teach for America.)

They are succeeding.

But sooner or later, they will be exposed for being the carpetbaggers, charlatans and criminals they are.

That includes many (though not all) of the charter operators and education reform groups.

But it also means Bloomberg, Klein, Obama, Duncan, Rhee, Gates, et al.

You can lie and cheat and deceive for a long time and get away with it.

But eventually people catch on.

It happened to Bush after Katrina.

It will happen to them too.

Unfortunately there won't be much left of the public school system by then.

And that, of course, is ultimately the point.

Now There's A Bill I Can Support

The NY Post reports today in their phony WAR ON CHARTERS series that a bill has been introduced that would force charter schools to admit the same kinds of students that traditional public schools do:

Charter schools that don't enroll as many kids with disabilities or limited English as do traditional public schools would be shut down under a bill introduced by a top Democrat in the state Senate, The Post has learned.

State Senate Conference leader John Sampson (D-Brooklyn) has quietly introduced legislation that would revoke the state license of charter schools that don't meet a quota for enrolling special-needs kids over two consecutive years.

"A charter school must enroll the same or a greater percentage of students with disabilities and limited-English-proficient students when compared to the enrollment figures for such students in the school district in which the charter school is located," the bill states.

The bill -- which mirrors recommendations made by the United Federation of Teachers in January -- also has the backing of Assemblyman Alan Masiel (D-Brooklyn) and 19 other Assembly Democrats.

Just as charter operators do not want any outside independent oversight of the financing and management of schools, they also are opposed to any regulations regarding the type of students they enroll.

Because they know the advantage they have - enroll who they want, dump them when they no longer want them.