Report: Ed Department gave nearly a billion to charter schools that never opened

NH Labor News -The Department of Education’s Charter School Program 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.