Landmark Look at US Charter System Reveals Waste, Fraud, 'Ghost Schools'

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/21/landmark-look-us-charter-system-reveals-waste-fraud-ghost-schools

"What is even more troubling is how difficult it is to find essential information on how some charters have spent federal and state tax dollars, even as governments continue to increase funding for charters while slashing funds for traditional public schools," reads the report. "Unlike truly public schools that have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending of tax monies is too often a black hole."

The study attributes this lack of accountability "to the way the charter industry has been built by proponents, favoring 'flexibility' over rules."

"That flexibility has allowed an epidemic of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that would not be tolerated in public schools," CMD states, noting that charters "are often policed—if they are really policed at all—by charter proponents, both within government agencies and within private entities tasked with oversight."

In fact, that oversight is so spotty that CMD's investigation turned up dozens of "ghost" schools, where federal grants were awarded to charters that never even opened.


"The bottom-line is taxpayers know far too little about how much their federal tax dollars are being used to fund charters," said CMD executive director Lisa Graves on Wednesday, "and there is far too little information provided by states about how tax monies are being spent by charters or by for-profit firms they are tied to."

Noting that "neither the federal government nor the states require charters to publish that information on their websites and neither the federal or state governments we examined publish that information themselves," Graves continued: "Even aside from serious questions about academic performance by charters—especially online charters—the lack of real accountability remains a real problem for kids and families, as more and more people and corporations have sought to get a piece of the pie, a revenue stream from taxpayer money, to operate or assist charters."