An investigation into federal funding for charter schools revealed that American taxpayers have been kept in the dark about how their money is being used to bolster education profiteers.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a report on Wednesday highlighting transparency woes related to more than three billion dollars spent at the federal level since 1995 to proliferate charter schools around the nation.
According to CMD, the Department of Education has very little information on how much money it has granted to charter school organizations through state governments, and which charter schools have received funding.
CMD estimated that the federal government has doled out $3.7 billion on charter school over the last twenty years, with the bulk of that funding coming from “Charter Schools Program State Educational Agencies” grants. That does not include money spent at a state level on privately-run schools.
“What has happened is that the federal government has passed off the primary responsibility of determining which charters are eligible to receive funds to the states. And states have pawned off that responsibility to authorizers, some of which are public entities, like school districts, while others are purely private,” the report noted.
“As a consequence, the public does not know how much federal seed money each charter has received and does not know how it has really been spent—this contrasts with public schools whose spending is governed by school boards accountable for public budgets and records,” CMD stated.
After several attempts to acquire the federal data through open records requests, CMD said that the Department of Education finally turned over a partial list of charter schools that had received federal funding in recent years, which the group published for the first time ever in its report.
“For years, no reporters or citizens could readily examine where their federal tax dollars had been spent on charters, which have a higher failure rate than public schools and have been plagued by numerous fraud indictments of charter school operators,” CMD added.
Read the entirety of CMD’s “Charter School Black Hole” report here.
