Doing Something Right

Perhaps the most corrupt part of our economy, and definitely the most corrupt part of the education industrial complex are charter schools.

They are more expensive, do not produce better results, are more segregated, and they are rife with fraud and self dealing.

The last two bits, segregation and corruption are why they are so popular.  The people who never got over Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, like the first one, and the banksters and other bunco artists love the second part, because creating criminogenic situations is how they make money.

The fact that this band of moral reprobates are upset that the Biden administration is proposing more oversight and accountability is a pretty good indication that the White House is doing the right thing:

New rules proposed by the Education Department to govern a federal grant program for charter schools are drawing bipartisan backlash and angering parents, who say the Biden administration is seeking to stymie schools that have fallen out of favor with many Democrats but maintain strong support among Black and Latino families.

The proposal would add requirements to the application process for grants from the federal Charter Schools Program, which has doled out billions of dollars over nearly 30 years to help open new charter schools or expand existing ones. It sets tighter restrictions on the schools’ relationships with for-profit entities and encourages more collaboration between charters and the districts they operate in.

The most controversial part of the plan would require grant applicants to prove demand and community support for their schools, examine the effect they would have on neighboring district-run schools, and demonstrate that they would not exacerbate segregation.

Proponents of the plan say it is aimed at increasing accountability for the schools, which promised to be engines of innovation and competition that improve district-run schools. But critics say the rules are onerous and out of touch with the reality of how many charter schools operate: autonomously, and as alternatives to traditional public schools.

Leaders across the charter school community have said the new requirements would quell the growth of such schools, which serve 3.6 million students — 69 percent of them students of color and two-thirds from low-income households — and have waiting lists of millions more.

Emphasis mine.  The reason that charter schools disproportionately serve poor and minorities is because one of the unspoken goals is to create a segregated school system. 

Individual schools are even more segregated, with schools tending to be nearly 100% minority or lily white.

The regulations with regard to for relations with for-profit groups are long overdue.  Between over-payment for curricula and educational materials, and excessive rents paid, billions of dollars are being looted from schools, frequently to the school founders, who own those same for-profit businesses.

………

As a candidate, Mr. Biden declared that he was not “a charter school fan,” which shocked many given that the schools had proliferated under the charter-friendly Obama administration. On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden vowed to cut off for-profit charters — less than 12 percent of the nation’s 7,700 charter schools — from federal funding.

Between Barack Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan, it's amazing that there were any public schools at all left in America.  They were more aggressive in privatizing education than the BW Bush administration.

Also, as I have noted, charter schools do not perform any better than the public alternatives.

The experiment has failed worse than the "New Math" did in the 1960s and 1970s. (Full disclosure: New Math worked for me)

………

The pledge reflected a longstanding goal of congressional Democrats — led by Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee — who in recent years have seized on loopholes that allowed for-profit management companies to tap federal funding, including from the Charter Schools Program, by contracting with nonprofits to essentially run their day-to-day operations.

The efforts came after a series of scandals in the sector, including a self-dealing scheme and other fraud, and research showing that students in for-profit charter schools performed worse academically than their peers in nonprofit charters.

This is literally a crackdown on fraud, and the response of the charter school industry is lobbying, basically rent seeking, which is an indication of their ineffectiveness and corruption.

The proposed rules deliver on Mr. Biden’s promise, requiring that charters receiving federal grants not enter into a contract with a for-profit entity to manage “substantial administrative control” of their operations. That provision has met little opposition, even among charter supporters.

Carol Corbett Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education and an ardent critic of charters, said the rules merely addressed the need for more accountability and transparency that should be required for any taxpayer-funded programs. The Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, has chronicled for-profit tactics, charter school scandals and how the federal grant program disbursed millions to schools that never opened or closed.

Ms. Burris’s organization joined dozens of others — including the National Education Association, which is the nation’s largest teachers union, and the Southern Poverty Law Center — in praising the department for “thoughtful and well-reasoned regulations.”

If you want to look at what the charter school supporters are up to:

………

For example, separate provisions that would prioritize applicants that partner with school systems and require applicants to secure a facility before receiving all their funding do not acknowledge the tensions that often exist between charters and district-run schools, said Amanda Johnson, the executive director of Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School in Clarksdale, Miss.

And now, quoting Paul Harvey, "The Rest of the Story."

Amanda Johnson was vociferously opposed to a Mississippi state requirement that board members who received state funding comply with state ethics rules. 

Complying with ethics rules is not that tough, it means that board members cannot steer funds to their companies or their employers companies, and that they need to disclose such conflicts.

Complying with those regulations should be, at most, a minor annoyance for anyone who wants to honestly run a charter school.