Making public education more accountable has been the solemn pledge of government officials for years, including the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Yet that same level of accountability doesn't seem to apply to the fastest growing sector of K-12 education – charter schools.
That has to stop, says a coalition of labor, community, and public education advocacy organizations. The coalition, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, has written a letter to Secretary Duncan raising concerns about his department's continued funding of charter schools – $1.7 billion in grants since 2009, according to an article in The Washington Post– while providing little to no oversight over what schools did with the money.
The office overseeing the federal outlays doesn't keep a full record of the individual schools that received the money, the letter states, and doesn't track the efforts of state agencies monitoring the schools.
Some of the charter schools receiving the funds never even opened and didn't account for what happened to unused assets purchased with the money.
Given this negligence, AROS questions the department's recent proposal calling for a 48 percent increase in funding for charter schools and repeats a previous demand for a moratorium on federal funding for public charter schools.