Thank you, President Biden, for tackling wasteful spending on charter schools!

Good afternoon everyone!

This article from the Progressive is talking about how President Biden is calling attention to how much taxpayers money is going to charter schools.

Here's an excerpt from that article.

President Joe Biden is taking steps to ensure that federal education funding will not be squandered on unneeded, mismanaged schools and the operators wanting to profit off of taxpayers.

But these efforts are being opposed by the powerful charter school lobby, which has enjoyed a privileged status in the U.S. Department of Education, granting charter operators exclusive access to an annually renewable grant program established under the government’s Charter School Program, or CSP.

Since its inception in 1994, CSP has awarded an estimated $4 billion to charter schools, charter industry-related advocacy and support groups, and state grant programs that fund charters. This year, CSP’s budget was $440 million. So where has all that money gone?

I emboldened a very good question; where has all that money gone?

This article answers that question. I will warn you some of those figures are triggering and infuriating.

Here's an excerpt of the Network for Public Education article.

Still Asleep at the Wheel continues our investigation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) that began with our March 2019 report, which you can find here. The Charter Schools Program has spent more than $4.1 billion dollars to fund new charter schools and to expand existing charter schools. In this report (which we revised in January of 2020), we document over a half-billion dollars that was wasted on defunct charter schools that had an active CSP grant from SY 2006-07 – SY 2013-14. Prior to 2006, the U.S. Department of Education did not require the states to report the names and status of the schools to which they gave CSP funds.

According to our analysis, 37% of the charter schools that were funded by CSP during those years either never opened (11%) or opened and then closed (26%). That figure is the result of our investigation of the status of nearly 5000 charter schools that received funds from CSP.

Schools that never opened, those on lists of closed schools, those that converted to district public schools, schools that lost their charter and were taken over by other operators or by the district and schools that abandoned their charter to merge with an-other charter were considered closed.  

I saved this tidbit on my Google drive.

It's incredibly flabbergasting just how much taxpayers money went to these defunct charter schools.

So thank you, President Biden and Vice President Harris, for tackling wasteful spending on these charter schools.

Thank you for reading.