Juan Gonzalez: Feds did not keep track of over 3 billion going to charter schools.

[madfloridian]

Posted in General Discussion for more visibility. Crossposting here.

Juan Gonzalez: Feds failed to keep tabs on $3B in aid doled out to charter schools

The federal government shelled out $3.3 billion over the past 20 years to launch new charter schools nationwide, yet failed to monitor how that money was used, a new report has found.

Federal spending to launch charter schools zoomed from a mere $4.5 million in 1995 to more than $253 million today, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group — with President Obama now asking Congress for a whopping increase to $375 million for next year.

And that’s on top of billions of dollars state governments spend for charter school operations.

Yet the new report concludes there is “no systematic public accounting for how the federal budget allocated to charters is actually being spent,” and “major gaps in the law allowing waste and fraud.”

.....The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t even bother to keep a public record of which charter schools get money from more than a half-dozen federal programs, said Lisa Graves, director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Her organization had to review thousands of pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests before it could coming up with an initial tally of federal charter school spending.

This is money coming out of the public school coffers. The public school system is losing major resources, and yet more and more is being required of them.

[merrily]

1. Criminentles! Thanks, madfloridian.

Public school tax money, collected from us by force of law, going to private pockets.

Why should anyone keep track?

[msongs]

2. the primary purpose of charter schools is fleecing taxpayers nt

[Scuba]

3. The primary purpose of charter schools is breaking the teachers union. Fleecing taxpayers and ...

... dumbing down America are tied for second.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Well, of course not ! That was the whole point !

The money was supposed to disappear quietly.

I'll bet the folks at the "Center for Media and Democracy" don't have any billionaire friends.

[FloriTexan]

5. Kick!

[Starry Messenger]

6. And naturally all the people who scream about teacher raises are silent on this.

[madfloridian]

7. I will never understand why people have cared so little about the loss of public schools.