Gage Skidmore
According to a new report, the U.S. Department of Education has spent up to $1 billion on charter schools that never opened, or ended up closing for mismanagement and fraud.
A hearing in the House of Representatives last week made headlines when Democratic members grilled U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about her budget proposing huge cuts to programs—including Special Olympics, after-school programs, and special education—while calling for a double-digit increase for the department’s charter school grant program.
Referring to a new report, which I co-authored with Network for Public Education Executive Director Carol Burris, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, told DeVos in the hearing, “This budget is full of cruel cuts to education programs, and it baffles me that you found room for a $60 million increase to the Charter School Program . . . especially when you consider recent reports of waste and abuse in the program.”
The report, titled “Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,” made big waves for a reason. It found that up to $1 billion awarded by the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program—in more than 1,000 grants—was wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud.
And while the report’s major findings are eye-popping, some of the details are perhaps even more disturbing:
- A Seattle private school that converted to a charter in order to obtain grant money only to flip back to a private school after the grant ran out a short time later, leaving ninety economically disadvantaged children scrambling to find a new school mid-year.
- Two Delaware charter schools were started by the same management firm that won multi-year grants two years apart from each other. One opened its doors but closed midyear, the second never opened at all.
- A Hawaii charter that won a grant in 2016 has yet to open, find a location, or complete the authorization process. Its website continues to say it is accepting new enrollees, but when I emailed the school to enquire how many students had enrolled, I did not receive a reply.
Some of the worst financial malfeasance occurred when federal grants went to state education agencies that turned the award money over to individual charters. Here again, hundreds of the schools that received grant money never opened or opened then quickly closed.
Some of the worst financial malfeasance occurred when federal grants went to state education agencies that turned the award money over to individual charters.
In California, the state with the most charter schools, between 2004 and 2014, 306 schools that received direct or indirect federal funding closed or never opened, 111 closed within a year, and 75 never opened at all—a 39 percent failure rate. The cost to taxpayers was more than $108 million.
Of the charter schools in Michigan that received federal money, at least twenty-seven never opened. Many more opened and quickly closed, and of the schools that managed to stay open, we found troubling results, including a grant recipient that received $110,000 in federal funds but is actually a Baptist Church.
In Idaho, federal grants totaling more than $21.6 million included more than $2.3 million going to schools that never opened or closed after brief periods of service. A state commission imposed a range of academic sanctions on thirteen of the twenty-five charter schools up for renewal in the state. Of those thirteen schools, nine had received federal grants.
Many of the problems we documented owe to the slipshod process the Charter Schools Program uses to review grant applications. Our review often found contradictions between the information provided by applicants and publicly available data. Numerous applications cherry-picked or massaged achievement and/or demographic data that reviewers never bothered to fact-check. And very few applicants bothered to provide evidence their schools were actually needed by the surrounding community.
The role of the grant application reviewers is also shrouded in mystery. Reviewers are not publicly identified, the primary criterion for a reviewer is having “a solid understanding of the ‘charter school movement,’” and reviewers are instructed to score each application “based only on information included in the particular application.”
DeVos praised the planned increase for the charter grant program as a step forward for “education freedom.”
The Department of Education’s own Office of the Inspector General has conducted several audits of the Charter Schools Program, and has warned the department that federal funds going to charter schools are at risk. The OIG report noted that DeVos’s department “did not consider charter school closures a risk to federal funds.” In other words, she denies the problem even exists.
Defending against scathing criticisms from Representative DeLauro and the other Democrats at the hearing, DeVos acknowledged that waste and fraud in the charter grant program had been around for “some time.” But when asked by the members of the House subcommittee what her department was doing to retrieve some of the money, she couldn’t provide a response.
In the meantime, the 13.6 percent boost DeVos and Trump want to give to charters in their current Department of Education budget proposal, is a sharp contrast to the enormous $8.5 billion they propose to cut to the rest of the federal government’s education outlays.
DeVos praised the planned increase for the charter grant program as a step forward for “education freedom.” But our report reveals that increasing federal funds for this program would likely perpetuate more fraud.
What’s needed instead is a moratorium on any new grants coming from the federal Charter Schools Program and a thorough audit of money that has been spent. DeVos needs to account for her reckless administration of this program, and be held responsible.