Report Shows How Charter Schools Are in Business of ‘Privatization and Profiteering’

The explosion of charter schools in the U.S. is allowing individuals, corporations, and organizations to use public funds to secure their own financial gain and private profit—often at the expense of the common interest they claim to serve, a new policy brief from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder finds. Released Thursday by Rutgers Professor Bruce …

This Can’t Be Happening – 09.02.15

Prof. Francis Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois Law School with a long career as an anti-war activist and upholder of human rights. He has served as a counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and was a legal advisor to the Palestinian delegation during the Middle East Peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. Prof. Boyle has served on the board of directors of Amnesty International, and the Council for Responsible Genetics. He drafted the legislation for what became the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act in 1989 which was signed into law by the first Bush administration. He has been a strong opponent of the current Afghan and Iraq wars, and was an advocate for bringing international arrest warrants against George W Bush, Cheney and others in the Bush administration. Prof. Boyle has published numerous papers in law reviews and many books. His most recent publications are “Palestine, Palestinians and Internaitonal,” “Biowarfare and Terrorism” and “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” co-written with Phillip Berrigan.

Anita Chabria – California home school interest surges as parents look to sidestep vaccine law Home schooling in the US is steadily increasing and out west there’s now the added allure of being exempt from a law mandating vaccines for schoolkids

With the passage of a new law this summer mandating vaccines for schoolkids in California, home school advocates and organizations say they are seeing surging interest in off-campus education options that would exempt them from the requirement. “The word on the streets is that, yes, people are coming to home schooling,” said Sarah Ford, membership director for Sonoma County Homeschoolers …

A growing number of charter school teachers want to unionize, the American Prospect’s Rachel M. Cohen tells Salon – Elias Isquith

When you think of charter schools, there are probably a few people and concepts that come to mind: Michelle Rhee, “grit,” Bill Gates, Eva Moskowitz, KIPP, etc. And if you happen to think of teachers unions at some point during this education policy reverie, you’ll probably have them in the role they’re traditionally assigned by the media — as anti-charter …

Feds Awarded Colorado Charter Schools $46 Million Because of “Hiring and Firing” Rules By Jonas Persson

Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) awarded Colorado $46 million under the Charter Schools Program. Part of the reason the state landed the competitive grant was that charters are free to hire unlicensed teachers and then fire them at will, documents reviewed by CMD show. Designed to create and expand “high-quality” charter schools, the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year program …

Charter Schools Are Mired in Fraud and Failure By Paul Buchheit

The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by many recent studies. Even CREDO [3], which is part of a conservative think tank funded by the pro-privatization Walton Foundation, recently found that in comparison to traditional public schools “students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics.” Another recent CREDO study [4] of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher …

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion on Charter Schools, with Few Controls (Part 1) – Jonas Persson

“The waste of taxpayer money—none of us can feel good about,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education just last month. Yet, he is calling for a 48% increase in the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) quarter-billion-dollar-a-year ($253.2 million) program designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—an initiative repeatedly criticized by the …

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It’s Really Bought – Jonas Persson

The federal government has spent more than $3.3 billion over the past two decades creating and fueling the charter school industry, according to a new financial analysis and reporters’ guide by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). (The new guide can be downloaded below.) Despite the huge sums spent so far, the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools …

Fraud, Waste, and Lies: Charter Schools Cheating Communities Out of Millions of Dollars – Sarah Lazare

Accepting and soliciting bribes. Diverting public funds for personal profit. Lying about the number of students. These are just a few examples of the fraud and malfeasance committed by charter school officials—cheating communities out of millions dollars that were supposed to go to education, a new report finds. The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and …