FL gave $25 million to pro-profit charter schools for non-attending students in 2006-2007

[madfloridian]

Last edited Mon Feb 10, 2014, 10:18 AM - Edit history (2)

Charter Ghost Schools: Money for Nothing

Crackdowns on charter school operators who collect big bucks for students that don’t show up for classes are few and far between. One charter school operator in Philadelphia, Curtis Andrews, was charged with wire fraud for taking $200,000 for students who no longer attended. Eventually he was convicted, received 33 months in prison and had to return the money.

But these cases are the exceptions. In another, more sensational case, an operator from Texas, Donald L. Jones, received $2.9 million for absent students. Yet despite having been convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bank fraud, and other offenses related to a mortgage fraud scheme involving forty properties and more than seventy loans, he has never been charged in connection with his charter school activities.

Recent investigations have found that among charter schools nationwide, few operators are charged with anything when they are caught receiving funds for imaginary attendance numbers, and they simply have to return the cash. All too often, the taxpayers are left footing the bill. For example, the state of Florida doled out $25 million to for-profit charter schools during the 2006-2007 school year for nearly 5,125 students who never attended school.


...And then there is Ohio. Ohio has some of the worst attendance records for its charter “dropout recovery schools” in the nation. In the 2006-2007 school year, reporters for the Scripps Howard News Service, found that Ohio paid $29.9 million to 47 of these recovery schools for students who never attended. A Life Skills Center campus in Cincinnati held the record in the 2004-2005 school year, where 64% of its enrolled students never showed up for class. The dropout recovery movement, an Ohio concept started in 1998, costs the state around $30 million or more a year for students who never attend school. “It’s a cash cow! We all used to sit around and joke about that,” said Mark Elliott, former principal of the record holding Life Skills Center of Cincinnati. “I spent less than $1 million on a $3 million operation. What the hell are they (executives at his former company) doing with the other $2 million?”

Florida has had so many situations like this in its unregulated charter school system.

Examples of serious charter school problems in FL. More oversight needed.

This is only one example.

BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. -Two weeks ago, College Bound Academy's 60 students found the newly opened charter school had closed, leaving them scrambling to find new schools.
When Thompson applied to start the charter school, he projected that he'd have 242 students, and received taxpayers' money.

...Another, Ivy Academy, closed this month after accepting nearly $500,000 in taxpayers' money, leaving behind a trail of bad debts and a criminal investigation. The owner of Ivy Academy hasn't returned Local 10's calls for comment.

..."We never get the money back, so it's a loss to the kids that they're not being educated, it's a loss and misuse of taxpayers' dollars," said Osgood. "They just get away with just strong-arm robbery in a sense with what they're doing in the charter schools."

Each charter school gets public taxpayer money. When the schools are closed for academic or financial reasons, that money is usually gone from the schools forever. If they take taxpayer money and fail academically or are closed because of financial shady dealings....someone must see that the money is returned to the taxpayers.

[madfloridian]

1. Charter experiment ‘spinning out of control’ in Durham County NC

Charter experiment ‘spinning out of control’ in Durham County

What is happening in Durham County, N.C., is exactly what charter school critics have long feared: the destabilization of the traditional district system.

Ned Barnett, the editorial page editor of the News & Observer wrote in this piece that the spread of charter schools in the county since the state legislature lifted the cap on new charters in 2011 is out of control, serving to “undermine” the traditional system that educates most of the region’s children — without the kind of accountability that school reformers say they love.

When the charter movement began years ago, supporters said these schools would serve as “laboratories” for best practices from which traditional schools could learn. In fact, there is pretty much nothing that successful charter schools do that traditional schools haven’t done, except, perhaps, routinely counsel out students. Barnett said that “the experiment is spinning out of control.”

Of course a new experiment with big money behind will spin out of control when no one is watching.

The growing number of charter schools is undoing the hard-won accomplishment of 1992 when the county overcame a history of racial tensions to combine the city school system and the county school system into the Durham Public Schools. The charters’ effect on the district schools has been a loss of middle-class children of both races and a concentration of poor and minority students in the district schools.

[jsr]

2. Recommend

[madfloridian]

4. Thanks.

So much.

[Wounded Bear]

3. K & R..nt

[madfloridian]

5. ......

Hard to get recs so appreciated a lot. Education posts tend to drop too quickly.

[liberal_at_heart]

6. K&R

[LWolf]

7. Our local "public"

charter school, fiercely loved and supported by our F****** school board, recruits students between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next with region-wide mailers that, among other things, promise lap tops to all students, flexible scheduling, college credit for classes, etc., etc..

They get a massive # of enrollments to start the year. Of course, in their system, students must be self-starting, independently motivated people with already well-established study/work habits. Halfway through the first term, large numbers are failing. By the end of the first term, and for the rest of the year, the school hemorrhages students back to their local high schools with zero graduation credits earned, 1-2 terms behind already. The charter school, though, keeps the funding for those students for the year, which is how they fund the laptops that the small number who stay eventually get, and some other pricey perks that the rest of our district does not. Of course, the schools taking these students back are educating them WITHOUT that funding for the rest of the year.

They get away with it because our board of directors, and, up until recently, our superintendent, love and support them. So do many parents, because daily attendance isn't mandatory, and students don't have to do as much to "pass;" that flexibility is what leads to so many doing nothing, and almost nothing, and then failing.

[madfloridian]

8. Yep, keeping the funding helps the charter, hurts public schools...

which is the goal after all.

[Wounded Bear]

9. Getting the funding helps the charter, hurts public schools...

FIFY.

Profitizing schools is probably the most idiotic thing I've heard come from the Corporatist a-holes to date. I consideer it worse than profitizing prisons, because it will actually lead to more "clients" for the for-profit prisons.

[madfloridian]

10. Amen to that.

[okaawhatever]

11. One of the most important topics of our times. Thanks for sharing. nt

[Jefferson23]

12. The corruption is so off the charts, I don't know what to say anymore. Grand theft seems appropriate

to me.


K&R

[Starry Messenger]

13. k&r

[Wounded Bear]

14. Re-kick...nt

[liberal_at_heart]

15. kick.