Trump Administration Boosts Charter School Grant Program
From Forbes.com
The Charter Schools Program is a long-running federal grant program aimed at helping the charter school industry with new startups and expansions. It has had some serious problems with waste and fraud in the past, but Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has announced that the program will be getting an immediate funding boost of $60 million.
Since 1995, CSP has distributed about $4 billion. A study by the Network for Public Education found that roughly $1 billion on that had been lost to waste and fraud, including charters that accepted grants and soon closed, or never even opened. A follow-up study found that nearly 1,800 charter schools had failed after accepting CSP grants.
Though she was the source of key data for the study, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos herself repeatedly dismissed the study. In a clip posted on C-SPAN’s website, she said,”I’m not sure you can really call it a study” and claimed it is just the product of people with a political agenda. Under DeVos, CSP continued to dispense funding.
Under the Biden administration, CSP was subject to new regulations that put some controls over how these taxpayer dollars were distributed. The new regulations included requirements for charter schools to better connect with community needs. New regulations also reduced the likelihood that a charter operator might spend taxpayer dollars on a school that never actually opened. Regulators also set out to limit charters that were only barely technically non-profit but actually operated as profit-making enterprises.
In February the department announced that it had “reigned in" regulations and “federal overreach” of the program.