Trump and Charter Schools – Tennessee Education Report

The Privatizer-in-Chief seeks reduced accountability for charter school operators

Charter schools are the gateway drug to full-scale school privatization by way of vouchers.

Charters are so nice and easy, even some misguided Democrats have been known to support them. By contrast, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is one of a very few prominent Democrats to support school vouchers.

The point: Charter schools ARE school privatization. Courts in Kentucky said so explicitly.

There’s a federal program that funnels money to charter schools, and under President Biden, that program was introduced to some accountability.

No surprise, then, that under Trump, the accountability for charters receiving federal funds is disappearing.

Peter Greene reports:

The federal Charter School Program has been shelling out grants to launch and expand charter schools since 1994. Analysis of the program by the Network for Public Education shows that one out of every four taxpayer dollars handed out by CSP has been wasted on fraud and/or failure. That means of the roughly 4 Billion-with-a-B dollars handed out by the feds, roughly 1 Billion-with-a-B dollars have gone to charters that closed swiftly, or never even opened in the first place.

Seems like something DOGE would be worried about.

But, um, no.

Instead:

Instead, yesterday the Department of Education issued an edict saying that the “unnecessary conditions and overly bureaucratic requests for information” would be stopped and that CPS would start handing out money more easily.