From the Miami Herald today:
Florida in total gave about 760 million to charter schools. About 70 million to schools which later closed.
Florida gave about $70 million to charter schools that later closed; state recouped little.
The only trace of C.K. Steele/LeRoy Collins Community Charter Middle School is a sign in the parking lot. It closed in 2014.
But over the course of the preceding decade, the school received nearly $540,000 to help with capital purchases under a program enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature and supported by the last three governors. Bethel Missionary Baptist Church owned the building when the school opened and it still does.
So what did get taxpayers get back? Not much. Some televisions, computers and other surplus supplies deemed unusable by the Leon County school district.
The story is repeated across the state: Charter schools, which are public schools run by private groups, have received more than $760 million from state taxpayers since 2000 according to an Associated Press analysis of state Department of Education records. Schools can use the money for construction costs, rent payments, buses and even property insurance.
There’s a reason that Florida has given charter schools so much and gotten so little back.
In Florida, the for-profit school industry flooded legislative candidates with $1.8 million in donations last year. “Most of the money,” reports The Miami Herald, “went to Republicans, whose support of charter schools, vouchers, online education and private colleges has put public education dollars in private-sector
pockets.”
Among the big donors: the private equity firm
Apollo Group APOL +0.00%, the outfit behind the for-profit University of Phoenix, which has experimented with online high schools. Apollo dropped $95,000 on Florida candidates and committees.
Lest you get the idea charter schools are a “Republican” thing, they’re also favored by big-city Democrats. This summer, 23 public schools closed for good in Philadelphia — about 10% of the total — to be replaced by charters. Charters have a history in
Washington, D.C., going back to 1996.
And they were favored by Arne Duncan when he ran Chicago Public Schools. Today, he’s the U.S. secretary of education. In 2009, Duncan rolled out the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative, doling out $4.4 billion in federal money to the states — but only to those states that lifted their caps on the number of charter schools.
Arne Duncan is leaving this month without an accounting of all those federal billions he was controlling.
