Audit Questions If Federal Charter School Grant Program Is Giving The Taxpayers What They Paid For

The federal Charter School Programs (CSP) was authorized in 1994; since then it has distributed over $4 billion in grants intended to “support the startup of new charter schools and the replication and expansion of high-quality charter schools serving students in prekindergarten through grade 12.”

In recent years, critics have questioned how effectively CSP has been in pursuing its goals. Now a new audit report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General suggests that CSP has not pursued those goals very effectively.

“Effectiveness of Charter School Programs in Increasing the Number of Charter School” set out to answer three questions about how well taxpayer dollars have been used.

First, how well has the department tracked the “number of charter schools opened and expanded using Charter School Programs (CSP) funds and the number of charter schools that stay open after Federal funding ends.”

The audit found that while the CSP office did have processes in place to track this information, “those processes did not result in CSP grant recipients reporting clear, reliable, and timely information.” In other words, the office has a process, and the process, which relies heavily on self-reporting by grant recipients, has not worked. Information is inconsistent, contradictory, or simply not submitted on time.

This is the information needed by the CSP office to determine if the grant was actually used as intended and if the recipient made good use of it. But the audit finds that the CSP office did not receive “all the information needed to assess grant recipients’ performance or evaluate the overall effectiveness of the CSP.”

The CSP office actually has no procedure to follow up on grantees after the grant period; they collected no information to indicate whether the new or expanded charter school was able to sustain itself after the federal money flow was turned off.

Second, did the grant recipients do what they proposed to do in their grant applications?

The audit reviewed 93 of the 104 grants awarded in 2013 through 2016.

Those grant recipients collectively committed to opening or expanding 1,570 charter schools with the grant funds.

They actually opened or expanded 798 charter schools, 51 percent of the promised total.

The appendix in the report breaks down the grant recipients. The grantees are listed by award number, but by digging through the department’s award records online, one can determine who some of the groups are. CSP grants are awarded both to states and to certain charter management organizations.

In 2016, Florida offered one of the most “bold and ambitious” plans, indicating it would use the grant to launch “200 new high-quality schools over the next five years.” The audit found that they had only opened 66 new charters with CSP money. While that was only a third of the targeted number of schools, they spent $41 million of their $70 million CSP grant.

With one exception, states at best achieved about two thirds of their promised numbers while spending a disproportionately high portion of their grant. CMOs did not do much better, though overall they managed to open 48% of their promised schools, while states only opened 41% of what they promised.

When it came to expanding charter schools, grantees exceeded their promises. States promised to expand zero, and expanded 39. CMOs promised to expand 69 and expanded 97. This suggests something about where some of the grant money is actually going—not to create new charters, but to support already existing schools.

Finally, did the CSP-funded charter schools stay open for at least two years after funding ended.

In this area, at least, the audit reports success. Over 91% of the schools remained open for at least two years after CSP funding ended.

In the end, almost one billion dollars of taxpayer money were spent to get half the results on which the grants were premised. States and CMOs that went after grants could not lose; they get to keep ten percent of the grant money, no matter how poorly they meet their commitment.

It’s surprising that after almost thirty years, this is one of the few times the government has taken at how well CSP is working. The audit suggests that the current efforts to reduce accountability and oversight for the CSP grants are misplaced; this program needs more oversight, not less, so that taxpayers can be assured that they are actually getting what they paid for.