StickWithANose

The quasi-privatization of schooling through the charter movement sets the stage for private charter management organizations to pick and choose the degree to which they are “private” or “public”, and the result is that they are perfectly positioned to loot public treasuries while avoiding much of the accountability that comes with it. This subtle truth is no where more obvious than this brewing faux scandal emerging from the recently passed Education Jobs Bill. The skinny is that charters which hire their personnel through private management companies [a way to keep teacher pay down and to avoid collective bargaining] are ineligible for additional funding because their employees do not work for the state. Of course, the idea that there is money out there for the taking that these organizations cannot access is simply unacceptable. The usual suspects are now crying foul and demanding that they get access to the funding… EdWeek.

Federal money from the $10 billion Education Jobs Fund is headed to state coffers—but not without what appear to be some initial implementation wrinkles and controversies.

Charter school advocates, for example, have voiced dismay that some charters may have a tough time tapping into the fund passed by Congress this summer and meant to help prevent the layoff of teachers and other education workers…

Under updated guidance released by the Education Department on Sept. 1, charters that contract with management organizations wouldn’t be able to use the education jobs funds to pay teachers who are technically employees of those organizations, but work as teachers in charter schools.

“There’s a lot of head scratching,” said Brooks Garber, the vice president for federal advocacy at the Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He said that more than 1,000 charters contract with management organizations, so a “large number of kids” could potentially be affected. In Michigan, for example, 80 percent of charter schools contract with management organizations, particularly for human-resources purposes, such as hiring teachers and other employees to work directly with students…

The Education Department guidance doesn’t apply to all charter schools. Charters that are considered to be their own school district are eligible for the jobs funding, and can use it in the same way that school districts can, to pay employees, provide benefits, or hire new teachers. Charters that are part of another district also can receive the funds, and use the money the same way other schools in the district can.

Charters that don’t have any of their own employees—including those that contract with a charter-management organization—could use the money to hire new employees. That means a charter that gets most of its employees through a management organization could technically “hire” a teacher it already has on staff.

That worries advocates who keep a watchful eye on charter autonomy, including Gary G. Naeyaert, a spokesman for the Michigan Association of Public School Academies.

And all this time I thought that the efficient private sector was immune from the financial problems besetting the inefficient public sector… Note the key worry of the charters here is that while they want the funding they do not want to give up their autonomy, ie. their freedom from many of the restrictions that come with receiving state and federal funding.