Failure of Charter Schools n Louisiana

Jeff Bryant

Epic Fail Of Charter Schools In Louisiana

Parents in New Orleans are sick of the instability temporary charter schools have brought to their community. Now they are organizing to repeal the state law that legalized charters, calling the schools an “illegal experiment” on their children. The annual budget for the Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which provides grants to individual charter schools and charter school management companies, has ballooned to $440 million, and the total amount spent by the program since inception exceeds $4 billion. Up to $1 billion of the money given out nationwide by the CSP was wasted on charter schools that never opened, or opened and then closed because of fraud, poor performance, financial mismanagement, and other reasons. The legacy of the federal government’s charter school grants should not be understood just by the sheer waste of precious education funds, but also by the real human consequences of spreading makeshift charter programs that throw communities into confusion, distress, and a sense of betrayal.