Giving Compass' Take:

• Charter school advocates say that competition should increase the quality of schools, but since there is little public information available parents are not able to accurately judge the schools that are supposed to be competing for students. Donors have an opportunity to fix that and help the charter system work as intended. 

• How are charter schools currently understood and judged by parents? Should policymakers have more capacity for oversight and evaluation of charter schools? 

• This issue should be part of the conversation in Puerto Rico, where lawmakers have approved a sweeping school choice bill.

It’s a question every donor to charter schools wants to know: how do I know my grants are being used responsibly? How do I know my money isn’t being wasted?

When charter schools were created, the answer advocates provided was that the market would reward good schools and punish bad ones. Parents in failing schools, advocates argued, could easily switch from poor schools to better ones.

Rachel M. Cohen shows that, at least in Washington, charter schools are easy to create and hard to close. They also don’t have much oversight if they choose to squander their budgets.

In 2013 District of Columbia attorney general Irvin Nathan sued three people who were associated with Options Public Charter School saying they laundered $3 million from the school into two for-profit companies they owned. In September 2017, the three people agreed to provide $575,000 in restitution.

In 2014 Nathan filed a second suit, which is ongoing, charging the founder of Community Academy Public Charter for diverting $13 million of the school’s budget into a shell management company.

At one DC Prep middle school campus, 27.5 percent of its students had received suspensions overall, including 45 percent of the special education students.

If donors want to make charter schools better, they might want to create a nonprofit that would act as an “impartial overseer.”

Read the source article on funding a charter school evaluation organization by Martin Morse Wooster at Philanthropy Daily