Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Audit: U.S. oversight of charter school funding is lax

Florida has created a new web-based system to more closely monitor charter school grant expenditures.

An audit of the U.S. Department of Education’s division overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in charter school funding has criticized the office for failing to properly monitor how states spend the money.

The report, released in late September by the department’s Office of the Inspector General, also singled out state education departments in California, Florida, and Arizona for lax monitoring of what charter schools do with the funds and whether their expenditures comply with federal regulations.

The education department’s Office of Innovation and Improvement spent $940 million from 2008 to 2011 on charter schools, which are autonomously operated public schools. Most of the money is funneled through state education departments, although some is given directly to charter schools.…Read More

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Charter schools expand with public, private money

As cash-strapped school districts lay off teachers and close campuses, publicly funded charter schools are flourishing and altering the landscape of public education, the associated press reports. Despite a painful economic downturn, the charter school movement is expanding rapidly across the country with support from the Obama administration, wealthy donors such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, and the highly publicized documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

Charter schools typically receive a mixture of public and private money and operate free of many regulations that govern traditional public schools in exchange for achieving promised results…

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