Dec 16, 2019, 2:30 PM
(From Forbes) A new federal report from the advocacy group Network for Public Education offers crucial statistics about the cost of charter schools that close or fail to open altogether, between 2006 and 2014. Notably, the report found that more than 35 percent of charter schools that received federal funding between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars.
The report also found that 537 "ghost schools" never opened but received $4.5 million in federal start-up funding. That was more than the 11% of all schools that receive funding from CSP, which began giving grants in 1995. The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, amounting to a total cost of some $7.7 million. In Arizona and Ohio (two charter-heavy states), enrollment was the primary cause of closure followed by mismanagement/fraud, then financial issues and academic concerns.
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