Success and Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. MOORE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chair, I rise to offer an amendment to H.R. 10, which reauthorizes our Nation's charter school program. I would just like to start out by saying this is a great improvement over the charter school legislation that we have seen in past times.

When the charter school movement began, as many of you may recall, lawmakers exempted those schools from many of the rules governing traditional public schools in order to allow educators their ability to explore new, innovative methods and models of teaching.

This yielding of exempting them from this rule yielded some unintended consequences. There have been stories in many States, and you just heard Ms. Castor of Florida talk about financial waste, fraud, murky funders or managers, conflicts of interest. It is a problem, notwithstanding our desire to see innovation.

This has got to be addressed because taxpayer dollars are, in fact, lost along with private funds, as well as innovation. The greatest cost, of course, is our children, who become, sometimes, puppets of other folks' financial interests.

A new report from the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education released just this month examined 15 of the largest charter markets and found $100 million in losses to taxpayers since charter schools entered these markets.

It is very important to put sensible oversight into place to ensure that public funds are not being wasted or misused. This amendment does just that. It simply requires that States receiving charter school grants must set aside 2 percent of that grant to provide financial oversight of charters of publicly funded money and to disclose private contributions that they receive.

I just want to say, anticipating some rebuttal, that the funds would be set aside and the authorizing agencies of these charter schools, be they the State or the local education agency, would be able to use the set-aside for appropriate financial oversight.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. MOORE. Mr. Chairman, I think it is unfortunate that the gentleman from California is opposing this amendment as well and my Republican friends opposing it, because we often find ourselves talking about unfunded mandates. What my amendment does is try to make sure that we are providing not only the guidance and insistence that there be audits, but that we actually provide the ways and means for it to be done.

It is one thing to say, oh, yeah, they are going to audit themselves. With what? Audits cost money. So I find it unfortunate that they would pass this unfunded mandate on to these chartering agencies.

I would urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment. I think it improves the bill. I think it provides the needed resources for this accountability, these accountability activities.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source