D.C. schools are under a federal court order from the late 1990s to improve the timeliness of their response to special-needs children. About 23 percent of the 46,000 students in the D.C. public school system receive special education services. Many receive services from private schools at taxpayer expense.

By contrast, in the 2007-08 school year, 12 percent of the 21,800 students in D.C. public charter schools -- which are also subject to the court order -- received special education services.

For a quarter-century before Hurricane Katrina, Kathy Riedlinger held one of the most coveted jobs in the New Orleans school system: principal of Lusher Elementary, the Uptown magnet school. But neither she nor her peers at other public schools were ever going to get rich.

In 2004, Riedlinger earned a base salary barely topping $60,000, though with stipends she boosted her take to $91,488, according to her tax form.

That number skyrocketed after Lusher became an independent charter school in the dark days after the flood. Lusher's new board of directors -- whom Riedlinger helped choose -- would soon grant her more money than most district superintendents.

This year, Riedlinger will haul in $203,556, including a $5,000 yearly car allowance. That doesn't include a possible performance bonus, such as the extra $10,000 Lusher's nonprofit board granted Riedlinger last year. The school's attorney, James Brown, declined to comment on whether she would get a similar sum this year. "That's in the discretion of the board. That's all I'm authorized to say," Brown said.

Several other principals and school leaders saw no problem with the arrangement, given Riedlinger's track record. Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas, who makes $252,000 while overseeing 33 district-run schools and 33 charters, was among them.

"Kathy is a superb principal who runs a great school. She's more than a principal. She's a fundraiser, lobbyist and catalyst," he said. "In many ways, Kathy Riedlinger is Lusher."

Longtime school advocate Karran Harper Royal took a different view.

"It's a waste of money that should go into the classroom. As a taxpayer, I'm appalled. I don't care how good the school is," Royal said, noting that Lusher's high academic ratings stem in part from its selective admissions standards.

Royal also questioned the process in setting Riedlinger's salary.

"As the leader of that school, she pulled together the parents that she trusts and said, 'Look, we're putting together a charter.' She was the architect of that charter, and now to be paid that kind of money, that smells a little stinky," Royal said. "There's merit in the charter movement, but this kind of ridiculousness threatens the whole integrity of the movement."

The former director of a nonprofit charter-school organization was paid nearly $700,000 in her last year on the job -- almost triple the salary of the schools chancellor.

Former banking executive Mimi Clarke Corcoran -- who for seven years headed the Beginning With Children Foundation -- saw her compensation jump from $277,000 in 2005-06 to $689,000 in 2006-07, public documents show.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein earns $250,000.

The foundation provides management services to two Brooklyn charters -- Beginning With Children and Community Partnership -- that are publicly funded.

In Corcoran's final year, the two schools paid a combined $675,000 for the foundation's services, which include hiring staff and fiscal management.

I calculated the total expenses per pupil at 58 New York City charter schools for the 2007-08 school year.  Here is the workbook with my calculations.

The total expenses for the 58 schools was $236,230,149.  The total enrollment was 17,680.  This comes out to a per pupil calculation of $13,361.  The average school expenses per pupil was $13,520.  The median school was $12,948.  For the 2007-08 school year, the “base funding” per pupil, i.e. the fixed amount per pupil received from the DOE, was $11,023.  So spending on the average student was $2,338 above the base amount.

For Tequila Green, 18, MEI Futures Academy was a haven, a one-of-a-kind D.C. residential charter school where she could wake up with her 2-year-old daughter in a dorm-style room, have breakfast in the cafeteria and drop her at the on-site nursery before her first class of the day.

"I thought this was a good place," Green said. "We're around other girls that are going through the same things we're going through."

But a vision that once seemed so promising will flicker out next month. The D.C. Public Charter School Board, citing persistent academic and operating problems, revoked MEI's charter at its April meeting. The school, housed in the former Masonic and Eastern Star nursing home on New Hampshire Avenue NE, will close in June.

"The idea was wonderful. I wish very much it had succeeded," said board member Dora Marcus. It was the second time this year that a charter school created for a high-need, hard-to-reach student population has collapsed. City Lights, which served about 75 students with serious emotional and learning disabilities, relinquished its charter and closed in February.

The board, responsible for overseeing the District's 59 publicly funded and independently operated schools, had revoked only three other charters since its inception in 1996. All three -- Southeast Academy, New School for Enterprise and Development and Sasha Bruce -- had financial, academic or management issues but remained open for at least five years. (Four other schools, including City Lights, chose to give up their charters rather than go through the revocation process). MEI has been open for just two years.

Executive director Aminiyah Muhammad-M'Backe said the school needed more time to reach students who had in many cases dropped off the social grid, leaving school and moving in and out of the judicial system.

"This population is hard," said Muhammad-M'Backe. "People don't want to talk about teenage mothers who are oppositional, defiant, not ashamed of having had babies. They are not on anyone's statistical page. Everyone wants great data. They don't give you the outcome data you want in short order."

Staff members contend that the school has made significant strides and that the board's revocation was unfairly abrupt compared with the forbearance extended to other struggling schools.

"It was on its way, starting to flip, you know? Flip in the right direction," said guidance counselor Cheryl Reinhardt. "This should have been saved."

According to outside audits, interviews and staff reports, MEI lacked a coherent curriculum for its 50 students, with just two on track to graduate this spring. Last year, not one of the 15 10th-graders who took the DC-CAS standardized test achieved proficiency in reading or math.

Muhammad-M'Backe said those scores are not surprising, given that most students entered the school reading on a third- to fifth-grade level.

To reform the academic program, the school hired Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, a national educational consulting firm that specializes in serving nontraditional student groups by emphasizing hands-on learning in out-of-school settings. But Gladys Graham, the firm's regional director, said constant teacher and administrative turnover made it difficult to put the program into effect.

"The school is not in a place where we could implement the design," she said.

For the most part, charter schools have failed to live up to many of their promises.

They are providing a wealth of choices for parents, but a Free Press review of state test data shows they have not outperformed traditional schools by many measures. Nor has competition from charters spurred improvement in traditional public schools. And innovation inside charter schools often stays trapped there.

the expansion of school choice may be the only goal that Michigan's charter schools have completely met. Academic performance in the state's 232 charters is, on average, no better -- and by some measures, worse -- than traditional schools. Innovations in charter classrooms often stay there because the competition for students between traditional public schools and charter schools has led to a contentious relationship.

And even the success in providing choice has -- according to one study -- had the unintended consequence of pulling down test scores in traditional schools, possibly because of how much money charters draw away from school districts.

The state’s charter schools will continue to be laboratories for innovation but will no longer have lax financial controls and uncertain academic standards.

Senate Bill 278, sponsored by Senator Don Gaetz, reins in what has become a growing scandal of mismanagement among many of the state’s 358 charter schools.  Charters are publicly funded but are independent of school district rules.

The new law requires charters to adhere to generally accepted accounting standards, produce monthly financial statements available to the public, and establishes financial emergency “triggers” which allow the Commissioner of Education to intervene if a charter school is showing signs of serious fiscal problems. 

The state’s auditor general and Department of Education found that some charter operators have been diverting funds meant for student instruction to purchasing luxury cars, hiring unqualified relatives, leasing buildings at far more than market prices, and paying excessive administrative salaries. 

About a fourth of Florida charters are operated by for profit companies.  A disproportionately large number of those schools experienced financial management problems, according to the Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability. 

Nearly half of all charters do not receive a letter grade from the state, which means they can avoid letting parents know how well or poorly the school is doing and aren’t subject to corrective actions which neighborhood public schools must take to improve academic performance.

Under Gaetz’s bill, more charters will be graded and parents will be given accurate information about their student’s performance as well as the school’s academic standing.

U.S. venture capital investments sank 61 percent in the first quarter, dropping to the lowest level in 12 years as financiers became even warier about sinking funds into startups during a deepening recession.

In yet-another indicator that a pullback that began last summer is not abating, venture capital investments totaled $3 billion during the first three months of 2009, according to a report released Saturday by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters. In the year-ago quarter, investments totaled $7.74 billion.

The Union War on Charter Schools

As New York shows, they want to kill any education choice.

The clash has exposed fault lines of wealth and class that are perhaps inevitable as philanthropists, in New York and nationwide, increasingly invest in public education, providing new schools to children in poor neighborhoods while making communities dependent on their generosity.

And for those lucky to have such benefactors, the situation raises core questions: Who ultimately controls charter schools, which are financed by taxpayers but often rely heavily on charitable donations? Do the schools, which operate outside the control of the local school district, answer to parents, or to their wealthy founders?

At Beginning With Children, many parents and teachers say that the Reichs’ main interest is to burnish their reputation as advocates for charter schools, and that the school’s original purpose, of catering to each child’s individual needs, is now secondary to drilling for exams in an effort to elevate scores and the Reichs’ credibility.

The Reichs support not just Beginning With Children, and a second school they founded in Brooklyn, but charter schools generally. They gave $10 million to help create the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, a nonprofit group dedicated to opening 50 more of the schools.

“Joe and Carol Reich started the school for whatever reasons initially,” said Gail Sims Bliss, a teacher and former trustee who resigned reluctantly. “But it has grown into their participation in the charter movement with a capital M.” She added, “They cannot allow the school to compromise their status and their progress in this particular movement.”

Some experts say the state's method skews the comparison in favor of charter schools by comparing charters in more affluent areas to those urban districts. When the charter schools are compared with the districts in which each actually sits, about three out of five fall short on the MEAP.

"The findings are misleading and misrepresent the evidence in the report," Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University wrote to the state Board of Education.

On the MEAP math test, for example, a Free Press analysis found 20% of charter schools did better under the current MDE formula but scored worse when compared with their local districts.

Concord Academy in Antrim, east of Grand Traverse Bay, illustrates the gap. It beat the 20-district average for math MEAP scores on which the MDE based its report. But it did worse than Alba Public Schools, the district in whose boundaries the school sits.

"The families in this area are pretty transient. ... We have to segregate out those test scores of students who've been here and those test scores of students who've been in another district," Concord Headmaster Stephen Overton said.

Months later—after quietly organizing and pressing their peers to sign union cards—the formation of Chicago’s first charter school teachers union is but a step away.

Should the state’s Labor Board rule that the teachers followed protocol in their bid to unionize, they will begin crafting a new labor contract that will largely come to define their sought after “voice” in school decision making.

The nature of that contract and how closely it resembles traditional teachers union contracts will be closely watched by national observers, from advocates to agnostics in the highly partisan world of teachers unions and charter schools. Simply put, a tiny sliver of the nearly 4,000 charter schools across America are unionized and there are precious few examples of how to marry job protections and other benefits afforded to unionized teachers with the operational flexibility that charters like to trumpet.

“It’s been all consuming just getting the cards signed,” says Emily Mueller, a Spanish teacher at the Chicago International-Northtown campus who played a central role in the union drive. “Just talking about contract issues seems like a major relief.”

Some charters, like the Green Dot schools that originated in Los Angles, started up as unionized shops and feature lightweight contracts that give principals substantial hiring and firing authority in exchange for higher teacher pay and clear pathways for influencing curricular and other educational choices.

Other charters, like two schools started recently by the United Federation of Teachers in New York, have looked for new ways to run schools while sticking to the rules laid out in the traditional UFT contract. Indeed, teachers at the schools have staggered their class schedules to provide a longer school day for children—without violating the limits on working hours spelled out in their union contract.