Apparently, no one at the U.S. Department of Education has read a newspaper recently because yesterday they proudly announced they were giving $71 million to the Ohio Department of Education to run a competitive grant program for new charter schools here.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a release that:

“All students have the right to an education that prepares them for college and their careers, and we’re thrilled that a growing number of charter schools create opportunities for students to achieve just that. In particular, we are excited to see so many high-quality charter management organizations focused on replicating successful models in high-needs communities. As we celebrate charter schools that help children from disadvantaged backgrounds, we must continue empowering educators to create great schools while holding ourselves to the highest possible standards of excellence.”

However, in Ohio’s case, the money will be going to fund a department whose chief charter school oversight officer in July resigned in disgrace after it was revealed that he deliberately rigged charter school sponsor evaluations to benefit charters run by Ohio’s big campaign contributors.

So the USDOE is giving $71 million to a department that doesn’t have a chief charter school officer and whose previous head rigged a system to make Ohio’s failing charter schools look like they weren’t?

Sometimes it pays to read a newspaper, or do a Google search.

Or look at the CREDO study the USDOE cited in its own release. In that study (whose methodology has been criticized by some and is not peer reviewed), CREDO found that Ohio was one of four states whose charter school performance got worse since 2009 and Ohio charter school students lost nearly a full marking period of learning in math and half of one in reading.

CREDO since did an Ohio-specific analysis and found that outside of Nevada, Ohio’s charter school system is the nation’s worst, with kids in rural areas losing an entire year of learning if they attend a charter school.

Yet Arne Duncan’s USDOE thinks dropping $71 million here is a good idea?

It’d be one thing if Ohio’s charter school system was among the nation’s best rather than a national joke and mocked at a national conference … of charter school supporters. It’d be one thing if Ohio had a Department of Education with a chief charter school oversight officer rather than a department without one because the last one it had resigned after illegally rigging an evaluation system to make poor performing charters look better than they were.

So the obvious question is this: Who’s going to administer this money, and more importantly, who’s going to end up getting it? Let’s hope it goes to the scant few high-performing charters in this state.

But given this state’s history, especially recently, does anyone here have confidence our Department of Education won’t rig this latest windfall for the state’s notoriously poor-performing, politically-powerful charter school operators?