Last spring, the founders of a high-scoring charter school in California were convicted of misappropriating over $200,000 in public monies. According to the charges filed, the couple spent, for example, “more than $34,000 on meals, entertainment and gifts that they classified as business expenses or gestures of appreciation for teachers.” Also, “Some charges centered on the lease for the main campus on De Soto Avenue in Woodland Hills. In 2004, the couple negotiated a 10-year lease for $18,390 a month. But three years later, they began charging the school $43,870 a month for a sublease. At the same time, Selivanov and Berkovich took on responsibility for a $520,000 bank loan to the school.”
The couple was sentenced this week. The husband will spend nearly five years in state prison, while his wife will be incarcerated for 45 days in the county jail plus probation and community service.
The California Charter Schools Association entered an amicus brief on their behalf maintaining that the couple are not guilty of any criminal offense because charter schools are not subject to the laws governing public schools. CCSA says that charter schools are exempt from criminal laws governing public schools because they are operated by a private corporation.
They say the money received for their nonprofit corporation is not public money, even though it comes from the state and from taxpayers.
CCSA maintains: “Moreover, the prosecution completely ignores the fact that the Legislature has expressly allowed charter schools to be operated by private nonprofit corporations, and that many, if not all, of the complained of actions of the defendants are lawful actions of employees and officers of nonprofit corporations (e.g., ordinary and necessary expenditures on meals, gift cards, flowers, leases with employees and officers of the nonprofit etc.) And, most importantly, the court cases and administrative agency decisions make clear that these private officers and employees of the nonprofit corporation are not subject to Penal Code section 424 – because these nonprofit corporations are private entities, with private employees, expending private moneys (i.e., not “public moneys”).”
This criminal prosecution, says CCSA, has sent “shock waves throughout the charter school community,” which heretofore thought that the laws applied to public schools did not apply to them.
In a case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, an Arizona charter successfully argued that it was a private corporation, not a public school. In Chicago, the teachers at a charter school wanted to form a union, but the charter founder argued before the National Labor Relations Board that the charter was operated by a private corporation and not subject to state labor laws.
Anthony Cody reviewed this case and concluded that we should accept the claims of the California Charter Schools Association that charter schools are private entities, managed by private corporations that are outside the purview of the law.
Is this really a good development for American public education? One set of schools (charter schools) receiving public funds but exempt from the law, and another set of schools (public schools) closely regulated by the state? One set of schools (charter schools) free to set their own discipline policy, free to enroll few students with disabilities and English learners, while another set of schools (public schools) must accept everyone, including the students excluded or tossed out of the charter schools.
Does it make sense to give public money to schools that are neither transparent nor accountable for their use of that money and unwilling to comply with state laws?
It seems that whether charters are “public” or “private” depends upon which of those two designations benefits the charter in a given situation. For duping the public, charters advertise themselves as “public schools.” (Moskowitz does so until the word comes to make public Success Academy’s financial documents; then, she cries, “private.” On the Success Academy website, her schools are advertised as “public”: http://www.successacademies.org/page.cfm?p=4 )
Indeed, but if Success Academy were really public, a principal wouldn’t get away with using a full-size room for her office while putting 30 kids in a half-size room making space for herself. The DOE would be able to enforce its regulations in terms of how much space kids need.
Actually, it is not a principal’s choice in success academy. It is just how the school is built. Success Academy Is a really good school, and we have lots of meetings. And since there are lots of teachers, we need a big principal’s office.
I keep reading all these disturbing accounts of “charter schools”. .. the “great american ripoff”, . . Diane Ravitchs’ own fault while in the Bush era she mainlined the “no child left behind”, and since every child is being left behind in the glaring concept of dumbing down of american children… using public funds for these profit centers is a travesty, especially when public education is so terribly underfunded by our Congress… they are happy to give up their votes to these high flyers Rocketeers, KIPP and others for extra campaign funds. The only way to get our educational system back is to fund it… stabilize it, and modernize our universities educational programs. We need to return to the concept of teaching the child… without which we are a doomed society!
Dennis Petrak, I served in the first Bush administration from 1991-1993. I was not part of the George W. Bush administration. I had no role in writing NCLB, which became law in 2002. That was the job of Margaret Spellings, Sandy Kress, Rod Paige, George Miller (CA), and Ted Kennedy’s staff.
My son went to a really good public school where the teachers need to have meetings with the principal. They used empty classrooms after hours because the needs of the kids supersede the needs of the teachers to have a nice venue for meetings.
No, in fact, we MUST INSIST that charters are public schools. Without that insistence, they have no obligation to comply with the IDEA, or any other civil rights laws.
Systems change, they don’t comply with those laws anyway
So, you’re just going to let them not comply? Not me. That’s why I sue them under the laws that make them public. Please don’t encourage anyone to take that safety valve away or you will see a much darker side of charters than what you’re worried about now.
Do you know of any lawsuit against Success Academy for violating Section 504 or IDEA? This seems so widespread there should be a class action lawsuit by now.
I am not aware of such a lawsuit, but nobody should trivialize the importance of having laws that charters must comply with. Here is an example of how we used the ADA to deal with disability discrimination in voucher schools in Milwaukee. http://systemschangeconsulting.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/defending-the-civil-rights-of-children-with-disabilities-in-voucher-schools/
“DPI considers schools as its clients or customers”. I’m getting the feeling that in NY, SUNY, the authorizing body of Success Academy, also considers the charters its customers instead of the students. If this is the case, the Formal Complaint process is a scam and the only recourse is the US DOJ like you guys used. Success Academy operates in a legal vacuum when it comes to use of space because of operating in NYC but being authorized by the state.
Except that by allowing them the label “public”, they can claim that they are protecting and advancing “public” education, when in fact they do no such thing.
Say want you want about the non-legal use of the terms “public” and “private,” but the legal terms have important meanings which those of us who support quality education for our children should work to enforce.
Want to be a private, entity? Fine, great! STOP TAKING PUBLIC FUNDS. If you are a private corporation, then you have NO right to collect FTE funds from the state. Talk to a REAL private school and learn how they pay the bills.
I’m sure that there is a warm space reserved for them in the future.
OK , no public monies then.
To paraphrase Lincoln: If I can save my charter school while pretending to be public, I will do that. If I can save it by insisting I am private, I will do that. And if I can save it by being public one day and private the next, I will also do that.
Paging Dr. Nathan. Paging Dr. Nathan.
I dont know about Dr. Nathan, but I certainly think transparency and accountability are important. When the NSF and NIH give public money to private schools like Johns Hopkins or Stanford, those government departments insist on both. K-12 should be no different.
Do they give them money for general operations or does the money come in the form of grants for specific research projects? As far as I know, they are grants or some other contract based agreement for research purposes, so your comparison is disingenuous, pretending not to be apples and oranges.
The institution takes somewhere around 45% as overhead, but I think it varies depending on the granting authority.
Apologies, misread your comment.
School reformers are going to have to address this honestly and directly. It is happening in courtrooms, but taxpayers will eventually find out.
This is a motion filed by the former AG of Ohio regarding White Hat, which is a notably corrupt charter chain that has been operating in three states for more than a decade.
“This motion asks the Court to help a group of public schools break free from dominance by private interests. The Plaintiffs are charter schools. They are public schools, funded entirely by tax funds, but a group of corporations have appropriated them to the corporations’ private interests.
Those corporations (collectively “White Hat”) have done so through management agreements that give them control of more than 96% of the Schools’ funding and all their personnel, academics, and purchasing decisions.
White Hat also claims ownership of the property bought with the public funding that flowed to it through the Schools.
The public received very little in return for that outlay of tax dollars. Most of the schools have received the equivalent of D’s and F’s on their State report cards and their performance has declined during the term of the agreements.The Schools tried to change that by changing their relationship”
White Hat has argued for a decade that they are a private entity in order to evade regulators. Charter school proponents in Ohio have done absolutely nothing to stop them.
Richard Cordray was then the Ohio AG. He brought this Motion on behalf of the people of Ohio. Cordray then went on to head the consumer financial protection bureau in DC. Our current AG has dropped the case.
I thought they were ordered by a judge to open their books? What happened? I know he has the Republican politicians in his pocket but wow.
They tok it to the Ohio Supreme Court. They petitioned for “reconsideration” which almost never succeeds. It’s a stall tactic.
While this case was pending, they were given more publicly-owned schools.
Charters in Ohio have come up with an interesting way around closure laws. If they are slated to be closed, they simply re-arrange the legal entity and payment routing and re-open as new schools.
We were joking here locally that the way to preserve existing public schools might be to re-organize them as charter schools 🙂
This is the court of appeals case re: White Hat.
They claim they are a private entity.
Click to access 2013-ohio-911.pdf
Also, a Chicago charter chain SUCCESSFULLY argued that they are a private entity in a case before the National Labor Relations Board. They were trying to stop their employees from forming a union.
According to the National Labor Relations Board, then, charter schools are private entities, akin to defense contractors.
I wonder if we could compile a database of charter school court cases where they claim they are private entities, and use that to disallow the use of the word “public” as misleading and deceptive.
You could certainly do the first, but not the second.
You actually might be able to. There are still some strong consumer protection laws left, at the state level.
They can’t use advertising that is deliberately misleading.
Pretty hard to prove it’s deliberately misleading when there’s no clear consensus on what the word “public” means in that context and when the state charter statutes themselves define charter schools as “public schools.”
“Pretty hard to prove it’s deliberately misleading”
I think you’d have to find a student that was harmed. One of the issues with charters calling themselves “public” is that students may not have the due process rights that attach re: a public school.
So if a student were expelled without due process, that student was harmed by what is false advertsing, because he or she assumed due process rights attached when they enrolled in a “public school.”
There are all kinds of problems. But what I’m saying is much more basic. How would you prove that the statement that a charter school is a “public school” is “false” when (1) there is no clear consensus on what the term “public school” means and (2) the charter school law itself states that “a charter school is a public school”?
It’s a political, not a legal issue: if the stench of the ever-rising tide of charter scandals catches the public’s nose, then the question will be decided in the court of public opinion.
At some point, an ambitious prosecutor will feel it advantageous to start handing out subpoenas to some of these people, and the house of cards will be in danger of collapsing.
“It’s a political, not a legal issue: if the stench of the ever-rising tide of charter scandals catches the public’s nose, then the question will be decided in the court of public opinion.”
Exactly. There seems to be a lot of confusion on that point. Charter schools describe themselves as “public schools” for marketing purposes. But those two words have no legal significance in that context, and they’re not “false” in any legal sense.
Based on what I’ve read and what I can remember personally, the “charter schools are public schools” language probably took hold in the context of the reform debates of the late 80s/early 90s, when the ed reform movement was beginning to gather steam and most of the debate about “school choice” centered on vouchers. Vouchers were a very divisive given the First Amendment issues and privatization concerns they raised. My sense is that charter schools were seen by many as the “middle bowl of porridge” — a system that promoted choice, decentralization, and competition on the one hand, but subject to public oversight that private-school voucher recipients lacked. “Charter schools are public schools” had to be an appealing mantra for reformers in that climate. It wasn’t technically true, but it was a lot less untrue than “Catholic schools are public schools.”
Actually, it probably was a phrase taken directly from the original charter model (by the teacher from Michigan), a model in which charter schools actually were public schools. And then the Minnesota charter law happened and the 1990s reformers kept using the old mantra. I’m kind of making this up, but it would make sense. Joe Nathan probably knows this better than anyone here.
What about compiling a database of IDEA and Section 504 violations by charters like Success Academy? Most parents with special needs kids end up leaving the school, so those voices are lost.
How can they sleep at night and look in the mirror the next morning?
Most crooks have no trouble doing that.
I think words mean something, so I propose we call public schools “public” and charters and private school that are funded by vouchers “publicly-funded.”
Public schools and then publicly-funded schools.
It’s more specific and also, well, ACCURATE.
It’s vitally important the public understand what they’re giving up with these contracts. These are actual, tangible public assets, and they’re being contracted away without informed consent.
In the Wisconsin State Senate: regarding revisions to Senate Bill 76. This particular bill was dropped back in March, but has suddenly been put back on the fast track with recent Senate Substitute Amendment 1 to Senate Bill 76 and a public hearing held last week.
The revisions to this bill would:
Greatly expand the number of entities permitted to authorize independent (non-school-board-authorized) charter schools to include all UW campuses, Wisconsin Technical College Boards and CESA boards of control. This means that a public charter school can open in our community without the approval of the local school board.
Reduce general school aids to all school districts and raises property taxes. Those additional authorizers will surely increase the number of independent charter schools authorized. Given that the per pupil payments to independent charter schools are funded as a draw on the general school aids that would otherwise be payable to every school district in the state, this bill will result in a growing aid reduction to public schools. Because local school districts are allowed to levy property taxes to cover the reduction in state aid, this will likely result in an increase in local property taxes.
Remove the right of school boards to determine if they wish to authorize additional charter schools. This could force school boards and other authorizers to replicate additional charter schools if the charter school operators are deemed to have a proven track record of success. Nowhere in state history has the legislature required a school board to create another school and stripped locally-elected officials of their authority to make such a decision on their own.
To summarize, the mandate to replicate charter schools, coupled with the expanded list of charter school authorizers, will greatly diminish the control of locally elected Boards of Education. This will mean a loss of control for the local electors who voted them into office. Local taxpayers may also see their tax levy increase because funding for these charter schools is taken directly off the top of the general fund, reducing general aid available all public school districts in the state.
This bill may be voted on by the Senate Committee on Education as early as tomorrow.
Wow. It sounds like cronyism is in full swing
I don’t take joy in people’s misfortune but it is about time that the cash cows come to an end. This is nothing more than the theft of public tax dollars. Please come to Michigan and begin investigating the shysters running charter schools.
For the life of me I can’t figure out how charter schools can get away with being called “public”.
Why not call them subsidized private schools? Remember the saying – ‘subsidize the losses and privatize the gains’ (and every 5 years or so throw some crooks in jail and then they get out and continue to live the good life).
They are publicly-funded private schools. In some cases, they are publicly-funded private prep schools – for those wealthy parents who prefer the gov’t pay for their little angel’s private education experience with their higher SES peers.
concernedmom & K Quinn & Barbara [below]: your comments are both short and to the point. IMHO, they are particularly helpful because we needs ways to briefly describe the reality of most charter schools as opposed to their public image.
Over and over again on this blog, people have reminded defenders of public education and a “better education for all” that a very large part of the appeal and defense of the main charterite/privatizer initiatives lies in playing off of unfounded assumptions. For example, the first reaction of many people to high-stakes standardized testing—sure! make ‘em prove they know something! real life won’t be easy so tough love now!—is to compare it with what they remember from their own days in K-12. It is very revealing that once the actual amount of money, time and effort involved is made widely know, public support for this particular EduHazing Ritual declines by, I don’t know, 98% [I am sure that Bill Gates would find this percentage “satisfactory”].
Thank y’all for your thoughtful contributions.
🙂
I think you’re on to something but I would suggest that “government-funded private school” is a better description for charters. Emphasizes the contradiction in tax money going straight into private pockets.
Oops, my comment was supposed to be in reply to Chiara’s comment (at 4:51 pm) but it ended up down here instead of closer to Chiara’s.
The general public needs to be informed of this controversy. I feel quit certain if you asked Joe Public if he is ok with his tax money going into the pocket of some rich charter operator in another state, they would immediately say no.
I sent a letter to my congressman in Brevard County, fl., John Tobia, and asked him if he felt it was OK for Imagine Charter to send money out of state. He played dumb and told me to ask my local school board if that happens.
WE MUST PRESSURE THESE POLITICIANS!!
UNO Charter schools in Illinois got almost a billion dollar grant from the state. Then, they get additional per pupil funds from the school district and also charitable donations from political playas. No way is this a level playing field for a neighborhood school. But even with all of this they are failing to outperform neighborhood schools in the areas they serve.
I feel the need to quote Miley Cyrus in response the query “Does it make sense to give public money to schools that are neither transparent nor accountable for their use of that money and unwilling to comply with state laws?”
—Can I get a “Hell, no!”
Charter schools cannot have it both ways. If the general public knew that a billion tax dollars could go to a “private school” they would have their politicians’ heads on a platter, and deservedly so.
Correction: about $100 million in tax dollars.
This is appalling no matter which side you are on. The good stuff that businesses do, like take employees out to lunch or have team events, should NOT be excluded from public institutions. Doing so only makes them more insulated from our general culture. And outsourcing services does not mean that the providers are now “public.”
On the other hand, pretending to be public while aggressively marketing to new customers is a lie. And the idea that these folks have some magic potion that public schools don’t have is laughable at best. I would have no problem shutting them down for misrepresentation and fraud – using technicalities just makes them look like the good guys.
Hello,
I noticed that the Charter School my some goes to is now totally test oriented and using Pearson technology so every thing he touches is graded and entered (sometimes more than once) into a Pearson grading system. So I looked and see that a Pearson representative is on the Board of Trustees for the school. This strikes me as being a conflict on so many levels and is very upsetting. The politics around the money here is troubling.
Charter Schools ARE Public Schools!
Charter schools always say in court that they are private corporations with public contracts. They say they are NOT public schools and not subject to state law. I agree with them. Charter schools are not public schools.