The New York Times has an amazing story by Michael Powell on the first page of Sunday’s sports section. Football star Deion Sanders won approval from the Texas Board of Education to open a charter school called Prime Prep Academy (Sanders’ nickname is Prime Time.) In no time at all, Sanders built a powerhouse of a sports academy. The school has a top-ranked basketball team, whose games are broadcast on ESPN, and presumably a super football team. This is a training school for aspiring athletes.
But it is not much as a school. According to Powell, “a respected Texas nonprofit group” that ranks schools gave the lower grades of the school an F, but did not grade the high school due to missing data. Powell says that Prime Prep represents “celebrity culture run amok and shoddy oversight of a charter school.” Parents send their sons there in hopes they might become professional athletes. Powell tells stories of school officials who were threatened by Sanders. The executive director of the school twice fired him but was overruled by the board. She is now the former executive director.
The Texas Education Agency is threatening to revoke the charter because the school cannot prove it used lunch money for meals. But, says Powell, Sanders is a close friend of the state Commissioner of Education, so don’t count on sanctions.
The former executive director said to Powell, “The high school was chaos. Academics didn’t even play second fiddle. It was all about getting those athletes scholarships and contracts. You didn’t mess with Deion World.” Powell waded through Prime Prep’s application for a charter and found it chock-full of jargon. A member of the state board told Powell that the board was awed to be in Sanders’ presence and fawned on him. But “the curriculum design was nonexistent.”
You can understand the allure of enrolling in a charter school that might propel you into pro sports. The teams are really good. The academic side seems to be a shambles, certainly not a priority. Most of the students are unlikely to break into professional sports. What will happen to them?
Is this the kind of innovation that America needs to compete in the global economy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve been following this and it’s even more disgusting than in the article. I suggest Googling Prime Prep. It’s apparently connected with Aspire. Sanders was charged with assault after a confrontation in a school staff meeting.
The only surprise to me is that this wasn’t about Texas high school football.
It’s all about the Glo-Ball Economy …
Oh yeah, and the Keds …
TAGO!
This is some choice stuff: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2014/07/heres_deion_sanders_admitting_he_choked_someone_audio_nsfw.php
As is this:
Deion Sanders Demanded a Raise, Threatened to Break Prime Prep CEO’s Neck (Audio NSFW)
The sad fact is, most of these kids will NOT end up in professional sports. But they will graduate from high school with awesome abs.
Michael Powell is a terrific reporter, as is Michael Winerip, who wrote on education for the Times before he was exiled to the Siberia of the Lifestyle pages.
Such wonderful reporting, yet the Editorial Board and columnists of the paper are impervious to the facts provided by some of their star writers, continuing to support every harebrained snake oil policy of the so-called reformers. They literally seem to armor themselves against reality…
Michael Fiorillo, you reminded me about how Michael Winerip was exiled to covering “Boomers” in the NY Times after a few years of sharp coverage of education issues. I noticed that Michael Powell’s devastating critique of Deion Sanders’ sham charter school was in the sports section. Maybe that is not such a bad thing. Maybe more people read it on the front page of the sports section than would have read it in the news section.
I noted this a while back but you may have missed it. The Boomers column was killed off several months ago. Lately Winerip has been covering the situation at Rikers.
I agree with you about this story reaching more people because of its placement in the sports section, which reaches a broad cross section of people.
I’ve been a fan of Michael Winerip for decades, ever since he did a beautiful feature on Lewis Mumford in the 80’s – it’s professional malpractice on the part of Times editors that he’s so misused – but I’m not so sure about Lifestyle sections, especially in the Times, which tends to have a very class-blinkered take on things, as if the only Lifestyle news fit to print involves the marketing and consuming of expensive clothes, expensive housing and entertainment, and talking about kale and designer cocktails a lot.
That’s our tax money paying for The Sanders Fake School of Delusional Thinking.
GIVE The Sucker an even break! People like that have a way of … themselves. OK! (OJ)
What… you mean a football star couldn’t run a school? Next, you’ll be telling me a tennis star can’t run one, either.
The tennis star isn’t running a school. He’s running a property management and investment company.
…which is building charter schools with his name on it.
As long as school is his football academy.100% private- funded. He’s a superstar, so he should be able to found school. No single penny from taxpayer’s money–which is highly questionable.
And… it would be helpful if it was actually working.
Diane, wondered if you saw this from the Texas Tribune. It’s about how Latino activist groups are weighing in on what they actually want in their own public schools.
It’s the same as national polling of all public school parents. They want better funding. “Choice” isn’t a priority. Funding is:
“School finance is, by far, the biggest priority the groups identified, and the report summary echoes a lot of what the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) has argued in its piece of the everlasting school finance lawsuit: that Texas’ school funding is based on what lawmakers want to spend, not what a quality education actually costs, and that cuts in school funding have meant scaling back bilingual education programs.
Teachers and advocates also agreed, according to the report, that “increasing the number of well-prepared Latina/o teachers” should be a top priority—a finding that squares with research suggesting that Hispanic teachers tend to stay in high-needs schools longer, bringing stability to classrooms as well as a cultural relevancy that helps students relate to lessons.
It’s also worth noting what’s not listed among the top priorities: charter school chains, vouchers and full-time online schools, which the report dismisses as “privatization experiment efforts” that siphon money away from the schools most kids attend. In other words, if you ask Latino teachers and activists—and not Sen. Dan Patrick—there are plenty of “civil rights issues of our time” more pressing than school choice.”
http://www.texasobserver.org/latino-education-agenda-more-money-better-teachers/
Chiara, thanks, will post it.
This is the same as in my state. Our state actually has a constitutional mandate to properly and adequately fund education. The same section also says that it can fulfill this duty by reporting why there is not enough money to do so.
The FBI is going to need a special “charter schools division”:
“Two Albuquerque charter schools have paid more than $1 million to a private company owned by the schools’ top administrator and another school official, according to a financial review by the state auditor’s office released Wednesday.
State Auditor Hector Balderas said his office found potential contracting violations and conflicts of interests at Southwest Secondary Learning Center and Southwest Aeronautics, Mathematics and Science Academy, which are part of a consortium of four charter schools called the Southwest Learning Centers.
The governing boards of the schools announced earlier this week that head administrator Scott Glasrud has taken a leave of absence amid an FBI investigation.
According to Balderas, a company co-owned by Glasrud and another founder of the schools, Dalene “Dolly” Juarez, was paid $1.1 million since 2008 for the lease of aircraft for the schools’ program that prepares students to be private pilots and for careers in aviation.”
Everyone understands that there is no way hundreds of individual schools can be regulated at the state level, right? They’d have to hire an army of regulators. That’s why we take school regulation and reporting to the local level in the United States.
This is never, ever going to work. If it DID work public schools would have done it 50 years ago. They don’t report to the school board and county or city government for kicks or because they love regulation or the “status quo”. They do it because it’s the only sensible, practical way to regulate hundreds or thousands of individual schools.
This is a recipe for disaster. It’s bad government. It won’t work.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/national-international/article1161102.html
Gives new meaning to the phrase “pilot program”!
http://www.wfaa.com/news/education/Low-state-rankings-present-latest-problems-for-Prime-Prep-Academy-270529551.html
“In fact, the elementary school on the Fort Worth campus, for the second year in a row, ranks as one of the lowest-performing charter schools in the state.”
“He [School Superintendent Ron Price] said when school started last fall, Prime Prep had two certified teachers. Today, he said all of his teachers are certified and he expects better results next year.”
Someone should tell him he’s deviating from the talking points. Certification doesn’t matter and either does experience in the Grand Unified Theory of Ed Reform.
No dice on that argument! “Excuse!” 🙂
TEA Commissioner Michael Williams seems to be in bed not only with Sanders, but with every other charter school connected athlete, lobbyist, and politician in the state. Williams has no experience in education, but has managed to pimp the Texas Education Agency to an all time high!
Let them have it. It is what the parents want and what the kids want. It also keeps them out of public schools where their misplaced priorities would likely be distractions. Schools don’t have to be one size fits all. I thought that is what we here were all fighting against, taking freedom away from parents students and teachers to do it their own way.