In a two-part article called “Florida’s Charter Schools: Unsupervised,” Karen Yi and Amy Shipley of the Sun-Sentinel describe how the state’s weak laws allows charter school operators in South Florida to profit while wasting taxpayers’ money and children’s lives.
South Florida has more than 260 charter schools. Local districts are supposed to oversee them. The laws about who may open a charter school are lax. Charters open and close, and millions of dollars disappear. Is every charter a fraud? No. But members of the charter sector hold key positions in the state legislature, and the charters are the pride of former Governor Jeb Bush, so there is little effort to rein in the miscreants.
The article begins:
“Unchecked charter-school operators are exploiting South Florida’s public school system, collecting taxpayer dollars for schools that quickly shut down.
“A recent spate of charter-school closings illustrates weaknesses in state law: virtually anyone can open or run a charter school and spend public education money with near impunity, a Sun Sentinel investigation found.
“Florida requires local school districts to oversee charter schools but gives them limited power to intervene when cash is mismanaged or students are deprived of basic supplies — even classrooms.
Once schools close, the newspaper found, districts struggle to retrieve public money not spent on students.
Among the cases the newspaper reviewed:
“• An Oakland Park man received $450,000 in tax dollars to open two new charter schools just months after his first collapsed. The schools shuttled students among more than four locations in Broward County, including a park, an event hall and two churches. The schools closed in seven weeks.
“• A Boca Raton woman convicted of taking kickbacks when she ran a federal meal program was hired to manage a start-up charter school in Lauderdale Lakes.
“• A Coral Springs man with a history of foreclosures, court-ordered payments, and bankruptcy received $100,000 to start a charter school in Margate. It closed in two months.
“• A Hollywood company that founded three short-lived charters in Palm Beach and Collier counties will open a new school this fall. The two Palm Beach County schools did not return nearly $200,000 they owe the district.”
The laws were written to make it easy for anyone to open a charter school.
“State law requires local school districts to approve or deny new charters based solely on applications that outline their plans in areas including instruction, mission and budget. The statutes don’t address background checks on charter applicants. Because of the lack of guidelines, school officials in South Florida say, they do not conduct criminal screenings or examine candidates’ financial or educational pasts.
“That means individuals with a history of failed schools, shaky personal finances or no experience running schools can open or operate charters.”
“The law doesn’t limit who can open a charter school. If they can write a good application … it’s supposed to stand alone,” said Jim Pegg, director of the charter schools department for the Palm Beach County school district. “You’re approving an idea.”
“Charter-school advocates say the complexity of the application, which can run more than 400 pages, weeds out frivolous candidates. But school officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties told the Sun Sentinel some applicants simply cut and paste from previously approved applications available online.”
Charter operators can receive approval and funding before they know where their school will be located. Two iGeneration charters in West Palm Beach opened 11 days after school started.
“As students showed up for class, parts of the building remained under construction. Classrooms had not undergone required fire inspections and sometimes lacked air conditioning, district documents show. The iGeneration charters bused their high schoolers on unauthorized daily field trips because they didn’t have enough seats at the school, records show.
“On one trip, they lost a student. Though she was found four hours later, district officials immediately shut down the schools.
“Because of the quick shut-down, the iGeneration charter schools were overpaid nearly $200,000, according to the Palm Beach County school district. The schools have not returned the money.”
Academic chaos is not unusual:
“A former teacher at the Ivy Academies stored her classroom supplies in the trunk of her car. Every morning, she’d wait for a phone call to find out where classes would be held that day.
“I would never know where we [were] going,” said teacher and former middle school dean Kimberly Kyle-Jones. “It was chaotic.”
“The two Ivy Academies lasted only seven weeks.”
District officials didn’t know where the “nomad campuses” were.
“The biggest tragedy is what happened to those students during the course of time they were in that charter,” Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said. “When you get a lot of private actors coming into the marketplace, folks are in it to make money … Public education is not a place for you to come to make money.”
Some of the charters don’t know how to run a school or to provide basic supplies. In one, the lights were turned off because the school didn’t pay its elecrtticity bill. Children are the losers.
“Every time a charter school closes, dozens of children are displaced — in some instances, mid-month. Many return to their neighborhood schools where some struggle to catch up because their charters did not provide required testing, instruction in basic subjects or adequate services for those with special needs.
“This isn’t just a regular business. This isn’t a restaurant that you just open up, you serve your food, people don’t like it, you close it and move on,” said Krystal Castellano, a former teacher at the now-closed Next Generation charter school. “This is education; this is students getting left in the middle of the year without a school to go to.”
When charters close, district officials are often unable to collect money that the charter didn’t spend:
“State law requires that furniture, computers and unspent money be returned to the districts, but when officials attempt to collect, charter operators sometimes cannot be found.
“We do know there have been a few [charter schools] … where hundreds of thousands of dollars were never spent on kids, and we don’t know where that money went,” said Pegg, who oversees charters in Palm Beach County. “As soon as we close the door on those schools, those people scatter … We can’t find them.”
“When a Broward school district auditor and school detective went searching for Mitchell at the Ivy Academies in September 2013, he left through a back door, records show. District officials said they have yet to find him, or to collect the $240,000 in public money the schools received for students they never had…..
“When the Miami-Dade school district demanded the return of more than $100,000 it overpaid the Tree of Knowledge Learning Academy in 2009, the year-old charter school ceased operations. The district did not recoup the money.
“It’s almost mind-blowing what’s going on,” said Rosalind Osgood, a Broward School Board member. “They just get away with it.”
Two-thirds of South Flotida’s charters are run by management companies, which further complicates the money trail. These companies collect between 10 and 97% of all revenues.
“They’re public schools in the front door; they’re for-profit closed entities in the back door,” said Kathleen Oropeza, who co-founded FundEducationNow.org, an education advocacy group based in Orlando. “There’s no transparency; the public has no ability to see where the profits are, how the money is spent.”
Given the low bar for opening charter schools in Florida, the number is expected to increase dramatically over the next five years. There are more than 600 charters in the state now. And there will be no more supervision than there is now.
Part 2 of the series tells the story of Steve Gallon, who was banned from working in Néw Jersey because of fiscal improprieties but welcomed as a charter leader in Florida.
Sounds like the laws come from or will be copied by ALEC.
No background checks are pushed in bills in state legislatures across the country. It’s an important piece to the charter scam. This way, a charter operator can hire, say, an ex-accountant who was disbarred for money laundering, and hire him as the CFO. If they get caught, charter operator gets to claim ignorance and save face by saying no background checks were to save money.
And the Bush name is synonymous with fraud.
Zak: wow!
With the Teflon Defense, anything goes.
Ohio. Over 150 exemptions from laws governing public schools. *See this blog, 8-18-14, “Ohio: As Charters Flourish, Accountability Disappears.”*
But charter schools are just like public schools, right? That’s what the advocates/promoters/sellers of charters & privatization claim over and over and over again.
Rheeally—in a Johnsonally sort of way.
But not really…
😎
P.S. Anyone else notice that the “stand-alone” application without background checks parallels the decontextualized CCSS ‘closet’ reading?
Apparently “decontextualized”/“de-background checked” = $tudent $ucce$$. Who knew?
But not to worry. It’s all about the kids.
😡
P.P.S. But with this built-in incentive to smash-and-grab, isn’t this just another version of the mid-year dump?
See the thread on a posting on this blog for 2/15/2014:
[start quote]
Yes, when a charter dumps a child, the money does NOT follow that child. They have to keep the students for a week—or a month—and they get to keep the entire year’s money allocated for that child.
Put another way, there is no pro rata amount of money that goes along with the child. If the charter kicks the kid out after a month, a nine-month allocation does not go along with that child.
Whenever public school advocates try to change this, the charter folks throw up every roadblock and obstacle that they can.
[end quote]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/15/reader-offers-a-dose-of-common-sense-about-high-test-scores/
And note the follow-up discussion on a thread in a posting on this blog of 2/18/2014 entitled “New York Comptroller Releases Charter Audits: Not a Pretty Picture.”
One of the money quotes from Steve K: “Charters get the money and we get their test scores. I have two of the students in my classes. They’re nice kids but academically behind.” Any question now why the test scores used to label, sort and rank—then punish—public school staff are squishy and abused by the education reform establishment?
But rest easy. The invisible hand of the marketplace will sort this all out. And if there are objections to the unfettered greed of free market fundamentalists answering every educational need?
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
How did I know she would say that?
😏
Why is it than such widespread fraud and theft rarely hit the media? Is it because the people that own the media are also invested in these charters? The school districts should be able to sue the state government for lost revenue since the governor and legislature are the fools that passed this ridiculous law.
It seems that these concerns tend to be very state specific. We read a lot about Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, but little about financial scandals in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and even New York City.
Perhaps different regulations make a difference.
It is obvious that the charter school scam is out to control all over the country. It is obvious there is no regulation or oversight. It is obvious our taxpayers money is paying for this debacle.
My question is this: If Arne Duncan and the education gods think Common Core is so great and so necessary for all children, why do they not impose these standards on charter and private schools?
Maybe these regulations don’t apply to charters because their main purpose is to demoralize and weaken public education so the charters can swoop in like vultures. Why else would you design a test where most participants fail? Back in college, I was told that my tests should reveal a bell shaped curve; if most fail, it was MY failure! I guess Pearson never took a testing and measurement course.
You can bet that a sizeable percentage of the missing money is kicked back to the very politicians who enable the fraud. It is simply the economic dynamics of the situation.
How are charter schools in Colorado Springs operated? I’m curious about The Classical Academy. Are the teachers certified? Is enrollment open to all students? Do they receive public school funds? Do the students have to take the same state tests? I am a former superintendent of an 8,000 enrollment school district in Texas and now live part of the year in Colorado Springs. I hear a lot of praise for these “public” charter schools.
Athens111, please find out about Colorado law governing charters and let us know.
It was a sad day when the phrase “education entrepreneur” entered our vocabulary.
Absolutely mindblowing. Why is this not on the front page of Washington Post, NYT????
There’s this weird absence of discussion in ed reform circles about charter schools in FL, OH, MI and PA. All I ever hear are the Big Prestigious Names out of NYC and Boston.
It’s just odd. These states have completely deregulated “charter sectors”, many of them are run by for-profit chains, and yet all read about are the schools with the high scores in Boston and NYC.
It’s not an urban/suburban/rural thing either, because of course FL, MI, OH and PA have large urban areas. This huge swath of the country has a profit-driven “charter sector” run by national companies and contractors, and it’s just completely ignored by all the high-profile policy people. They play with the numbers, too. They count schools rather than students when comparing for-profit charters to non-profit charters, but that’s deceptive. The question should be how many CHILDREN now attend for–profit K-12 schools.
It isn’t just FL. It’s OH, MI, PA and FL.
I thought this was enlightening. It’s the sales pitches of national management companies who hope to privatize Pennsylvania’s public schools.
You can read their actual pitch. I didn’t even know Edison was still in business. That was the corporation Chris Christie worked for, right?
Charter Schools USA seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. It must be absolutely huge by now. How many schools has that one entity privatized? How many states?
http://www.ydr.com/yorkcity/ci_26346506/potential-york-city-charter-school-operators-be-narrowed
Also, we always talk about the charter schools in the deregulated, for-profit states of FL, OH, MI and PA.
That’s only half the story. There’s still a lot of kids in public schools in these states. How’d you like to be one of them? Their lawmakers and “representatives” have either completely abandoned their unfashionable schools, or are actively working toward replacing them.
The headline on this post could be about just about any topic. I can say that about FLorida because I was born there and spent the start of my journalism career chasing the weirdities of the region for the Miami Herald. But don’t take my word for it. Florida fans of Carl Hiaasen’s novels know they’re so funny because they exaggerate so little…1:-{)>
Jeffrey Weiss, that’s true about Florida, the land of boom and bust. But I could say a few things about Texas…..
Jonathan Alter says it’s “baloney” that people are making money off charter schools:
http://njmonthly.com/articles/towns_and_schools/jonathan-alter-school-reform-magic-classroom.html
Everyone in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan are just imaging this is happening.
These scam charter operators don’t exist, according to Jonathan Alter.
I wish journalists in these states would stop with these crazy conspiracy theories!
Did you see Jonathan Alter in “Waiting for Superman”? He looks into the camera and says, “We know what works. Testing and accountability work.” This from a political journalist who knows zero about schooling.
know the intimate friend of Jeb Bush called jonathan gage is leading the scholls charter and soon made a fortune Money