Jeb Bush is trying to present himself to the public as a moderate. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When it comes to education, Jeb Bush boasts of the wonderful transformation of the schools in Florida, but that is not an accurate portrayal of what Bush actually did. With his far-right dedication to privatization, he has created a voracious industry of greed, which relies on the public’s gullibility. Some of his allies are getting very rich, but the children of Florida are not benefitting by the opening and closing of charter schools, many of which operate for-profit.
Jeff Bryant describes how Jeb did it, knowing full well that he would destroy public education at the same time:
The obsession over money that is driving charter school growth in Florida is increasingly evident to those who bother to look.
“Outrageous,” is the word former state Senator Nan Rich uses to describe recent decisions Florida lawmakers made to steer more money toward these schools. Until she termed out, Rich represented the 34th District that overlaps part of Broward County. Although she has never opposed charter schools, she now believes financial demands coming from the sector have become unreasonable.
As a recent article in Florida’s Herald-Tribune notes, for the past two years, only charter schools have received capital outlay funds from the state for new construction. Now charter school lobbyists say their schools deserve a share of local property taxes too.
“When they were started, charters were never supposed to tap capital funds,” Rich explains, “but gradually lawmakers with ties to the charter industry tipped the scales to favor them financially.”
“I’m not one who opposes charter schools that are set up the way they were intended,” Rich adds. But she now believes, “The whole movement … is undermining public education and moves public money to private interests.”
What Rich and Jensen describe is an increasing fear among parents and public officials across South Florida – and Broward County in particular – that any educational value charter schools were supposed to bring to the state is now overshadowed by corruption and chaos linked to money-making.
A new consensus is percolating from the ground up that those responsible for starting and operating charter schools, and making decisions to support the growth of these schools, “don’t understand children,” as Jensen puts it. They’re mostly, “motivated by money….”
Most people trace the manic scramble for more charter schools in Florida to one source: former governor and current Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush. In 1996, two years before he became governor, Bush helped steer passage of the state’s first law permitting charter schools. That same year, he led the effort to open the state’s first charter, Liberty City Charter School in Miami.
During Bush’s first administration, charter school growth averaged a whopping 56 percent annually in the Sunshine State, according to a Florida-focused NPR outlet. Annual growth rates during his second and final four-year term dropped to 17 percent, but by the time Bush left office in 2007, charter schools across the state had grown from a modest 30 in total to well over 300. The number of Florida charter schools has since doubled to over 600.
In his initial campaign to promote these schools, Bush maintained that charter schools would rescue students from supposedly failed public schools, especially in low-income communities of color. But by 2009 – two years after he left office – Bush’s rationale for charter schools had significantly changed.
According to a Palm Beach Post news article published that year, Bush debuted his revamped message at a summit put on by his non-profit organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, in Washington D.C. In his speech to that group, he declared, “I wish our schools could be more like milk. … Go down the aisle of nearly any major supermarket these days and you will find an incredible selection of milk. … They even make milk for people who can’t drink milk.”
Bush would repeat his observation from the dairy aisle three years later at the Republican National Convention of 2012, and what was once thought of as a civil rights cause became firmly established as a campaign for a new business-oriented model that would offer increased consumer “choice.”
“It started as a movement and now it’s an industry,” Vickie Marble, a well-known Florida charter school advocate, gleefully declared to NPR reporters chronicling the evolving messaging campaign.
One of Jeb’s favorite charter chains is Academica:
With nearly 100 schools in Florida “and well over $150 million in annual revenue,” Academica has been a key player in charter school expansions in the state since 1999. And Bush has shown an affinity for the schools for years. “As governor,” Hensley-Clancy reports, “Bush visited Academica schools several times, his emails show.”
But Academica has a long history of financial wheeling and dealing, so much so the organization is now the target of “an ongoing federal probe into its real estate dealings,” as the Miami Herald reported in 2014. While the 1996 law allowing charters to operate in Florida restricted applicants to nonprofit groups only, profit-minded charter businesses like Academica have skirted that restriction.
Another of his buddies runs the for-profit Charter Schools USA chain:
Another large, Florida-based, for-profit charter school chain, Charter Schools USA, practices a similar business scheme. As a Florida television outlet reported in 2014, “Charter Schools USA makes millions by managing schools, but tens of millions building and renting their buildings.”
The reporters note that when a non-profit board opens a new charter school and contracts with Charter Schools USA to manage it, Charter Schools USA’s for-profit “development arm, Red Apple Development, acquires land and constructs a school. Then, CUSA charges the school high rent.” One charter school paid “a $2 million rent payment to CUSA/Red Apple Development. The payment will equate to approximately 23 percent of its budget.”
Academica and Charter Schools USA are hardly the only large charter chains operating under these kinds of business practices in Florida and generating significant growth as a result. According to Hall’s research, “The top four charter operators in Florida for 2011-2012 were Academica (72), Charter Schools USA (37), Charter School Associates (20), and Imagine Schools (23).” More recent research by Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker finds that large charter school chains – the ones mentioned by Hall, as well as others like White Hat Management, Rader Group, the Richard Milburn Academy and KIPP – dominate the state.
As governor, then later as the head of his influential foundation, Jeb Bush did everything he could to facilitate these sorts of charter school business dealings. As MacGillis explains in his piece for the New Yorker, “Bush signed a law allowing charter operators who were denied approval by local school boards to appeal to the state.” The “state,” in this case means the Florida State Board of Education, which was appointed by, you guessed it, Gov. Bush.
If he is elected President, we can say farewell to public education and hello to financial schemes that generate millions for charter chains.
Spread the news. Send Jeff Bryant’s story to every newspaper writer, every TV reporter, every editorial board.
Jeb Bush is no moderate. He is a front man for the avaricious.
¡JEB! and his ilk are trying to engineer a social transformation that converts all social institutions into corporate industries. They know they cannot pull this off through democratic means and so they are doing it by means of every other hook and crook they can cook up.
“Transforming all social institutions into corporate industries”. The word is …….”fascism”…….and every fascist effort in the history has failed within a few years….every one!
Educators have been screaming about charters and the corporations making them forever. Does it take complete bankruptcy of public schools for taxpayers to decide enough is enough Jeb BUSH hAs always been about the per cent, always will be. He enables them to fleece Florida taxpayers out of their education money and they kickback money for his run for President. That’s how they do it, they need to be stopped right now.
Good piece on charter school property/lease deals in PA:
“The issue isn’t limited to Philadelphia, according to state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, who is conducting a statewide review of charter leases.
“About half the charter schools we’ve audited basically have this circular arrangement where there’s an entity that owns the building and an entity that leases the building, and they’re connected,” he said.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20150914_The_get-richbusiness_of_charter_consulting.html#ja6LOf2mthLT4QOJ.99
We should probably stop pretending this stuff is limited to Ohio.
FL, OH, MI and PA is a big chunk of the country, and that’s not including any of the “wild west” ed reform states in the actual western part of the country- Arizona comes to mind.
It is definitely not limited to Ohio. It is happening everywhere, including where I live in North Carolina. Charter schools are now all about the money. Real estate contracts are one of the more lucrative ways to put public money into the pockets of the charter school owners. Another lucrative scheme is online charter schools. Two just opened in North Carolina. The state is going to pay around $6000 per student the company needs only one teacher per 50 students in grades K-8 and only one teacher per 150 students in grades 9-12. Yes! A teacher-students ratio of 1:150 in high school. Nationally, 2/3 of students who start in an online charter school drop out of the school. It is all about the money. The legislators of North Carolina could have just skipped the masquerade and given these companies cash from the state treasury.
Thanks. I thought NC would be next because they were putting in the same policies that failed in Ohio. They can’t regulate hundreds of schools at the state level, even if they wanted to (and they don’t want to). It’s been so strange to see the Ohio schemes spread over 17 years, because some of these states are right next door! Why Michigan would adopt Ohio’s failed charter scheme is beyond me, but they did.
It is another ploy to get taxpayers to underwrite their profit.
Thanks Diane. What I found in South Florida should alarm any parent — charter schools being allowed to open without crossing guards and fire escapes. And in the mean time, people profiting off these substandard schools. Shameful.
With a little tweaking, the article could be titled, “How Kasich turned Ohio’s schools into chaos, corruption and cronyism”. And, Kasich, like Jeb, didn’t do it alone. It took the grand, profit ambitions of the 0.2%, under the guise of helping America.
And don’t forget the President and his team.
DC has funded and promoted this every single step of the way. Arne Duncan and President Obama promote Jeb Bush and Jeb Bush turns around and promotes Arne Duncan.
It’s working out very well for all of them.
I still can’t figure out how these three national politicians manage to ignore OH, FL, MI and PA when they’re congratulating each other on their awesome “reforms”, but they do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/17/jeb-and-arne-together-again/
JEB(?) is no moderate, in fact, none of the GOP candidates are moderates. He not only would destroy public education but he would return us to trickle down economics on steroids. His toxic tax plan: he proposes to cut the number of individual tax brackets from seven to three, taxing income at 28 percent, 25 percent and 10 percent. Currently, the top marginal income tax rate is 39.6 percent.
His proposals would double the standard tax deduction that most filers take, end what Republicans call the “death tax” on estates of the deceased and seek to make marriage more beneficial for tax purposes.
Mr. Bush also proposed cutting the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent and giving incentives to invest domestically as he seeks to spur economic growth to 4 percent annually, an objective that has been met with skepticism by economists.
All these tax cuts would lead to a massive loss of revenue and would massively increase the deficits and the national debt. This from the party which is always howling about the deficits when a Democrat is in the White House. Bush would then scream for massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA and any social programs that help the poor and even the middle class. It’s called, starve the beast so that you can drown government in a bathtub and cripple its ability to help the ordinary people. The rich must be rewarded and the poor must be punished under the Bush tax plan. Ugh!
Why do these fools keep voting for people that want to destroy the federal government and make America an arm of corporate greed and power? Citizens are just there to be exploited. No wonder they are not resonating with voters.
$$$$$!!!!! It’s all about PROFITS for the FEW.
Democrats are rolling out their college plan at a public school:
Must be campaign season again. Time to show up at the much-maligned “government schools”! Look for your state representatives to start appearing also. They will declare their undying devotion to the same schools they spend most of their time trashing and hope you don’t know what they’re up to in the statehouse.
I wonder when reporters will start challenging him on his statements.
I have said it over and over, as long as parents send kids to these schools, they will continue. It is up to the parents to demand accountability from politicians.
Bruce, as PT Barnum said, there’s a sucker born every minute. The advertising and PR business lives on that maxim.
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
Do we really want this fraud to be the 3rd Bush to move into the White House?
How are these charter schools not violating civil rights?? I have heard Kasich say that the solution is to have a separate school for problem students (so the charters can cherry pick their students). I imagine the school for problem students would be private as well.
Kasich already has separate schools for problem students. He has for-profit “credit recovery” schools.
He turned the most vulnerable students over to his biggest charter campaign donor:
http://www.whitehatmgmt.com/schools/Life-Skills-Centers
I met a woman last week with a son who attended online. His girlfriend did all the work, which he neglected to tell her until 2 years after he “graduated”. He basically skipped high school, although I think his girlfriend probably learned something.
From the article — “Michael Ryan, mayor of the city of Sunrise, a Broward municipality, is another local official who is grappling with the impact of charters without seeing any strongly expressed need for the schools coming from his constituents. In his view, the original idea of charters was to open in neighborhoods where citizens felt the schools are not working. But “we’re not that type of community,” he tells me during a conversation in his office. “We love our schools.””
And yet he voted to allow a charter school to open in the city. It is located in an industrial area across the street from an in-patient rehab (health, not drugs) within two miles of five elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school.
Former Senator Nan Rich kept the Broward Inspector General from having oversight of the Broward School District (her daughter is on the school board). A 2011 grand jury report called the school board inept and corrupted by contractors and lobbyists. The ex-Broward Teachers Union President is facing charges from both the state and the feds. I wonder if the IG had oversight over the district schools if they would have had oversight of the charter schools since the district authorizes them? That would have been a good thing.
Bushes are the epitome of the corruption and nepotism in America. Why would anybody vote for him.
Jeb is finally getting “his”…..that is for sure. What goes around comes around. I love the low energy Jeb commercial. Jeb should never get President of the U.S. with all of the damage he has done to Florida schools. Never.