Florida is controlled by Swamp creatures who want to divert money from public schools and send it to charter schools and religious schools. Jeb Bush is the puppet master who has demanded strict accountability for public schools, minimal oversight of charter schools, and no accountability at all for religious schools.
In this article, Carol Burris—the executive director of the Network for Public Education—examines the charter school mess. Florida has about three million students. About 300,000 attend charter schools. Some members of the Legislature have direct conflicts of interest but nonetheless vote to shower favors and money on the state’s charters.
Burris reports that nearly half of the state’s charters operate for profit. Entrepreneurs have flocked to Florida to get the easy money.
Burris begins:
Schoolsforsale.com claims to be “the largest school brokers in the United States that you will need to call.” Its owner, Realtor David Mope, is a broker for private schools, online schools and preschools. He will also help you start your own virtual school by providing certified teachers, marketing expertise, and assistance in securing accreditation.
Mope is not a newcomer to the for-profit school world. He was the owner and CEO of Acclaim Academy, a military-style charter chain. Acclaim’s “cadets,” who were predominantly minority students from low-income homes, wore army fatigues and engaged in drills. The schools’ education director, Bill Orris, had previously led a charter school that was shut down after its management company abandoned it.
Warning signs of failure were there from the beginning. The chain aggressively attempted to open new schools in multiple districts before establishing a track record in its two existing schools. Most districts saw red flags, but two did not. In the fall of 2013, two more Acclaim schools were approved, bringing the total schools in the chain to four.
As school grades came in, unsurprisingly, the Acclaim Academy charter schools were rated “F.” In 2015, three closed their doors, leaving families in the lurch in a manner that parents described as chaos. Although Florida’s State Board of Education had allowed the schools to stay open to finish the school year, Mope filed for bankruptcy, sending students out on the street scrambling to enroll in another school with only a few weeks left in the school year. Vendors would never be paid. Parents helped teachers pack up. Nevertheless, Mope pretended the schools were solvent and continued to broker a deal to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment.
How could Acclaim Academy ever open in the first place? Who would give this risky charter chain the seed money to get started? The American taxpayers did. A U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program (CSP) grant for $744,198 helped get the Acclaim Academies off the ground.
Acclaim Academy charter schools were among 502 Florida charter schools that received grants from the Department of Education between 2006 and 2014. All but two came from federal money given to the state for distribution. According to the CSP database, these Florida charter schools were awarded a total of nearly $92 million in federal funds between 2006 and 2014.
At least 184 (36.6 percent) of those schools are now closed, or never opened at all. These defunct charter schools received $34,781,736 in federal “seed” money alone.
Diane,
The first paragraph says it all: TRUE and just so sad. Florida is sinking so “swamp creatures” is a good term.
“Florida is controlled by Swamp creatures who want to divert money from public schools and send it to charter schools and religious schools. Jeb Bush is the puppet master who has demanded strict accountability for public schools, minimal oversight of charter schools, and no accountability at all for religious schools.”
not only Jeb but the entire Bush family benefiting heavily from FL-style investment in school reform
Too bad there is not a way to apply and enforce some verion of The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), to impose serious consequences on the fraud, waste, and abuse in the charter school industry especially since so many of these franchises are multi-state operations made possible by federal funds in addition to private money. The alternative is to oranize and vote out the legislators who support these frauds.
Thanks, Laura! This is the best idea I have heard all day. Any proceedings would bring unwanted publicity to this corporate shell game. Maybe it would force the public to wake up from its deep sleep.
Schoolsforsale dot com is a thing? I don’t believe it. This is a joke, right? I clicked the link to the website, and well, that is one elaborate hoax just to poke fun at how far down into the muck online venture capitalism has descended. Schools for sale? Really? For anyone without any credentials or qualifications? Schools for sale? What’s next, children for sale? Governments for sale? This can’t be reality.
Florida is ground zero for profiteering profligates. We need someone to research how much various states have wasted on useless privatization. The current climate is absurd. Florida and other states keep throwing public money into various privatization schemes without the public weighing in on where the money is going or how the money is spent. We need accountability figures to let the taxpayers know how much money is getting dropped into the black hole of privatization. Taxpayers should be asking representatives what’s the return on this “investment?”
“Schools for sale” – the hideous end result of the billionaires’ decades-long drive to destroy the cornerstone of American democracy, our public schools.
God help us ….
This is all in the great Florida tradition of grift. Yes, selling sinkholes and swampland to Yankees has mostly given way to late-night erectile dysfunction infomercials (yes, a big industry in Florida), casinos, tort law, strip clubs, megachurches, and charter schools, but it’s still the capital of the con. No wonder Mar-a-lago is located here! OF COURSE the man who brought you Trump University would locate here. It’s wilder than the Wild West, AND we have cotton mouths, mosquitoes the size of Labradors, and gaters in every drop of fresh water. Basically, ne’er-do-wells throughout the country flee the law until they can’t flee any further because there’s an ocean in the way. O Florida! Of thee I sing!
Conversation (I am not making this up) at the Tampa, Florida Department of Motor Vehicles:
Elderly woman: It’s a wonder they gave it to me [her license]. I’m blind as a bat.
Me: Then you’ll be right at home on the roads here.
cx: gator, ofc
it’s up! https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Florida-s-charter-school-s-in-General_News-Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis_For-profit-Education_Fraud-190505-504.html#comment733032
with comments: (with links at the page at OPED)
Florida oh Florida …what a mess! “The Tampa Bay Times published a powerful editorial about the Legislature’s enactment of yet another voucher program for private and religious schools. Needless to say, the Legislature does nothing for public schools other than to divert funding to nonpublic schools, enact mandates, and harass teachers.”
“The schools that get vouchers will not be subject to the school letter grades foisted on public schools. They will be free to take the students they want and throwout those they don’t want. They don’t have to follow the state curriculum standards or take state tests. Their teachers don’t have to be certified. They are relieved of any accountability, while public schools are submerged in it.”
Peter Greene: Florida is the Worst State in the Nation for Public Schools and Teachers
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/05/florida-really-is-worst.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FORjvzd+%28CURMUDGUCATION%29
“Peter Greene knows there are many states where public schools are under attack: Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Michigan, and more. But one state stands out as the absolute worst: Florida. If you hate public schools, Florida is for you. If you hate teachers, go to Florida. To get the full flavor of why Florida is an abomination, open the link and read the post. It begins: There are plenty of states in the country that are not very friendly to public education, but Florida under its new governor has established itself as the very worst state for public education. The worst. Its hatred of public school teachers and its absolute determination to dismantle public education so that it can sell off the pieces to privatizers and profiteers puts the sunshine state in the front of the pack.”