A reader describes the situation in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a community with good public schools:
“Further to the point about GREAT home-grown administrators, Fort Wayne Community Schools has another bit of good news today: Two genuinely abysmal local charter schools lost their certification and their appeal today!
http://www.wane.com/dpp/news/education/two-fort-wayne-schools-lose-charter-contracts
(These are the folks who won’t scoop up one of our empty school buildings for $1/year, an available option that our ever-so-friendly state legislature mandates. Instead, these folks BUY real estate and buildings, and then LEASE…from themselves!! That way, about $3 of every $4 they get in public funding….goes right past the school books and into THEIR real estate books!!
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110417/EDIT/304179965/1147/EDIT07
but we digress!
Today’s news would be really TREMENDOUS news, except that with Indiana’s ridiculously nihilistic Republican legislature, even Fort Wayne’s excellent locally controlled and locally administered public school system is NEVER more than the stroke of a pen away from some cataclysmic new “education initiative” (read “voucher expansion”).
Just the other day we learned that Carpe Diem – who wants to open a new cubicle farm “school” within a block of one of our best high schools, failed to get enough applicants to go into business…errr…operation next year. So, Carpet Bombing…errrr…Carpe Diem announced that they’d skip opening next year and go for a 2014 opening!
But, you say, their application – which got a rubber-stamp approval from Indiana’s charter approval board – was for a 2013 opening, even despite that their public hearing was a full house of public education supporters who ALL spoke against approval for Carpet Bombing our public schools. But alas – the board skipped the “hearing” part of their public hearing, and approved the application anyway, and NOW – the Carpe Diem people have taken upon themselves to unilaterally revise and extend their “approval” beyond what they plainly are limited to. Some people (mainly, our tremendously passionate FWCS school board president, Mark GiaQuinta, and all the informed citizens, parents, and stakeholders in FWCS) think that it is plainly OUTRAGEOUS that these Carpet Baggers can just swoop in, rewrite the rules and the laws to suit themselves, and scoop as much money as they possibly can out of the public education system before the lights come on or clock runs out (or even beyond that point, with their friends in the state capital)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The hedge funds brag that they can double their money in 7 years instead of 12 years by being in education. There are special tax breaks and such which allow this with investing in property for schools. Major game as the regular charter schools are salivating at the prospect of taking ownership of public school buildings as property is a big part of what this game is all about. Then you have the supply contracts as contracts is where the rubber meets the road. It is all about percentages. As the hedge funds brag “We learned there is a lot of money in education.” Yes, it is more than the DOD budget as K-12 general fund is over $700 billion and the DOD budget is about $642 billion. Big money and investors need a new profit center and that is education. You not only get the money you make the next generation what you want for you to make max profit and not care about their best interests. After all “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
There has to be a lot of financial impropriety with these charters. If you want to know the game read the latest DOE OIG audit of the total lack of accountability of charter schools at every level in the states of Florida, Arizona and California. This audit is DOE-OIG/A02L0002. I am willing to bet the conditions are the same in your state. These people are simpletons and do not change their strategy.
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In that sense, the name “Carpe Diem” certainly is apt.
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Carpe aurem.
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Carpe cole.
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