If only I had known sooner, I would have posted the announcement of today’s symposium.
Yes! There is money to be made by investing in charter schools! It’s all about the children! It’s the civil rights issue of our time! And a great investment too!!
“Bonds and Blackboards: Investing in Charter Schools (New York, NY)
Symposium – July 10, 2013; 9:30 – 6:30 PM
WHAT: A one-day symposium to help Wall Street – especially the tax-exempt bond market – understand the value of investing in charter schools and best practices for assessing their bond credit.
WHEN: Wed., July 10 – 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (Registration and breakfast begin at 8:30 a.m.)
WHERE: The Harvard Club of New York City, 35 West 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
WHO: Confirmed speakers include Noah Wepman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; LISC CEO Michael Rubinger; charter school investors Alliance Bernstein, Hamlin Capital and Nuveen; commercial bankers; bond underwriter RBC Capital Markets; and rating agency Standard & Poor’s. The charter school sector will be represented by SUNY, a charter school authorizer; charter support organizations; and charter school operators.
The keynote speaker is Brett Peiser, CEO of Uncommon Schools, a charter school network of 32 schools in the Northeast that has successfully reversed the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income counterparts.
Registration for this event is now closed.
If you are interested in attending, please email effc@lisc.org to see if we can accommodate you.
Location: Harvard Club
35 West 44th Street
City: New York
State: New York”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many school districts use bonds, sold by a variety of companies, to help finance construction and/or purchase of new school buildings. Selling these bonds involves significant profits to the companies that are involved with these bonds.
I’m not a huge fan of this situation, but many districts do use these firms (some of which are headquartered in New York – on or near Wall Street) to help develop and market bond packages for school facilities.
Although it’s not entirely clear, the focus of this meeting appears to be on selling bonds for charter public school facilities. There is a comment that “However, the percentage of the nation’s 5,600 charter schools that have accessed the tax-exempt market for their permanent facility financing needs remains below 10%.” So although it’s not entirely clear, I think this may be about sharing experience with bonds that permit the construction and/or purchase of buildings for charters.
Perhaps some of the people active on this website can research the profits made by companies that are involved with bonds that enable district public schools to construct and/or purchase buildings.
These profit seeking ventures hope to continue to cash in on the bashing of public schools. In fact, they have a vested interest in actual or perceived failure, and are investing as such. New school rating formulas–letter grades for Ohio schools–combined with the Common Core will surely help.
Bonds are the best way to make a lot of money off of charter schools as there are special tax exemptions which make it so that hedge funds can double their money in 7 years instead of 12 years and they brag about it. Bonds for school construction on the other hand are also great revenue generators at they make it on two sides the interest and on the construction. At LAUSD there are $27 billion in these bonds. They construct at 2-3 times the going rate in L.A. County according to their records and the Calif. Office of Public School Construction study in Jan. 2008. L.A. County is only 1.04 or 4% above the national average as only labor is more excluding property acquisition. I have checked. When you construct how many of your projects will you get done? When you are losing in district enrollment 8,000/year and to charter schools 10,000/year why all the construction and why illegally spend that money on equipment, I-Pads, which will only last 2-3 years not the minimum of 10 years as is the law. As I continue to say we live in a lawless country, for the rich and powerful that is. We have been studying their tricks internationally. They are cookie cutter as is the way they falsely charge teachers and terminate them without “Due Process.” At LAUSD, board member Galatzan is a lawyer and asst. D.A. for the L.A. D.A.’s office. She does not believe in “Due Process” as a result of her statements on teachers by just being said that they might have done something wrong to be terminated and to lose their credential. It just took a friend in this position 20 weeks to get their credential back. Would you like to be prosecuted or have your job and life on the line with someone who does not believe in “Due Process?” I would like to see what she would do if it were her on the other side. By the way she is one of the biggest charter school backers.
Do any of you also think there are some nice offshore accounts for those who help the fascist oligarchs?
No need for that in Illinois, where a $98M grant was given away to UNO, one charter management organization, to build a couple of new charter schools. Or charters can just rent an existing school building here for $1.
Considering all the free startup money provided through tax dollars, charters are the lowest risk investment I have ever heard of.
How do people in Chicago respond to that? Is there any sense that this is ridiculously inequitable? I saw the giant gleaming UNO facility amid all the anguish and heart break over losing neighborhood schools, and I wondered if people in the city see it that way.
Is there a sense of “wow, this is just really unfair” to the vast majority of kids?
This isn’t about whether public schools (which in many cases need them because of other funding issues within their municipality) or even private school use bonds for capital projects – that’s common.
My question about this symposium and how it informed Wall Street, is, are we talking about public bonds or are we talking strictly about wall street making private loans to charter companies? If so, and, the charter is receiving free space in a public building, then, I’d want to know if a charter’s charter is revoked, does the company remain on the hook for the private funding. If we’re talking about private companies buying private land with a private loan – then this is a basic issue of the “for-profit” nature of charters – but isn’t a new problem with the public essentially financing a private purchase.
If it’s private companies making loans to private for-profit businesses in the public sector, then there’s just not that much new here.
It’s my impression that this was a sarcastic post, but anyone who’s seriously interested in the relationship between Wall Street and charter schools probably have learned a lot at this symposium.
Clearly you have no idea how public schools finance themselves and you must have missed stories like this where public district school administrators made huge mistakes with Wallstreet and cost the taxpayers millions.
….
Denver Public Schools to spend $177.4M to end swap deals
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/print-edition/2013/04/12/denver-public-schools-to-spend-1774m.html
Denver Public Schools is putting the last chunk of an exotic pension finance deal into traditional fixed-rate debt, but it will cost Denver taxpayers nearly $140 million to do so.
That’s on top of a multimillion-dollar payment DPS made in 2011 in order to fix out other parts of the original debt.
The bulk of the $140 million, an estimated $135.4 million in unwinding fees, will be paid to three banks — Wells Fargo & Co., Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Bank of America — to end the “swap” deals DPS has with those banks on $396 million in variable interest-rate bonds, according to DPS estimates, as of April 3.
…..
Wonder how many ‘fradulent’ vouchers $177 million equals.
“The keynote speaker is Brett Peiser, CEO of Uncommon Schools, a charter school network of 32 schools in the Northeast that has successfully reversed the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income counterparts.”
Well — as Uncommon Schools in fact done this? If they are blowing smoke with this claim, how are they doing so?
Of course Gates Foundation was there.
Why bother getting elected? You can run the public school system in the US with a straight purchase. Cut out the elected middleman completely!
They really ARE innovative. They’ve come up with a very streamlined model of “government”
When regular public schools use taxpayer dollars to fund construction using bonds, in the end, taxpayers owns an improved or new facility or new equipment. Wen a charter school uses school funds to buy or build facilities, who owns those buildings? From what I have seen in at least one charter chain, a separate entity owns the property and school funds, 25% in this case, are paid in ‘rent’. In the end, a for profit or non-profit agency retains the title.
I uploaded a series of 40+ slides from an earlier LISC/Royal Bank of Canada webcast that was a precursor to the July 10 event
http://dwelker.tumblr.com/post/55134482798/orrick-and-bond-buyer-charter-school-bonds-presentation
Orrick and Bond Buyer Charter School Bonds Presentation
The slides speak for themselves but are probably the short version of what the July 10 event at the Hahvahd Club in NYC covered. LISC was involved in both. The smug comes through exceptionally well with Billy “Its all for the benjamins I mean kids” Wildman.
Note that one of the “Exemplar Transactions” is for New Plan Learning, the land-owning wing of Gulenists’ chain Concept Schools. It would have been a much bigger deal if it hadn’t have been for those meddling kids. Fitch downgraded these bonds in March 2013 but it was a mixed assessment with bleets of increasing enrollment supporting increasing revenue (note the absence of the “best practices” supporting academic performance that LISC feels necessary).
It will be interesting to see how the interest rate shock impacts the deals in the pipeline. This year’s first six months saw 26 issuances close compared to 28 in same period in 2012 and 22 in same period in 2011.
It is impossible to not see this all as legally-sanctioned racketeering.
Combine that with the impunity, arrogance and hypocrisy, and it’s sickening.
Read about Noah Wepman, when he worked for Michelle Rhee in DC:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dc/2009/11/gray_calls_for_wepmans_ouster.html
Seems like he caught a ride on the gravy train.
Every SUNY graduate should send a message to SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher and let her know conspiring with Wall Street and sanctioning charters is NOT acceptable!
There are many folks getting very rich from financing/developing/building public charter schools, however, keep in mind that similar profits are made when building regular public schools too. One area that needs to be fixed is how charter management organizations make profits in developing their own school buildings. See the Miami Herald’s “Cashing in on Kids” article: http://www.miamiherald.com/charterschools/
Also read: http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/make-big-money-building-charter-schools