This is a stunning research job by Jersey Jazzman about the money tree that is turning canny businessmen into multimillionaires by investing in charter schools.
They package financing from the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. Department of Education, the Walton Family Foundation, and they spin it into gold–for themselves.
The family charter group he describes controls over $100 million in real estate. They have gotten very, very rich.
Here is his conclusion. Please read the whole post. It is jaw-dropping.
“…while we can debate the relative merits of charter schools, one thing is quite certain: any notion that the charter industry is “all about the kids” needs to be dismissed, because there are adults who are clearly making a lot of money off of charter expansion. And it’s not just people like the Zuluetas: Bruno himself, according to Building Hope’s 2011 tax return, earned $388,709 in compensation and another $56,865 in benefits for a year’s work. In contrast, the average Florida teacher salary is $45,723.”
These are the same people who claim that teachers don’t put children first. What do they put first? It is not the children.
– See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/07/make-big-money-building-charter-schools.html#sthash.9D3ptFh6.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can this situation be compared to anything else that has ever happened in US? I seriously want to know. Is there any prediction about how this “make money on charters” will play out over the next decade? I get why it is bothersome, but what are the predictions? Can anyone paint that scene? (I imagine open, welcoming public schools being fewer and farther between, making the ease of knowing there is a school for your child more frustrating. Also you, as a parent, are at the mercy of whatever charter school management decides, which could be tricky).
??
The best analogy and prophecy would be gotten by looking at the way the Defense-“Intelligence”-Security Sector (DISS) works today. A franchise to suck up the dollars, the lives, and the sacred honors of the People with one sweetheart, mutual back-scratching, Good Ole Boy deal after another, its ancillary mission being to disinform the public by way of evading even the most token oversight.
Just look at the health care “industry”. What was once a mainly not for profit sector turned into a for profit sector and what has it gotten us? Excellent health care for those who can afford it (certainly not the average Joe and Jane) and non existent or crappy care for the rest.
Look at how “Cheney’s Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion on Iraq War” because our government enabled “the privatization of what were former U.S. military operations,” so profiteering by private corporations “rose to unprecedented levels” http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/308-12/16561-focus-cheneys-halliburton-made-395-billion-on-iraq-war
And similar to the privatization of the prisons. As a matter of fact, the effort by Pearson to make the GED test much harder and much more expensive can only raise the bar for people to pass. Without a h.s.diploma or GED accreditation, people will the already scarce jobs are that much scarcer. And taking to the streets that much more viable.
people will find — excuse me
Corrupt. Disgusting. Sad. Men with lots of money who don’t have benevolence within, so they can’t give for the betterment of all, can’t focus on the greater good…instead their greed drives them to desire and obtain more money, on the backs of small children. We must find ways to empower the children.
It was always a bad argument. If teachers are self-interested because they work for public schools, then every charter operator, investor, employee, publicist and lobbyist are also self-interested because they work for privatized schools.
The point was to discredit advocates for public schools. Period.
It only works if teachers are the ONLY advocates for public schools, which (sadly) was true for a long time.
Duncan said at the charter industry convention that 94% of kids attend traditional.public schools. If you’re an advocate for public schools you’re an advocate for the 94% of kids who have been abandoned by adults in government.
We should be asking reformers why never, ever advocate for MOST kids, but ONLY work on behalf of privatized schools.
So it is smoke and mirrors based on the assumption that teachers are not up to the job and sponging off a bad system.
Why is it that I get told by non-educators that historically teachers are whiny? Really. Who started that cliche?
I don’t know if you’ve heard that anywhere besides from some of the right-wing posters on this blog, but if you read the comments section of most newspaper articles that blame teachers, for everything from the economy to poverty, people say a lot worse things about teachers because they tend to believe the propaganda.
In fact, teachers have spent the last thirty years of education “reform” saying very little about it publicly. They are really only just now speaking up, after being subjected to a witch-hunt over the past five years.
When politicians and corporate “reformers” eventually lose the war they have waged on public education and teachers in America, in order to privatized education, this era is bound to go down in history as the Teacher Inquisition.
It gets worse. Fernando Zulueta is the brother-in-law of Florida State Representative Erik Fresen. He hired State Senator Anitere Flores to be CEO of Doral College, Inc., a non-profit charter school and private college company.
And we have the nerve to call other countries corrupt. Who but the U.S. could crash the finances of most of the world till today with nothing happening? Who buy the U.S. could get away with stopping another head of states plane illegally and nothing happens. Who but the U.S. could start two illegal wars, kill millions of people, waste our money and with 1.5 soldiers dying a day call it a war? More have died from suicide. How do we count them and the PTSD not to speak of the horrors laid on those we terrorize. What good have we done there? So, why not do our own people, our students? It fits the package. After all, a rich guy needs a new profit center to feel good. And that is important if you are in Washington and want to stay in office. Fear of not being reelected is the main fear of politicians. Remember that.
Nothing more than a legalized racket. Charters are doing.nothing to improve education in US. I cant believe USDOE has backed this racket. A bunch of crooks
In some school districts, such as in my majoral controlled city, state law says that charter operators cannot be for-profit enterprises. So you get a very skewed perspective of non-profit charter providers, who come off as if they are charities. However, their top non-educator executives are typically taking in six figure incomes that exceed those of city superintendents who are managing hundreds of schools, while charter school teachers are often non-unionized, over-worked and underpaid and have a higher than average turn-over. Non-profit charter schools are tax-exempt cash cows who rake in millions in government funding, many of whom engage in cronyism and nepotism, giving out no-bid contracts and jobs to friends and relatives, like UNO in Chicago.
A lot of education “reform” organizations have figured out that there are distinct advantages to establishing non-profits, too, like “Teach For Awhile”. TFA has raised over $1B since first established and currently has $350 million in assets. Meanwhile, they charge finders’ fees to school districts that employ TFAers, while the districts are also responsible for paying the salaries of TFA “teachers.”
Being a non-profit today is misleading and a gross misnomer, as that can result in an extraordinarily profitable venture.
Bottom Line
Money paid by the state to the charter(s) +
Money made by ALL the “players” =
a more expensive education and a more than likely inferior product
Sounds just like the kind of standard business approach a lot of broke companies used:-)
Wonder how much better the public schools could be if they had access to the profits?
Wonder why the politicians are ok with this kind of waste of public funds?
Wonder why the folks who scream so loudly about conspiracies (ex CScope in Texas) are concerned with REAL fraud ?