Thank goodness for reporters like Jessica Califati of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey!
In this report, she shows how the for-profit K12 corporation has a sweet deal running the Newark Prep Charter School. With only 150 students, the school is paying K12 nearly $500,000 in taxpayer dollars for its services.
The deal is very favorable to K12. If the school wants to cancel the contract, it must give 18 months notice. If K12 wants to cancel, it need give only 60 days notice.
A teacher who left the school complained that she was assigned to “help” 60 students, which was too many.
K12 made profits of $30 million last year. It’s CEO, from McKinsey and Gpldman Sachs, was paid. $5 million, based not on academic results but enrollment.
K12 is under investigation for inflating enrollments to collect higher reimbursements from the state:
“A preliminary report by the Florida Education Department’s inspector general found the company asked employees to teach subjects not covered by their certification and inflated its enrollment. An online charter school in Colorado recently severed its relationship with the company after state auditors found K12 Inc. overcharged the state for students whose enrollment could not be verified.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I could do the same job better, with field-trips, mentors, iPads/tablets for less. But then I’m just abashed/vilified teacher. What a scam and who allows a bid or RFP that has a 60 day notice for vendor and 18 months for the purchaser. Yikes!
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missing ? third sentence
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Someone on the take is who allows it.
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Or just the plain ol “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”. Blink, Blink!!
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And I still haven’t gotten an answer to my question: how is it that extracting profits from a already strapped educational system makes it “better” somehow. More than magical thinking!
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It’s the same question I’ve been asking for years about for profit healthcare and health insurance.
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You’ll never get an answer because it’s not about making it better. It’s about making a buck.
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So Newark is giving $3,333 per/student to K12 for virtual education. What a scam. “Education” on the cheap while fattening the wallets of the convicted felon, oops sorry, “philanthropist” Michael Milken and his cronies.
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I’m surprised that for-profits are moving into the NE. We’ve had these “innovative experiments” for over a decade in places like Ohio, Michigan and Florida, but my sense was national reformers had kept the blatant profiteering outside their own backyard. I say that because they always seem to hit that their charters are NON PROFIT as almost a rebuttal, ignoring the proliferation of for-profits in the states I mentioned. I’m genuinely surprised they’re expanding for-profits in a place like NJ. I don’t know whether to be alarmed at how reckless they’ve gotten, or pleased that this finally may be too much for media to ignore.
Have Cerf, Christie or Booker ever mentioned for-profits before dropping one into this community? I know Duncan spends a lot of time and energy pretending the giant for-profit chains don’t exist. May be difficult to do when they’re in NJ, in a major media market.
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I’ve assembled a kind of summary on the press and research on K-12, Inc. here: http://cyberschools.wordpress.com/
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K12 entered Tennessee a couple of years ago, They latched on to a poor, rural district (Union County) to run money through. I understand they heavily lobbied a willing state legislature to pass laws like they wanted them passed. Our district had 26 students leave to attend. All but a small handful (I think 5) of these students had returned to our school by mid-year (but the state money did not). They may have improved their operations by now, but at that time K12 sent a list that they claimed were students who had left our district to attend. Turned out this was a list of all the people they had talked to about signing up, but were claiming had signed up. Maybe an honest glitch, but they were not easy to deal with on this.
It is much better for each individual district to develop its own virtual programs or develop local district consortiums to fit the students in those districts. Our district was doing just that so that students needing this kind of approach to learning could have it, and there are actually folks close by in the community to solve any problems as needed.
K12 is a terrible money grabbing scam in my opinion. Keep it local and tailored to the districts’ student needs. Other Tennesseans may have more updated information on K12 in TN since I have been “retired in the woods” for a year now!
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We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, K-12 was founded by a convicted felon (Milken) and a moral blowhard and compulsive gambler (William Bennett), and received its contract from someone (Cerf) whose company could never earn a profit, despite the political favoritism it received.
Even according to their own grotesque standards of market-based education, these people are failures at everything except crony capitalism.
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I am sorry but NO ONE should ever earn $5 million a year to perform a service for the public good. Such pay is double the highest paid public university presidents…men and women who have at least earned a PhD and usually have many, many years of experience as relatively low paid administrators under their belt before getting hired as president. As Steven Pruis mentioned (above) how does extracting profits from an already underfunded system provide increased ROI to taxpayers? Where is the outrage??!!
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Sadly, not all public university presidents have earned a Ph.D. Mitch Daniels comes to mind.
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Just out of curiosity, what do you believe the the maximum salary should be for someone to perform a “public good”?
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The public schools are rapidly becoming businesses.
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“The board, principal and school business administrator set all policies and run the school,” the letter states. “K12 is a vendor. They make suggestions and provide support, but that’s all.”
But when asked to describe a specific responsibility it handles without any guidance or assistance from K12 Inc., the board could not name one.
For goodness sakes, Star Ledger. Get the emails. The reporter in Maine who stopped cybercharters in that state already showed you how it’s done. The NJ-ACLU was able to get Booker/billionaire emails. It’s not that difficult. If they’re “running” the school, there has to be correspondence to that effect.
Who is actually running Newark charter schools? If it’s former felon Michael Milken, don’t people deserve to know that?
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outrageous. Thanks for sharing this.
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Some good news: read June 4, 2013 post about Illinois’ passing a bill calling for a one year moratorium on virtual charters. This was a result of community, school personnel
and school board members pushing back when K-12 attempted to infiltrate 18 school districts in the Fox Valley area suburbs of metro Chicago. I attempted to locate the Naperville S.D. 203 (or 204-?) video of their school board hearing to link here (it’s out there!)–EVERYONE who wants to keep the K-12 wolves from their door should watch & take a lesson. The B.o.E. & the administration really did their homework, flabbergasting the K-12 rep. (who was grossly underprepared anyway), barraging him with questions that he should easily have been able to answer but, of course, could not, promising that he’d have “the info. for them by the end of the week. (He didn’t.)
ALL 18 districts rejected K-12’s application, community members rolled up their sleeves & garnered state legislators to introduce & back a bill to place a moratorium (a one-year) on approval/opening of ANY virtual charters.
It CAN be done–keep bombarding them with facts, e.g., “Isn’t it TRUE that __ million of your budget is spent on…advertising?” and “Our school district DOES make yearly AYP–in fact, we have a LARGE number of students who meet or exceed. So WHY do our students need your program?” and “Why is it costing you x,y,z per pupil (money which, BTW, you are taking from OUR school district) when you have no building expenses, no transportation expenses, no food program expenses, etc.?”
When the charters come a-knockin’ you districts out there–can put a sock in!
It CAN be done & HAS been done here, in Illinois. Yes, YOU can, & you WILL!
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Welcome to New Jersey. Don”t offer a higher minimum wage but allow a charter school to make millions on taxpayers backs. Good job Christie and Cerf. Keep helping your cronies to make more money on the back of taxpayers.
Sign entering Jersey should read, Welcome to NJ where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class is destroyed.
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New Jersey law allows for-profit companies to play a big role in public schools.
One thing they can’t do is run the place.
But charter school experts and one lawmaker said it’s sometime hard to tell if the rules are being followed, and K12’s involvement with Newark Prep is one of those instances.
“Technically, on the books, K12 is just a contractor hired by Newark Prep Charter School, but in reality it is running the school, soup to nuts,” said Luis Huerta, a Columbia University Teachers College professor who studies the impact of virtual charter schools across the country.”
This is the real scam, because Cerf and Cristie can continue to insist these schools are nonprofits based on a what amounts to a shell that is set up to get around state law when really they’re not.
I think the next big push is to capture a piece of public schools, replace live courses with online courses within a public school (but only a low income or middle class school, of course).
Looking at the decade-long track record of the online providers my fear is lower income kids will end up with cheap online content replacing several live classes during the school day.
It’s funny, because the first place I saw this happen was in juvenile detention centers. They pulled teachers out of detention centers and replaced them with online garbage to save money. It was understood to be a money-saving effort foisted on a vulnerable population. No one kidded themselves that it was in any way “for the children”.
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