The following was sent by Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy:

Denis Smith, a retired public school teacher, administrator and former charter school consultant at the Ohio Department of Education, sent the message below to the editor of The Columbus Dispatch.

January 16, 2014

Denis Smith, a retired public school teacher, administrator and former charter school consultant at the Ohio Department of Education, sent the message below to the editor of The Columbus Dispatch. Since there has been no response from The Dispatch, with Denis’ permission, it is being forwarded. It appears that the media is as oblivious to the charter school scam as state officials in Ohio.

Mr. Marrison:

This message is sent to you and your education reporters on a background basis and with the intent that there will be no attribution to me in the event of any subsequent story development. I hope you accept this important qualification as I provide you the following.

Your coverage of the unrest in Turkey as featured in the December 26 print edition did mention that part of the protests directed at the Turkish government are generated from followers of a Turkish national named Fethullah Gulen. There was no mention that Gulen is an exile who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania and who directs operations in a number of countries that support his business network.

Let me get right to the point. Do you intend to inform your readers that this same Gulen Movement, with deep ties in the Middle East, has established a network of charter schools around this nation and maintains about 20 affiliated charter schools here in Ohio? I believe that your readers need to know this important connection as we all cover the unfolding developments in Turkey which may end up destabilizing the current government in a volatile part of our world.

The New York Times has provided coverage of Gulen’s involvement in American public education through publicly funded charter schools in a series of articles going back to 2011, mostly written by Stephanie Saul. If you or staff are not fully informed about the Gulen Movement, I provide you this query for some of these links: http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/stephanie+saul+charter+schools

As a retired school administrator and as someone who has monitored the growth of this foreign network for the last six years, I am concerned at the lack of coverage by your newspaper of a foreign organization that has used public funds to set up a chain of 135 charter schools in 25 states, with some of those schools operating here in Ohio.http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/p/gulen-school-characteristics.html

Could it be that your newspaper is so obsessed with beating up the Columbus City Schools over data-rigging that you have chosen to ignore what many of my colleagues feel is an even bigger story, viz., how public funds are supporting an organization which hires Turkish and other foreign nationals over Americans to staff its system of charter schools and where taxpayer funds may be transferred to other countries?

In case you are interested in pursuing this story, here are some questions that a good investigation of these schools might raise as you might work to tell this story in the public interest.

1. As the auditor’s office or the AG might say, what is the proper public purpose in allowing a foreign-based organization to use public funds to establish a chain of charter schools in this country, knowing that they are exempt from about 200 sections of the Ohio Revised Code?

2. Is there an insufficient pool of trained and qualified American administrative and teaching staff that can justify the importation of charter school staff through one-year visas, knowing that these individuals will be paid with public funds? Obviously, this program would involve the U. S. Department of State. Previous investigative work has been done in this area, but it is dated by several years and needs to be reexamined.

3. Charter schools are supposedly public schools. If that is the case, why do the governing board members of these schools appear to be mostly male? (At least they were several years ago, when I had the opportunity to observe this state of affairs.) Do the parents of children enrolled in Gulen-affiliated schools even know the identity of these individuals or how to contact them? Are board meetings publicized and accessible to the parents of the schools? Do all-male boards containing some foreign-born individuals truly represent the public interest?

4. How are these governing board members chosen? Are they hand-picked for their allegiance to Gulen and his beliefs? With such a uniform profile, how can these board members represent the students, parents, and the larger community?

5. Is there a requirement that these board members need to be American citizens, knowing that some of the teachers in the schools are in this country on the basis of one-year visas? Has anyone, including the Ohio Department of Education and the school authorizers, examined the reason for a large number of foreign-born individuals on the boards of these schools?