According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the federal SEC has “charged the clout-heavy United Neighborhood Organization and its charter-school network Monday with defrauding investors in a $37.5 million bond deal by “making materially misleading statements” about contracts that funneled millions of state taxpayer dollars to organization insiders.”
Federal officials say their investigation is continuing and that “UNO leaders have agreed to settle the case against it by promising to never again enter into crony contracts and accepting the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee the group’s operations for a year.”
Blogger Fred Klonsky says no one in Chicago was surprised. the leader of the UNO charter chain was co-chair of Rahm Emanuel ‘s 2011 mayoral campaign
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Note that they are charged with defrauding *investors*. No one gives a rat’s patoot that they’re defrauding *citizens* or *children*.
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Dienne: such a telling point.
And so missing from the MSM treatment of such practices by the leading charterites/privatizers.
Thank you for your brief but important comment.
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Sad, that is the essential point.
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yup
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Good thing they didn’t steal a loaf of bread or anything really serious …
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Exactly. What a joke this is. I can see we’re going to have robust regulation of these contract service providers!
I don’t know: can regulation get any weaker and still be called “oversight”?
No wonder politicians love charter schools. “Relinquishing” means they are completely off the hook for any responsibility and accountability for public education or public funds. Set up a “choice” website and come up with a contractor payment system and you’re done! The market will take care of the rest!
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37,5 million goes missing, and they agree to settle the case by promising never to do it again. If that doesn’t say ‘a nation at risk’, I don’t know what does.
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Much said in few words.
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Dienne: what you said.
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I don’t see an allegation that $37.5 million went missing.
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amen
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So very Chicago…but sadly it is also becoming the norm nationwide…ahhhhhh just what I needed to read on my first day of summer break.
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“Up until June, De la Cruz middle school was a top performer. It had won the Spotlight Award from the state board of education for 2008 and despite being in a neighborhood with a lot of students still learning English and a serious gang problem, De la Cruz had managed to be a rare educational success story in the city of Chicago. Unfortunately, when the city cut bus service to the school attendance dropped and while small classes are a selling point for charter schools, in public schools it is called “under utilization.” At an emotional meeting last year in front of Arne Duncan it was announced that the school would be closed and the building demolished.
At that point, most urban school districts would have given up the building for dead as it closed out the year, but Chicago is the city of broad shoulders. A new phone system was put in, a perpetually leaking basement was plugged, installing new windows, and repair and renovation was taking place all the way up until the last day of school. Yesterday, at the Chicago Board of Education meeting all that repair paid off. It seems that UNO needed a building for its Octavio Paz school and now with all the repairs the former De La Cruz building is now inhabitable. The city was able to lease that building to UNO for $1. Now everybody’s happy, right?
Unfortunately, we still have the ungrateful parents of the neighborhood aren’t thrilled to have a UNO moving into the building. They can’t understand why their school was too small, but UNO would be able to cap their enrollment at 480 students for the year. UNO continues to build an amazing power base. Big-time national players have taken notice. Former President Bill Clinton once courted UNO. The group has promoted the interests of North America’s largest waste hauler, Waste Management Inc., utility giant ComEd and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. However, it was yesterday’s educational miracle that makes me think they have friends in even higher places. They are truly blessed.”
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I am begging….somebody….anybody…..give me a link to a well written piece explaining the difference between non profit charters, and for profit charters………please.
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The term “profit” can be a little confusing in this context, to the extent that we understand “profit” to refer to the amount by which revenue exceeds expenses. “Non-profit” doesn’t mean that a corporation can’t make that kind of “profit.” It means that the corporation is limited in what it can do with its profits. The main thing it can’t do is distribute them to the corporation’s shareholders, and in fact non-profits don’t have shareholders. It can use them to pay employee salaries, as long as those salaries are for work that’s consistent with the non-profit’s mission. As Michael alludes below, a lot of non-profits pay high salaries to their top executives (especially non-profits that function in the arts, like museums and orchestras). But the assertion that there’s no difference between non-profit and for-profit corporations is hyperbolic, to understate it.
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It’s simple, Joe:
For-profit charters pay their executives exorbitant salaries, cream students on the front and back end, appropriate public school facilities or pay inflated rents to cronies and insiders, and function like behaviorist boot camps for Other People’s Children.
For-profit charters, on the other hand, pay their executives exorbitant salaries, cream students on the front and back end, appropriate public school facilities or pay inflated rents to cronies and insiders, and function like behaviorist boot camps for Other People’s Children.
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Sorry, the rush to press the return key overcame my proofreading skills once again: the start of the last paragraph should begin “Non-profit charters, on the other hand…”
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Michael Fiorillo: the rapier is so much more effective than the broadsword. I am sure that Cyrano de Bergerac would appreciate the deft touch!
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And when you have a moment, please consider doing the same for “public” charters and public schools.
Keeping in mind, natcherly, that “public” charters are just exactly in every particular like public schools down to the molecular level except for two [maybe more?] things:
1), They are almost always better, betterer, and bettererest [charterite/privatizer spelling employed].
2), They are increasingly different in such matters you mention as salaries, creaming students, etc.
But apart from such unimportant subatomic dissimilarities, exactly and perfectly the same as public schools—except, to be fair, for not being “dropout factories” and “factories of failure.”
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” [Mark Twain]
😎
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Does anyone really believe that they won’t do it again?
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You know that chunk of money that is taken out of your paycheck called federal tax, state tax, and other assorted tax? Awhile ago your tax money that was allocated to public schools – those education dollars – all of it went to your local, free public schools – as an investment in the citizenry – the public good – the common good – democracy – you know, old fashioned, American notions like that –
Now fast forward to today -uh- how can I explain this in a delicate way ?
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Oh dear, we won’t do it again. Let us keep the funds we ripped off. Don’t track the damage to children and communities and make us pay for repairing the damage we have done.
These are white-collar criminals who will soon figure other ways to rip off children.
Gee, you Feds are so rough!
Gee, Rahm, you told us we could get away with this.
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That’s Democrats for you. Corrupt then, corrupt now. But corrupt forever? I hope not. If you self-identify as a Democrat, get your party under control, or are Democrats exempt from common standards of honesty because they are for the little guy? The ends never justify wrong means except in a defensive war. But you are in a war, you say, against the plutocrats? Sounds like class warfare to me. If that’s how you see it, I can understand. What happened to “American”?
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