This is the third in a series by the Detroit Free Press about the remarkable conflicts of interest, nepotism, and self-dealing in Michigan charter schools, which collect $1 billion a year in public funds.
Read it and be amazed that legislators and law enforcement officials permit this blatant misuse of public funds.
The story begins:
“Alison Cancilliari was a Grosse Ile teacher making $64,000 when she and her husband, builder Dino Cancilliari, founded Summit Academy in 1996 in Flat Rock.
“A second charter school, Summit Academy North in Huron Township, soon followed, and the couple would later claim they invested more than $750,000 to launch the charter schools.
“They would also be accused of a textbook case of self-enrichment as millions of dollars in school funds were steered into companies founded by the Cancilliaris and the president of the schools’ for-profit management company.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whatever faults and perceived “perks” the teachers union may have, it is dwarfed by the corruption an unchecked management, not only is prone to, but, too often, participates in.
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Instead of giving all of this money to worthless charter schools to waste, states need to be establishing ways for the middle class kid to finance college. Some states are looking into “Pay it Forward” programs where the student, after the Bachelor’s degree, pays back into the system for the next group of students to attend. Something needs to be done. The middle class is dying. They are trying to take away our public schools, along with taking away the college educations of the middle class. There are college kids, as we speak, with excellent GPA’s that have no way to fund their college for next year. Our U.S. is in a crisis for education of the middle class kids. These college kids cannot get the necessary financial aid until they are 24 years old. Many parents sincerely want to help, but are throttled by low credit scores due to our poor economy.
I honestly think it is an effort by the billionaires to take away our public schools and prevent our middle class kids of getting a college education. Then, our world will only have the rich and the poor. It’s already here. It troubles me every day.
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Why does the Free Press need a FOIA request to get documents from a public university regarding (supposedly) public schools?
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In a request for information from an Ohio public university, on a topic unrelated to charters, two representatives from the DOL said, public universities are excluded from some reporting required of private universities because they were thought “to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard.”
Higher ethical standards explains hiring a NCAA-sanctioned football coach to be president of an Ohio public university.
DOL said a change in reporting requirements would require Congressional action.
With Kasich and Batchelder, Ohioans can’t expect integrity.
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CMU is getting “millions and millions” of dollars from “growing” charter schools?
The laser-like national focus on charter schools starts to make sense, huh?
When publuc schools are gone we’ll certainly blame lawmakers of both parties, and the thousands of paid lobbyists but public universities who are both promoting charter schools to the detriment of public schools AND financially benefitting from this are also implicated.
It is bad enough we are paying people in the federal and state government to damage our local public schools. We are also funding public universities to do the same thing?
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Michigan state government is apparently completely purchased but you have to wonder where the federal government is in all this.
Has there been a single federal prosecution in MI, PA or OH?
They’re all getting plenty of federal subsidies. Have we just completely halted prosecutions of politically connected people?
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Meanwhile, Michigan’s public schools are completely abandoned, that is when they’re not being openly derided by federal and state government.
Charter schools are only half the story. The other half of the story is the damage that has been done to public schools.
We have to stop hiring people who don’t value public schools to run public schools.
“Agnostics” and “relinquishers” make lousy advocates for kids who attend public schools as we’ve seen in OH, MI, PA and at the federal level.
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I’m not sure where to post this but I was reflecting on the charter school movement and where it is now versus what it’s original intentions were. Three thoughts struck me:
First, charters were originally envisioned as a means by which communities could develop an alternative to the traditional school. This was to be done locally and often under the guidance of teachers. Instead, it has morphed into an increasingly corporatized system of fast-developing chains. Even Richard McLellan, John Engler adviser and no friend to public schools, noted that the Engler administration underestimated the for-profit dominance of charter schools in Michigan.
So, the original mission of charters has not come to fruition and is disappearing.
Second, charters were supposed to be laboratories of education. They were to provide interesting or innovative models for experimentation. Some charters do that. Most do not. Most actually harken back to the methods of the prior generations. Worksheets (mastery is the new term for this), chants (KIPP, I’m looking at you), and endless amounts of test prep (as noted by insiders who have left Success Academies in NYC). These are hardly innovative approaches. Instead, they’re designed for high-stakes results. The intensity of no-excuses reform is really a throwback and not in line with 21st century innovation.
So, innovation has been limited at best.
Third, charters were to create competition which would force traditional school improve and adapt. Or simply wither and die. The idea is that this would improve the quality of all schools. But Michigan has had charters for 20 years now. And we keep descending when compared to other states in test scores. Detroit has been the most intensely “reformed” city and continues to score dead last among urban areas in the nation. Apparently, improvement didn’t occur.
None of these are trotted out as reasons for having charters now. They get occasional lip service but usually these ideas are ignored. Now, it’s simply providing “choice.” That’s the only real argument they have left. Somehow, choice must simply be better. It must provide better results, it must create more innovation. But after 20 years, has it done that? Not really and to be quite honest, it appears that my state and its largest urban community has in fact gotten worse.
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Reblogged this on Dolphin and commented:
Wow. Just Wow. Hiring yourself for consulting and construction work has got to be the height of unethical standards.
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Street gangs do this and RICO statutes are invoked and hefty jail time ensues. Why not here? Oh yeah, I forgot, the politicians are the co-conspirators, they are exempt, laws are for little people like us.
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http://www2.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=13230
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Why be concerned about children when there is money to be made? Which is more important?
We now have an oligarchy which rules our government: research by two major universities so why be surprised when money is more important than people, even our own children?
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cross posted
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Tangled-web-at-two-charter-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-Schools_Conflict_Dollar_Management-140625-763.html#comment496823
with this comment:
If you are outraged, or if you care about the future of education and thus opportunity in this country send this to your contacts… and go to the Ravitch blog for the continuing coverage of the assault on public eduction that is taking place across the country in 52 states and 16,000 school districts… too many for our citizens to realize how the corporate world has taken control of education in order to profit from this essential institution.
They did this to health care, and now they are selling education, and the reform they are pitching is pure hogwash. Insidious, because in the end, an ignorant citizenry can be sold anything!Look at what Duncan is selling NOW (the link to the piece here is embedded at oped.)
He is enabled by the silencing of the voices of the real educators. This piece by Stepeh Nelson–(the link to the piece here is embedded at oped.) tells the tale: Beyond carrying the burden for the very real inequality in our schools, teachers have now been legally pit in opposition to students and parents — this is the most concerning outcome of Vergara. Corporate reformers –StudentsFirst, most notably — have worked hard (and successfully) to convince the public that teachers and students are at odds — that the rights and interests of teachers are fundamentally in conflict with those they serve. Vergara legitimizes this false division between teachers and the community, straining critical relationships needed to support children — especially in those communities facing the worst learning (and living) condition”
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Given the considerable interest in corruption associated with education, I thought many readers might be interested in a major Ohio investigation reported in the July 25 Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch – apparently the state has found that officials in several districts
http://www.dispatch.com/content/topic/special-reports/2012/counting-kids-out.html
“But the state said yesterday that because the district and its schools manipulated data, report cards for at least two years are wrong and will be changed. They are being corrected now.”
“Districts’ grades dip after data-scrubbing scandal
Two Ohio school districts will have their state report-card grades publicly docked today because they “scrubbed” low-performing students from their rolls. The two districts – Northridge near Dayton, and Campbell near Youngstown – are among six that are getting new report cards today for the 2010-11 school year. The new report cards are the result of state investigations into student-data fraud that began in June 2012 when The Dispatch reported data tampering in Columbus City Schools.”
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In Ohio, critics call the Dispatch, the Disgrace. If the Republican State Board of Education inflated the grades of charters, I don’t think the Dispatch would cover it.
In the fight against ALEC’s anti-union bill, one of the paper’s reporters wrote an article that could be construed as saying, business wasn’t funding the propaganda in support of the bill. The reporter gleefully identified unions, as opponents. Readers could infer that the other side was funded by a fairy godmother.
Pay for performance and meaningless measures demean education. The articles you reference provide proof.
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Are you denying the misbehavior (which the state department found)? Or are you suggesting that perhaps newspapers get very political (which is one of the allegations about the Detroit paper’s stories?
Or can it be that perhaps newspapers are political and that some educators misbehave?
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Don’t you get it? Money for the raiders not education.
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