Mercedes Schneider reviews the botched charter application of Greater Works Charter School in Rochrster, Néw York. The lead applicant and CEO, Ted Morris Jr., was only 22 yet claimed to have 7+ years in the education field.
Schneider calls on the chair of the Regents–Merryl Tisch–to take responsibility for the incompetence of the State Education Department.
This charter school should not go forward.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Resign?
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take the new PARCC tests and post her scores?
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All of the above.
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throw a party for her friends John King, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, Andrew Cuomo and invite us too…to provide a casual setting for discussion of how things are going in New York since the Common Core has been implemented.
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Well, its clear she and her cohorts are not doing any due diligence. She may as well have said, after getting caught red handed not doing her job, “let them eat cake.” It is plain and clear how little she cares about anything but transferring dollars from public schools into the hands of liars and thieves, so long as it achieves her and Cuomo’s goals of getting rid of certified teachers, the union, and public schools.
Does anyone here think there will even be a backlash larger than the small circle it is contained in now? We shall see. I anticipate nothing.
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And I call on the NY Post to have moderately high journalistic standards and Cuomo to at least seem ethical.
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All roads of responsibility lead back the state’s chief elected executive officer. We must remember that Cuomo dismantled his own ethics commission.
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Cuomo won just 11 of the state’s 56 counties outside New York City, … In Manhattan, Cuomo beat Astorino with 80 percent of the vote
The state’s most powerful Republican secretly worked for months to help Democratic Gov. Cuomo win re-election — in exchange for Cuomo’s promise not to aid Senate Democrats in their Long Island races, a top New York GOP leader has charged.
Former state Republican Party Executive Director Michael Lawler — who managed Rob Astorino’s ill-fated gubernatorial run against Cuomo — told The Post that he learned of the alleged bombshell deal between Senate GOP leader Dean Skelos and Cuomo just days ago, after suspecting for months that it existed.
“Dean Skelos clearly was working against Rob’s campaign — he and the governor cut a deal,’’ seethed Lawler, a protégé of GOP Chairman Ed Cox.
The Nassau County-based Skelos and his aides “fight for nothing, stand for nothing except staying in power,’’ Lawler charged.
http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2014/11/fred-dicker-andrew-cuomo-had-secret-re.html
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… Chris Christie wanted nothing to do with Republicans across the river because he would “waste his time backing a loser.” Paraphrased. Just like the Republican Bell in NJ put up against Booker so there’d be no contest. Not that I’d want Bell, but Booker IS a republican so it was one ick against another ick.
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I don’t question the politics involved in his re recrowining. My only point is that looking at Tisch of NYSED is fruitless: the power and responsibility lies with the King, himself
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It should be law: if voter turnout for the lead gubernatorial is less than 2 million, Regis Philbin becomes governor until we find someone worthy. Oh, but Regis would have to double as both gov and ed chancellor.
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…candidate…
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***VIDEO OF TED MORRIS, JR,***
Here’s a news story with a handsome, telegenic male reporter who forget to check if Morris had actual credentials… and Morris arguing that his lack of experience actually gives him an advantage over seasoned education professionals.
http://13wham.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/local-man-launching-new-charter-school-17949.shtml
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Just watched the interview with Morris again… I fail to see any of the overwhelming charisma that I was expecting from Morris… the only thing that stands out he employs some serious teeth-whitening, and that he could perhaps he could miss a few meals and slim down a bit. (Hey, a lot of us can say the same 😉 )
The principal of the last high school he attended said that Morris showed up on campus, sat at the lunch tables, shot the breeze with students and teachers—including the principal—but never attended any of the classes to which he was assigned.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2014/11/25/questions-raised-year-old-charter-founder/70096942/
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“Former School Without Walls principal Dan Drmacich and the Rochester School District both verified that Morris left the district in 2008.
” ‘From what I remember, he was very articulate, a great conversationalist, but … he didn’t go to many of his classes,’ Drmacich said. ‘We constantly worked with him through his teacher adviser and the school counselor, to no avail — to the point he realized and we realized he was just coming to school and hanging out versus attending classes on a regular basis.’ ”
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One phone call to this principal from Morris’ charter partner Kozik would have—or should have—ended Kozik’s involvement with Morris and his proposed school. However, Kozik never made that phone call… or probably chose not to make that phone call so he could have deniability.
Kozik is a disgrace to education for being stupid or corrupt enough to get himself involved with a crook like Morris. I wouldn’t hire him to work at a school—not even as a lunchroom monitor or crossing guard.
Could someone without a high school diploma—let alone without a medical degree—bamboozle people into allowing him to practice as a doctor, or head up specialty department at a hospital?
Could someone without a high school diploma—let alone without a law degree—bamboozle people into allowing him to practice law, head up a law firm, or serve as a judge?
The whole time, Morris was crossing his fingers that nobody found him out while saying to himself, “What a bunch of suckers!” My guess is that, during his teen years, Morris was carefully and constantly looking for a scam with a big payoff for himself, and then chanced upon the neo-liberals’ and privatizers’ recent push for totally unregulated charter schools to replace public schools, and Morris saw exactly the phenomenon that he could exploit.
He probably Googled “charter school scam” or something similar to see how he could pull this off… and all the ways to steal money and line one’s pockets while running a charter.
As he perused scandal after scandal in on-line news reports, he would notice that in most instances, by the time the charter crooks were caught, the money that the charter thieves stole was effectively theirs for good—moved to an off-shore bank in the Caymans or Switzerland. As an actual paid employee, they could fire Morris once his scam was exposed, but they couldn’t recover the money.
Had this gone ahead with Morris running the show, I suspect you would have seen all the usual charter school perfidy:
— farming out services to for-profit companies owned by Morris, and Morris pocketing a huge sum;
— a crooked real-estate deal that results in Morris pocketing a huge sum;
— hiring of Morris family and friends at huge salaries, but vague duties where they do nothing, and never/rarely even show up on campus;
— in general, just cutting costs to the bone of every aspect of the school that they can—more money for Morris to steal… and do so via the use of uncredentialed teachers with 50-80 kids crammed in a room full of computer terminals… and no oversight as to whether any of the on-line “lessons” deliver instruction or the students are doing any real work—“Hey man, charter schools are awesome… I get to surf the net all day, and play video games!! Woo-hoo!!”
Morris even says not to expect a significant portion of the students at Greater Works Charter School to go to college… so when no one ends up going, he can say “that’s how we planned it… so kids could get into careers that didn’t require college.”
— eventually, an announcement that the leaders messed up, and that school is millions of dollars in debt, and has to suddenly close with the students being dumped back into the pre-existing public schools from whence they came, and the crooks like Morris skipping out of town to repeat the scam elsewhere. (This happened with the ICEF charter chain here in Los Angeles, with billionaires rushing into save the schools from total collapse and public scandal. The crook Mike Piscal skipped town and, I believe, head up one of Andre Agassi’s schools.)
What I notice from the the charter industry is that once a massive scam has occurred with millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money gone for good, they respond by saying, “Well, we want these crooked charter schools closed as much as anyone else. They give charters bad name, blah-blah-blah… ”
However, when school boards or legislators want to enact safeguards and regulations that would prevent multi-million-dollar frauds from happening in the first place, or ask the charter to reveal their books, those same charter proponents—California Charter Schools President Jed Wallace comes to mind— fight it tooth and nail. They talk about how charter leaders need flexibility and freedom to innovate and can’t be held back by the status quo… or some other such nonsense.
If you took away the opportunity for charter heads to line their pockets—
i.e.
—say that those in charge of charters had salary caps so that salaries would be in line with their equivalent in the public school system;
or
— impose strict conflict-of-interest regulations where you can’t farm out any services to companies you own or are related to… and instant death penalty for the charter once this is discovered;
or
—demanded that the books be wide open so you could see where every penny goes;
or
—demand that all their teachers be credentialed;
or
—demand that they could not cream off a subset of the brightest and easiest-to-educate kids, but instead had to educate everyone—even the Special Ed. kids, English-language-learners, behavior problem kids… that are more costly to educate, and, in general, had to have the same admissions and expulsion policies as the regular public schools…
If stuff like that happened, the motivation for the hucksters to open a charter would drop like a rock, as would the number of charters opening.
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I haven’t read everything on this situation, but I am curious to know: What’s up with the education professor involved with this? Yes, the regents should have actually read the application (insert eyeroll here) and figured out that the applicant was, um, unqualified, to say the least. But I want to know whether the education professor read the lead applicant’s resume…
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A great question! And, hats off to Mercedes for more dogged reporting. If only the New York Times owners would support someone of your caliber and really cover the charter, school reform story.
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Mega-kudos to Mercedes for her work!
To say the least, this affair casts serious doubt on Prof. Kozik’s critical reading and thinking skills. His Keuka College bio says he’s a former school teacher and principal with a recent doctorate from Syracuse University. His bio lists him as an assistant professor of education. I wonder what sorts of things he’s teaching his ed majors, and if involvement with GWCS could possible cost him a bid for tenure?
The other doctorate-holding organizer of the GWCS is apparently teaching in China at the moment.Must be one of Morris’ sweet Craigslist finds. Here is Norman Meres’ Linkedin proflie:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/norman-meres/3/97a/117
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Tisch should be fired and by her own probable rubric she enforces on others! Parents across NY State should be furious from the get-go. The fact that nobody knew the age of this 22 yr old fraudster means that one of the first checks on him in this approval process never went through – the criminal check!!!
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Nothing will happen to her, this is New York whose new motto should be Corruption and not Excelsior.
It also helps Marie Antoinette Tisch that our “fantastic” unions led by Compliant Karen Magee, Ravishing Randi Weingarten and the Magnificent Mike Mulgrew, as usual, have their heads up their corrupt posteriors.
To think my colleagues think it will get better is a scratch my head moment.
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Perhaps pushing the envelope to see how much corruption will be tolerated….
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These charters are crazy.
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Finally, a response that is short and to the point, and refuses to indulge in quasi reasonable analysis, explication or discussion.Yes, the self destructive Ted Morris gig is insane, meaning a reasonable person would not indulge in the multiple lies that he perpetrated that were reasonably easy to uncover. That young man is not ‘clever’.
On top of l’affaire Morris add a huge helping of Tisch’s and NYSED’s amoral behavior and top it off with a governor, who not only looks the way, he aids, abets, valorizes and legitimates the slimy behaviors of his agent underlings.
k-12 education in New York State is spinning out of control.
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