This teacher blogger has compiled a list of some of the most recent charter school scandals. It is not an exhaustive list; the scandals just keep coming. [For a more exhaustive summary, go to “charter school scandals,” a website maintained by Oakland, California, parent activist Sharon Higgins (with no subsidy from corporations,foundations, unions or anyone else.)
This teacher blogger memorably writes:
As I see it, “corporate” is to “education” as “cigarette manufacturer” is to “public health and well-being.
And then on to recent scandals, like charter schools inflating enrollment to pad their payments by the state.
He finds:
In other words, with stunning regularity, corporate education boiled down to one simple word. And that word was: Greed.
Why is anyone really surprised?
Many of us have written, for example, about the giant cesspool that is the for-profit college industry. It’s a great gig, after all, when five top executives of Corinthian College can pull down $22 million in salary over a two-year stretch—at the same time saddling students with high-interest loans—providing low-quality course offerings—and finally going bankrupt this spring.
How about the five top executives at K-12, Inc., a for-profit chain of elementary and secondary online schools? They divvied up a cool $35.4 million in salaries and bonuses in 2013 and 2014.
For fun, put that in kid-centric terms.
Those five individuals took home enough cash to hire 354 teachers (at $50,000 each), for two years to actually work with kids in grades K-12.
Greed is good, isn’t that right?
Then there are corporations like Pearson, which spend millions lobbying politicians to keep high-stakes testing required. It’s all about the kids.
The scandals keep on coming:
Go ahead, Google away yourself. You’ll find endless examples to tickle your fancy. But let’s end with perhaps the biggest scam of all. Let’s hear it for the University of Phoenix, a money-making juggernaut, a company so successful at piling up $$$$ it was able to pay the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL $154.5 million for naming rights to their stadium! Good advertising? Sure! Too bad the school had to pay a fine of $67.5 million, plus $11 million in legal fees, for defrauding students!
Too bad a U. S. Senate investigation showed the school spent a mere $892 per pupil each year to actually educate students.
Hey, not to worry! Company founder John G. Sperling raked in $263.5 million in a little less than a decade in salary, bonuses and stock sales. And his son, Peter, did better still: $574.3 million.
It’s a new world, with surprising ways to make a profit by running schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Money, it’s a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
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One of the weirdest thing in Ohio with charter schools is how we never hear from the schools themselves. It’s because they set up the governance system with “sponsors” as the one and only oversight function, but it’s kind of bizarre because public schools don’t operate that way.
If there’s a scandal or illegality in my public school system (and there have been) we hear from the superintendent, then principal and also the school board. Names attached to the school entity. Makes sense, right? The principal and superintendent are the managers and they’re responsible for what goes on.
With charters we get this “sponsor” statement: “Buckeye Community Hope responded” I never read the names of the people who are actually (supposedly) running these schools unless there’s an actual indictment or trial or something. I don’t know how this furthers “accountability”, setting up a system that has two layers before one gets to the school.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/06/state_grades_horizon_and_constellation_charter_school_sponsor_much_higher_than_cleveland_does.html
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Satire is good, especially when there is no need to fictionalize or even exaggerate.
I’ve written before that derision doesn’t change minds. I meant person to person attacks. Public ridicule of deserving public figures is categorically different. There should be more shows that indulge in political and cultural satire.
The depiction of Trump as a clown in the Daily News was called for given the way Trump trashes others, whether it’s countries, businesses or individuals.
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It’s a tad more than greed, it’s avarice-an excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain (MW Dictionary online)!
Actually these avaricious bastards fits quit nicely in the current American gestalt of I, ME, MINE!
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I think the whole privatization movement has turned into a sad commentary on the private sector.
They’re not “creating” anything when they’re just replacing the public sector. Replacing a public sector service with a private sector service isn’t “innovative”. It doesn’t create any additional value – it’s just redirecting public dollars and taking a cut along the way for the profit part. If I privatize our publicly funded senior citizen center I didn’t “make” anything.
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” If I privatize our publicly funded senior citizen center I didn’t “make” anything.”
If you do it right you should “make” something, a boatload of money for yourself, family and confidants. After taking out all the monies you claim insolvency and have the “gubmint” take over the services you destroyed. Pretty plain and simple to me, also avaricious, unethical, immoral, if your religious sinful and you should be strung up by your toes in a town square and boiling hot tarred and feathered and left to rot as an example of what not to do.
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Worst of all, it is our government that should be representing the will of the people, is complicit in assisting with the abuse by creating laws that give the wealthy tax incentives and credits to plunder the the public coffers.
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In the New York Times Magazine article, they talk about how the cost of something—say building the same exact length of highway—-is the same or roughly the same, whether it is done by private sector or the public sector, or whether the workforce is unionized or not unionized:
The main difference is that, when the workers doing the job belong to unions in either sector, the workers get more of the money. When it’s done by non-union labor, the bosses keep more of the money.
—————————–
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: (June 2015)
“In southeastern Wisconsin, union ironworkers earn $55 an hour and receive $33 of that in pretax income. (The difference goes to funding their pensions, health care and training.)
“The pretax pay for a unionized ironworker in Iowa, a right-to-work state since 1947, tops out at $26 an hour.
“In Texas, also a right-to-work state since 1947, the sole ironworkers’ local offers pretax wages of $18 an hour. Nonunion workers in the state doing the same job make about $8 an hour.
“ ‘A mile of U.S. highway in Texas costs close to the same as it does in Wisconsin, certainly not less than half,’ Colin Millard, an organizer for the Iron Workers International Union, told me.
” ‘So it is only a question of who makes the money — the workers or the owners.’ ”
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Now You’re calling back the 70’s!
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Supposed to be in reply to:
Actually these avaricious bastards fits quit nicely in the current American gestalt of I, ME, MINE!
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Interesting because I would say the 80s. I consider the gestalt of the 60s (of which I include the civil rights movement of the late 40s with Truman signing the executive order to integrate the military and into the 50s-Brown vs Board, etc. . . ) to have lasted to about ’75 when the Viet Nam war ended. After that was the slide into the I, ME, MINE gestalt so aptly represented by the election of Uncle Ronnie in ’80 and still continuing today.
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Yes, it was the late seventies I think that earned the me generation tag, and it must have been around ’79 that Al Franken introduced his own decade:
https://screen.yahoo.com/al-franken-decade-000000863.html
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Exhibit D
Disco
Saturday Night Fever
Trivia
The film opened in the United States on December 14, 1977 at the height of the disco era. Less than two years later, the disco era ended.
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Hey as I read both of these blogs (chock full of info) I wonder what ever happened to that one with a page title Ravitch Raspberries one? the one obviously written by reformers? Oh wait now I see, it’s gone and available from GoDaddy…where as this blog has gone on to reach MILLIONS!!!
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What’s the other blog to which you refer? Where and what was the “Ravitch Raspberries”?
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It’s just a “hate-Ravitch” site that Ben Austin’s corporate reform group Parent Revolution started with some enthusiasm, but pretty much lost interest in on soon after. Ultimately, they abandoned the site, and removed its contents from the net. Here’s the link to see where it once was:
http://truthinedreform.org/?reqp=1reqr=rJ5zpUIvLayypzAvMJphpTW6
No longer available on the net, here’s the “Ravitch Raspberry Mission Statement”:
“The site’s initial focus will be on attempting to debunk claims made by NYU education historian Diane Ravitch, who earlier this month quasi-apologized for calling Parent Revolution head Ben Austin ‘loathsome’, and on Friday penned another critique of the parent trigger (which as of this afternoon has already attracted 60+ comments).”
The whole thing was started two years ago this week, and was covered here:
KrazyTA makes a good comment on this blog (the link above).
KrazyTA: “Ben Austin or other employees of Parent Revolution could have posted directly—are you following me?—on this blog if they felt something needed to be corrected. Diane has a history of allowing all sorts of folks, with sometimes violently clashing opinions, to post here. Literally nothing stopped them from engaging in a frank and open discussion on this blog.
“Only one problem for them: you can’t spin your way out of trouble here. Too many viewers with all sorts of experience and expertise to expose the weaknesses in arguments and facts. People here are actually held ACCOUNTABLE for what they post.
“Weird, huh? Democracy in action.”
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Wonder if it was Rhee-written. Sounds analogous. Where is shee now?
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It’s sad and so undercover that the public doesn’t know or seem to want to know. Are the public schools so bad that the public rather have private corporations rip off tax dollars for the benefit of their own child. Is resentment of poor and minority students so pervasive that these crooks are allowed to steal legally, I don’t know but it is sad.
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Many of the moves against public education are made behind the scenes when deals are made by complicit mayors or governors. The process is NOT voted on by parents or the public at large. The complicit politician puts the school into “receivership” due to test scores, and the “hostile” takeover occurs. It only hits the news if there are marches or protests as in Chicago or Newark. They circumvent the democratic process to forward the privatization agenda. That is another reason to fight the testing from the CCSS. These tests with a rigged cut score designed to fail about two thirds of the students are being used to hasten the delivery of public schools into the hands of complicit governors or mayors..
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Earlier today I saw prospective learner/students referred to as “consumers of educational services”. Citizens are now valued based on what they can afford to buy,
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Another one that gets me is “human capital.”
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Greed is Good among the RheeFormers
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Arkansas sup’t told school board meeting last Monday that he recommended releasing all food service workers, then contract with Aramark to give workers a huge loss of compensation, so the district could make money off students in the cafeteria. Aramark’s promised return to district for the school year: about $1,700.00. This statement preceded at the same meeting by two neighboring sup’t’s & a CPA pitching her services as part of a financial mgt “co-op”, to help districts manage budgets. “It’s all in the coding,” said the CPA.
Attend your local school board meetings.
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As I was growing up, I could always bet on hearing my teachers remind me that history repeats itself. Sadly, this saying does not just involve war but extends into the American educational system. The structured, teacher-centered curriculums that were replaced by student-centered, hands-on instruction are slowly returning to address the new focus on Common Core standards and standardized testing.
Instead of listening to the input of individuals within the school walls on a daily basis, the dismal results of the No Child Left Behind Act has lead our government to pour money into the pockets of private businesses instead of into public schools that could use the money in more enlightening ways to serve all students. Corporations continue to repeat themselves with involvement in educational reforms based solely on increased net profits and not the best interest of all students. The problem is that this reoccurring theme is growing in momentum instead of being dampened.
Public education is becoming more privatized than ever before. Big business has its hands in everything, including writing the tests, scoring tests, analyzing test data, marketing test preparation curriculum, selling student test preparation books, running private schools, and even providing discrete funding for a little real estate to plaster their name inside school walls. This business-influenced structure of schools is creating standardized complacent workers instead of critical thinkers and life-long learners that have the creativity to be leaders and innovators and not just corporate workers, forming a society of 9:00 to 5:00ers.
One person may not have the answer to this flood of private capitalization in our schools, but maybe the individuals that could have the answers for a progressive education system that meets the needs of all students is being held back, within the classroom, sitting behind a test that restricts their creativity and their chance to change the world.
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