While teachers across the nation have salaries lower than those of other professions and often need to take a second job to make ends meet, the executives at Michael Milken’s cyber charter chain K12, Inc. are faring very well indeed.
Their schools have high student turnover and low graduation rates, but it is a very profitable business.
The chairman of the board and CEO made $4.2 million last year.
The former CEO made $4 million.
The executive vice-president and chief financial officer made $824,000.
The president and chief operating officer made $5.5 million.
The executive Vice President, secretary, and chief counsel made $1.1 million.
The executive Vice President and manager of school services made $854,000.
Numbers are rounded.
Remember: It is all about the kids.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And that doesn’t even account for how much they spend on advertising or (cough) lobbying.
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And all of it paid for by California taxpayers.
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And othe state taxpayers as well.
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Where are the fiscal conservatives when you need them? Republicans need to wake up on the folly of throwing away tax dollars on “school choice.”
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So-called “fiscal conservatives” are only opposed to wasting government money. Once the money is in private hands, it’s theirs to do with as they please. After all, they earned it, doncha know?
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should kathy s. see this?
ahhhh….capitalism.
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This echoes the entry phrase of the money people for oozing into education: do well by doing good. By now, it’s apparent that doing well is their only skill. The doing good is simply a form of spin and appearance maintenance. For them doing well is the only mission in life.
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material for John Olver
From: Diane Ravitch’s blog To: evapet2@yahoo.com Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 9:02 AM Subject: [New post] Executive Salaries at K12, Inc. #yiv9928089974 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv9928089974 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv9928089974 a.yiv9928089974primaryactionlink:link, #yiv9928089974 a.yiv9928089974primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv9928089974 a.yiv9928089974primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv9928089974 a.yiv9928089974primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv9928089974 WordPress.com | dianeravitch posted: “While teachers across the nation have salaries lower than those of other professions and often need to take a second job to make ends meet, the executives at Michael Milken’s cyber charter chain K12, Inc. are faring very well indeed. Their schools h” | |
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Great idea. John Oliver would definitely take this on. And while he’s at it, he can look into NYC’s very own Eva Moskowitz.
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Eva said in an interview that she may run for mayor against de Blasio
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Milken spent ten years in jail for racketeering and fraud. The main reason he is in the education “business” is that he is an expert at exploiting loopholes, and he is barred from the stock market. For a shady fellow like him, charters, especially cyber charters, are a windfall. He gets to use taxpayer funds and tax credits to grow his business. With very little oversight or accountability, who knows where the money goes?
The problem with the pay scale reflects a bigger problem in our country. The people at the top get paid too much while those at the bottom are paid too little. This is one of the reasons our healthcare expenses are out of control. Between huge salaries for CFOs and CEOs and insurance companies extracting profit, the American consumer is paying top dollar for medical services and medications, and the rates will continue to rise, even though Obamacare has helped to level this off for a time. These problems continue to contribute to income inequality if we do not address them.
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Right on target, retired teacher. And Milken lives in his Brentwood estate near his pal and equally devious public school privatizer, Eli Broad. We in So. California have these merchants of misdeeds right in our midst as they deform and destroy our schools…and the LA Times is their private advertiser. LA has a plethora of billionaires leading the charge to murder unions and public education.
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I cannot agree more about this and the “it’s all about the kids” rhetoric (BS)!!!
You have no idea the levels below this and the number of employees in the $400, $300 and $200K range. There are the G$, their regional VP’s making upward of $400K including their stock packages, their VP of … all making base salaries of $200K pus bonus packages, and finally there are their “loyalists” who used to be in positions which became too politically active (like Philadephia/Florida…etc) and had to reassign them to another role/position in the corporate office to assure they had their “message” contained who are making another $150K each.
Wait let’s take school based staff now with a Head of School (HOS) making a base of $120K and assistant HOS making $100-110K I think they are in 36 states with 50 schools total….another $8M+!!!
Imagine all of this money spent with a great return, a 37% average graduation rate and a whopping 17% graduation rate in Tennessee!!!
Let’s give them more schools, relax more laws, unreal how marketing can influence the “educators” in charge, wait that’s what the lobbyists get paid for, but you would expect the USDOE and Arne Duncan to know better but he is an advocate for them and for privatization.
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K12, Inc. has been the management company running Pennsylvania’s Agora Cyber Charter. Beginning July 2015 Agora is reportedly moving to self-managing.
K12 has historically received about 13 percent of its revenue from Agora.
Agora’s Pennsylvania School Performance Profile scores for 2013 and 2014 were 48.3 and 42.4; a score of 70 is considered passing by the PA Dept. of Education.
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Their big markets are Ohio and Pennsylvania. I’m not surprised by Ohio- there is no ed reform scheme too hinky for this state’s “innovative” ed reform leaders- we pour money each and every “movement” fad- but I am surprised that Pennsylvania never moved against them. The only criminal enforcement I saw was federal.
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Many of you may be indirect investors in K12 through pension fund holdings.
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Any idea how to find that information out? Where/how does one start?
TIA!
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Google (what else?), essentially. The pension funds report their holdings quarterly, I believe. They file this info with the SEC, and they usually put it on their web sites for the public to access. They may send it to you in the mail, too, if you’re a beneficiary. And all the finance web sites (Yahoo, Marketwatch, Google, Morningstar, etc.) aggregate the publicly available information for each stock and list the largest institutional holders. You look up the stock, and “institutional holders” or something similar is one of the sidebar options to click on.
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Thanks, FLERP!
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Start with PERS, which holds and invests the pensions for educators and nurses, etc.
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“Ms. Cleveland joined us in October 2002 and serves as Executive Vice President of School Management and Services. During her time at K12, Ms. Cleveland has been instrumental in building the managed public school line of business. ”
Oh, Diane, they’re just busy “building the managed public school line of business”
Stop being such a “traditionalist” and get on board with the entire lobbyist/political class.
It’s a public/private partnership and those are very fashionable. The public pays. That’s our role in this “partnership”
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Just like the 2008 Bank bailout, private profits, public loses.
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The cream always rises to the top. I am sure those executives compensation is right in line with the contributions they make to the the firms they represent.
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Unfortunately true, but the contribution to society is negative.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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This is without a doubt the most egregious charter in the country. They provide next to nothing for both teachers and students. Of course, this is where they get all of the extra money to pay for their executives lavish lifestyles and their massive marketing campaigns. They need to be shut down NOW.
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Then there is the other side of the coin: teacher pay
Glassdoor reveals that the average pay for teaches in Charter Schools USA Salaries is about $41,825 – The minimum is $35K and the max is 54k. And they pay their substitute teachers $11.57 an hour on average.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Charter-Schools-USA-Salaries-E234934.htm
And then there’s this from the Democrat & Chronicle: Most charter teachers are not members of the state retirement system, which provides a potentially generous pension; and unlike in the traditional public schools, where limits to the work day and work year are prescribed through collective bargaining, charters can, and usually do, require teachers to work longer hours and more days.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2014/12/07/charter-school-teachers-green-earn-less/20015915/
Salary.com shows us what public school teachers earn:
The annual median is $53,183 – the bottom 10% earn $40,268 – the top 10% earn $68,897.
http://www1.salary.com/Public-School-Teacher-salary.html
And lest we forget: “Some charters do better; the majority do the same or worse. CREDO also moved beyond individual student performance to examine the overall performance of charter schools across multiple subject areas. They found that while some charter schools do better than the traditional public schools that fed them, the majority do the same or worse. Almost one-fifth of charters (17 percent) performed significantly better (at the 95 percent confidence level) than the traditional public school. However, an even larger group of charters (37 percent) performed significantly worse in terms of reading and math. The remainder (46 percent) did not do significantly better or worse.” – See more at: http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Organizing-a-school/Charter-schools-Finding-out-the-facts-At-a-glance#sthash.59o2Bdv9.dpuf
In Conclusion: Charter school teachers work in mostly opaque, for-profit, autocratic (dictatorial) corporate schools that pay less, demand more work hours, have no retirement plans, have no one to stand up for them when they are abused by management in any way, have no job security, and those schools are academically mostly worse or the same as the public schools they are destroying.
But the 1% at the top are earning a lot more money then their counterparts in the transparent, non-profit, democratic public schools, and because charter school teachers are working in the private sector, they have lost due process rights that the Construction of the United States and its Bill of Rights offers public workers.
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Lloyd, as I’ve mentioned here before, I worked for K12.com for a time. As Lead Teacher, I supervised between eight and ten other teachers and was “lucky” enough to have been employed F/T. Far and away, the majority of K12.com teachers are not.
In addition to all these “Lead duties,” I had 300+ students each semester. Per policy, we were to grade all work within 72 hours, although we were often urged to grade within 24, especially at term’s end when students would turn in an entire semester’s work over a few days’ time (this could mean pile-ups of THOUSANDS of assignments). You can imagine how “timely and appropriate” the feedback we were able to leave was then. We worked year-round and were discouraged from taking time off; sometimes, requests would be flat-out refused unless we could talk another teacher into taking on our work in addition to their own.
I was paid $36K a year.
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When I first started teaching full time, I learned the hard way to put due dates on assignments and then refuse to accept late work, because what you described about students turning in thousands of assignments near the end of a semester happened to me and that stack was several feet high with grades due to the office to be turned in by teachers within seven days or less.
Even if I had given up sleep for seven days there wouldn’t have been enough time to correct all that work properly, so all I could do was scan the work in seconds to see if it looked like real school work and then check the box that something was turned in.
I had another rule: work had to have a proper title or it wasn’t graded because I wouldn’t’ know where to put the grade. The title for every assignment was written on the board the day the work was done and again when the work was corrected and I repeated several times to write the title on the paper right below their name—-it was clear that work without a name and title would not be corrected or count. You might be surprised at how many students still turned in work without their name on it and/or a title.
Due dates were set in reinforced concrete and I would not budge. The only exception was for students who were absent the day the assignment was due. When those kids returned to class, I accepted the work if they had it. If they said it was at home and they forgot it, I refused to accept it. There was a poster on the wall that clearly said all work had to be in class everyday and not left at home, and as a reminder right after I took roll, I read that poster out loud to every class.
It’s amazing how many of my students claimed I never did that when they didn’t have their work in class on time.
If a child was absent multiple days during an assignment, I’d allow the same number of days to finish the work they missed and turn it in on another due date just for them but not a day afterwards.
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OMG. Thanks, Diane. K12 Inc. = Greedy FRAUDS.
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LAUSD reported last month that a young girl high school student couldn’t graduate and pass the exit exam after finishing her ‘online school’.
Along with 22,000 others who couldn’t get a ‘C’ in UC required classes to graduate, so LAUSD lowered their standard to graduate them.
What?
Why is anyone surprised that as soon as they opened the Common Core gate in 2009, that the profiteers would be off and running to make billions off of our children.
Clever folks have created every conceivable way to destroy education.
The crime is that politicians are not standing up to this horror while parents are dumbfounded.
Picketing the politicians offices is a good start. They want to get re-elected.
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Thanks for that reminder, cooper. Some months ago LAUSD lowered the graduation grading rate to A – G…and made D a passing grade. Even the Cal State system which takes C students will not accept D as passing. And the top tier U.of California system accepts only A – A+ students. What a fraud is being perpetrated on the uninformed public.
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Looked at the link. Come of those executives had a pay cut from prior years. Wonder if the were on a pay-for performance plan. If so, they are still doing very well.
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The irony and hypocrisy (and inverse relationship) between those that actually influence learning, those that don’t, and their salaries. If the product is student learning, then should not those that have the most immediate, direct and efficacious, impact upon it get better pay; as compared to those furthest away, more distal, to the activity. Admins are just marketers and bean-counters (with connections to rich and powerful people). Take away their social-connections and look at their influence on student learning, and most of the time one will realize they are of much less-worth.
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Online education is a great model. The school doesn’t have the same overhead as a brick and mortar school, parents pay for the computers and oversee the coursework, and the school administrators get to pocket the per pupil funding. They don’t even care that online schools have some of the lowest test scores of all types of schools.
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At K12.com, students are provided with “free” computers…which of course were constantly crashing and not running the software required to access courses. At one point, it was made MANDATORY that teachers — even P/T teachers — staff tech support lines (Parature) to the tune of eight hours per week. We were NEVER to mention that we were not tech support, but rather encouraged to chirp that we’d be “happy” to “escalate” (i.e., submit a help ticket, presumably to be answered by an actual tech support person, maybe, if they had the time, at some point, in the future, perhaps).
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ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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Reblogged this on Creative Delaware and commented:
Omg! Someone hold my head so I do not far over! To make that much money and do what… is insane!
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Most are disabled children, calculate that! Oh and add another million for saving disabled children in california’s education…case in point san francisco federal case 2008 failure to educate the poor..which usually are also disabled! Experience is key and one educator was ex principle, retired. Love for Children will find money to educate them. Stop the discrimination of children!
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