Molly Bloom of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes here about the biggest theft in the brief history of charter schools in Georgia. That state is in the process of expanding the number of charters and is considering creating an “Achievement School District,” modeled on the failed ASD in Tennessee, in which low performing schools are turned over to charter operators.
Here is the story of Atlanta’s Latin Academy Charter School.
A $12,000 charge at a strip club. Thousands of dollars spent at Mercedes-Benz of Buckhead. ATM withdrawals of hundreds of dollars at a time.
The charges to Atlanta’s Latin Academy Charter School should have raised eyebrows. For the top state education officials and corporate executives on the school’s board, they should have set off earsplitting sirens.
Instead, the charges continued for years, siphoning more than $600,000 in taxpayer dollars that should have been spent on students.
Christopher Clemons, the school’s founder, has been charged with fraud and theft in the largest such case in Georgia charter school history.
Clemons left Atlanta after the losses were discovered.
He left a rented townhome strewn with Hermes boxes, lease paperwork for a new BMW, used boarding passes and a Rolex receipt.
He left the school so financially troubled that board members closed it.
He left nearly 200 children with few options.
And he left a cautionary tale for Georgia’s growing charter school movement. Latin Academy, with its all-star board and experienced leader, seemed on track to thrive. But behind that facade of apparent success, the school spent millions of tax dollars with little public scrutiny and operated with a lack of public input foreign to many traditional public schools.
Latin Academy’s academic performance ranked in the top 25 percent of all Atlanta middle schools in an area where neighborhood middle schools are better known for hallway chaos than academics.
Clemons is presently in jail in Colorado, awaiting extradition to Georgia.
In the last decade, the number of students in charter schools has tripled to 91,000, with more growth expected. In addition, the legislature allows entire districts to have “charter-like” freedoms, which means deregulation and freedom from oversight.
Expect more scandals, fraud, corruption, and theft. If men were angels, there would be no reason for oversight or regulations.
Could someone explain why deregulation is supposed to create better education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When will they ever learn? When all of the caring, dedicated teachers are gone and the crooks are in jail? Keep loading on all of the paperwork and test taking accountability in public schools while paving the roads to the privatized charter schools and that’s the way it will be!
“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes
In my opinion, Capitalism = a religious belief to serve the few.
“Clemons was a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who held an MBA from MIT’s business school.
By his own account, he helped start more than 30 charter schools nationally. He told colleagues at a national charter school training group he worked for that he could write an application that would win them a charter school in any state, former colleague Jeff Weiner said.
As head of a University of Notre Dame program training school leaders, Clemons was an “upstanding and values-driven leader,” said Notre Dame’s the Rev. Timothy Scully. “His performance as a member of our team was unassailable.”
You guys just don’t get it. The ed reform elite don’t require oversight or the ethics rules that apply to mere mortals because they’re BETTER than people who run public schools.
You know what really happened here? This guy was given a pass because he went to a prestigious college and knew the right people.
They’re snobs. It’s no more complicated than that. He was “one of them” so they trusted him absolutely.
Some assistant principal in Des Monies would never get this kind of deference. We had a case here where a new public school principal made off with the academic boosters account. She took the money in June and she was indicted by August. The county auditor caught it because he can add and subtract.
“Should we have done a little more?” asked board chair Kaseem Ladipo. “Yeah, we could have.”
“But the reality is that I would never ever expect a board to micromanage a school leader because of the assumption that they would steal from the school.”
All government contractors should cease reporting completely, because obviously ordinary accounting is now a bridge too far that no “innovative leader” should have to endure.
Is this what they teach at MIT business school? That “good people” don’t have to submit receipts? How can we tell the difference between the good people who don’t require oversight and the bad people who do? Should we just take their word for it?
This is nuts, the way they spin this. This theory applies no where outside ed reform.
I think it’s called “due diligence”; not, “micromanagement”. Of course, if you know
the difference you may not be fit for a charter school board.
For the same reason that deregulation of Glass-Steagall created better ‘investment banking’: private
profit; public loss.
It;s fun to look at the echo chamber in action.
Here’s the program at Notre Dame:
“The University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives (IEI) and Mendoza College of Business recently named Christopher Clemons as the inaugural director of the new Notre Dame Educational Leadership Program.
In this position, Clemons will oversee the program’s development and successful implementation, recruiting top-tier faculty to teach in the program’s Summer Institute, as well as school leaders to participate in the Mendoza College Executive MBA program. Clemons also will teach leadership and education policy during the six-week Summer Institute.
The Notre Dame Educational Leadership Program will prepare talented individuals for public school leadership and is an innovative partnership between the IEI and the Mendoza College Executive Education program.”
From there it’s just a short hop to the financial backer, and THERE you’ll find the same set of ed reform groups we always see:
“The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have partnered to create a policy maker’s guide to improving school leadership”
It’s a closed circle. It goes ’round and ’round but it’s the same people and same set of slogans over and over and over…..
http://www.k12educationprogram.org/
It doesn’t, in any field. With the rise of privatization the accompanying deregulation is pushed as a good thing. Yes, it’s good for privatizer since it allows them to plunder the public trust for personal enrichment. The greed and profits are so good, even our politicians get in on it.
“Could someone explain why deregulation is supposed to create better education?”
Libertarians like the Koch brothers have a ready answer to that question but it has nothing to do with creating a better education for our children. It has to do with getting rid of government so libertarian billionaires will be free to legally pollute the environment and cheat everyone else without fear of going to prison.
Back to the “GREAT” age of robber barons?
I think we are already there.
It’s a bedrock tennet of modern conservatism.
Regulations and oversight thwart the so-called ‘free market’ that doesn’t exist, never has, and never will.
We have billions in unpaid taxes by multi-national corporations who are free to do whatever they please and the results are a poisoned food supply, medical care that bankrupts individuals, a disappearing middle class, 1 in 4 children living in poverty and hunger within the USA, an impending national retirement crisis, and 30+ years of wage stagnation with record high productivity and profit-taking by investors.
All of these things were supposed to be fixed be deregulation and the ‘free market’ forces of magical miracle money.
Reagan, Thatcher, and all the rest of the moderns stuck to it regardless of how many times it was proven a lie and failed miserably, not to mention ended up being far more expensive than government-run programs.
It’s like people acting surprised that the core base of the Republican party are racist white supremacists who love Drumph because he says what they’ve always been thinking.
We have a rocky road ahead of us in the good old US of A. No doubt about that. Charter grifting and theft of taxpayer funds are just the beginning of the long decline brought about the end of Glass-Steagall and other regulations and rules.
And it’s getting worse, even among African-Americans, ironically, as the newly formed metro-Atlanta organization that calls itself Better Outcomes for Our Kids, or BOOK, exemplifies:
“BOOK feels that charter schools have the greatest potential for increasing student’s academic achievement in the Metropolitan Atlanta area. There are three reasons why charter schools possess this potential.”
The three reasons, here… http://www.bookatl.org/join-us/
Interestingly, if not revealingly, Mercedes-Benz of Buckhead hosted a coming out for BOOK a few weeks ago. At the event, Civil Rights icon Andrew “Andy” Young spoke in support of BOOK, and encouraged folk to spend at the luxury auto dealership. Note Molly Bloom’s callout of Christopher Clemons’ spending at Mercedes-Benz of Buckhead. Greed and commercialism to benefit “Our” children? I’ll wager, indeed.
In my opinion, BOOK is but an opportunistic potentially money-making response to 1) Atlanta superintendent and school board having turned Atlanta Public Schools into a “charter system” and 2) Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s looming Opportunity School District (OSD) plan modeled on LA’s failed Recovery School District (RSD) and TN’s failed Achievement School District (ASD). The worst is yet to come.
I believe that charter schools are nothing more than a way by which the rich are going to bankrupt public schools, and destroy our education system. People are looking for cheap solutions to expensive problems, and like buying retreads instead of new tires, cheap solutions will not stand the test of time.
Why don’t charter schools worik? Because they cherry pick their students, and always have a hidden agenda.
Poor children are worth $Millions to Corporate Greed Profiteer$!
This is clear!
Charters are a business! We should laugh at folks who try to use the education jargon to convince the public t hat charters are there to save poor kids from bad teachers who need to be fired. So tired of that exhausting deformsters mantra.
Gülens set up shop to help our poor black & brown children? Oh, Paleeeeze!