Gene Bruskin, who works at the American Federation of Teachers, has followed the growth of the Gulen-affiliated charter chain for several years. Here he gives a summary of what he has discovered. He notes that few Americans ever knew that there was a Turkish charter chain until the recent coup attempt in Turkey, when President Erdogan blamed the failed coup on a little-known Imam who lives in Pennsylvania in exile. That man, Fetullah Gulen, does not make public appearances. But now the media routinely acknowledges that he has a large charter chain, probably the second largest in the nation.

He writes:


In 2009, we were stunned by what we were finding as we ran down charter applications and tax forms for these widely dispersed but seemingly related schools. Teachers at the schools were contacting the union to determine how to proceed with asserting their rights in the face of management practices. (This is part of the challenge charter schools overall pose in public education, as these schools may receive nearly all their revenue from public sources, but their practices more resemble private entities than public schools. The teachers at one of those charter schools, the Chicago Math and Science Academy, ultimately became the subject of a landmark National Labor Relations Board case that found the CMSA was in fact a private employer and not covered by Illinois public sector labor law.)

As we pieced together the origin stories of more than 100 charter schools across the country, we found what can only be described as a public conspiracy. Dozens of Turkish men were forming charter school boards and applying to open schools for approval by city officials or school district administrators or state education department bureaucrats. These charter schools were allied with education management organizations—the private foundations or companies hired to run the daily operations of the schools—that were also run exclusively by Turkish men. The charter applications stated that these schools in part would be staffed by teachers or administrators brought to the United States from Turkey under the H1-B visa program for “specialty occupations.” (The cumulative numbers of staff with H1-B visas nationally are difficult to know precisely; in 2014, the Cincinnati Enquirer identified 67 H1-B visa holders out of a total teacher workforce of 541—comprising 12 percent of staff at 17 Concept Schools in Ohio.)

The Turkish individuals who came as H1-B visa teachers then became founding charter board members at subsequent generation charter schools. The historic research showed that starting in 1999, the first Turkish charter schools were approved, and that by 2009, entire charter chains had been created to operate dozens of schools: the Horizon Science Academy chain in Ohio, the Magnolia Science Academy chain in California, the Harmony Science Academy chain in Texas, the Sonoma Science Academy chain in Arizona.

As a labor organizer, I was surprised by the organizational capacity and sheer bravado of the whole charter school enterprise. But then we found the links to Fethullah Gulen in the academic work of Joshua Hendrick, a scholar then at the University of Oregon. And I was simply amazed. Was it really possible that a network of charter schools in the United States was in fact affiliated with the Turkish international missionary organization headed by the exiled Fethullah Gulen from Pennsylvania?

Was it really possible that no one in the American education administration knew about this network or grasped the implications? A strict interpretation at face value of all of the Gulenist movement’s declared intentions means one has to accept its missionary purpose as primary. In the United States, the Gulen movement has successfully employed many hundreds of its adherents inside the charter schools and used public funds to further employ many thousands of other adherents through contracted products or services to the charter schools.

Read on to learn what he learned as he investigated this mysterious charter chain run by Turkish nationals, most of which assert that they are not connected to the Gulen organization. Most surprising is the lack of oversight of the Gulen schools and the U.S. Department of Education’s financial support for them.