CBS News ran a story about the mysterious Gulen charter chain and the reclusive cleric behind it. Former Turkish teachers at the large chain claimed they were required to kick back as much as 40% of their salary.
The story is complicated, and few people outside the education world ever heard about it.
Turkey has accused the Gulen movement of fomenting a coup. Since the failed coup, the Turkish government has jailed thousands of people alleged to be Gulen allies. This is confusing to a public that knows little about international affairs, to which the media pays less and less attention every day as their budgets shrink due to competition with the Internet.
Meanwhile, the FBI has been investigating various Gulen charters for years, with no report.
Here is the part that puzzles me: why are local community public schools outsourced to an organization that has no connection to the community, whose board consists entirely of Turkish men, which relies on HB1 visas to import Turkish teachers, some of whom have poor English skills?
The central purpose of public schools is to teach the responsilities and rights of American citizenship? Can this be outsourced to foreign nationals?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There has to be more to the story. Money laundering, fraud. The FBI or CIA must be involved somehow and they don’t want to mess up their investigations. I think it’s odd that Gulan lives in a secret compound somewhere in mountain country PA. Anyone who needs to live in a “compound” is carrying around some serious intel.
When public education becomes a “market” then there are few barriers on who can make money. Charters chains with the “Gulen” touch find no barriers. They have the savvy, cash, and connections to work our system.
Yes, Laura…exactly. I have written so much here for so many years on this topic of the Gulen schools that I will lot be redundant. Anyone wanting more info can google it.
The big question is this. Why are US taxpayers paying for the 150 or so Gulen charter schools, run largely by Muslim Turks on H1B visas? Are the Gulen charters actually pushing Gulen’s particular variety of Islam? Why should US taxpayers have to foot the bill for any religion-related charters?
Comey has a 10-year term. He is a Republican appointed by Obama. He will be there another 7 years
Added question- why has the FBI been so lax or, publicly silent, in follow-up of its investigations. The FBI should clear the schools as having no gender bias, no labor violations and transparent and appropriate use of funds and, explain why the review process has taken so long. The delay leads to a lay person’s suspicions about CIA, national security involvement on domestic soil with, approved obstruction of FBI jurisdiction.
The Walton-funded Gen Next goals, cited at its website, relating to national security, the Aspen Pahara granting of Fellow status to school leaders, etc. seems like info. about which, citizens in a democratic society, would want media coverage.
I’d like to know more about the Niagara Foundation and politicians.
You’re aware that Somer Tamir, CEO of Harmony Schools, was in the spring 2017 Gates-funded Pahara Aspen Fellows list?
The bio. for him referred to Harmony as “public” charter schools. In Ohio, the taxpayer doesn’t own the assets that they bought, the operator does, which is descriptive of a contractor relationship.
Check out the pols in your state. Google Sharon Higgins–she’s been following this for years & has, sometimes, come up in Diane’s blog posts/comments.
Thanks.
Sharon Higgins dedicated her site, “Charter School Scandals”, with a profound statement, which acts as a damnation of men like Gates, “To those who have decided to help tear apart the tapestry of basic local human connections.” What we all understand is that, opposition to tyranny, is built in the connections at the local level.
The community builds the schools, the neighbors come to together. They have a meeting place, in the open, to raise voices about their kids and their communities’ futures…and, to make plans for change.
Just a wild guess, but Gulen seems to be one of those “leaders in exile”, waiting for the right opportunity to return on a moment’s notice and “grab the reigns of power” (like Karzai did in Afghanistan and Chalabi tried to do in Iraq)
It is all very “curious” and I suspect that the curiosity of the public is the last thing he and his gracious “hosts” (whoever they might be) want.
Ooops. So much for laying low in the Poconos.
But I really don’t care why he is here. I just don’t think public money should be going toward his schools and don’t think H1b visas should be used for hiring teachers when those are ONLY supposed to be given out when no qualified American citizens are available for the job. Given that there are qualified teachers within this country, I’d have to conclude that these H1bs are probably not warranted.
Neither are most of the H-1Bs that populate Silicon Valley and the rest of tech warranted. They are only supposed to hire H-1Bs when they cannot find qualified Americans. Instead, Big Tech has abused the system, and the government ignores the abuse. Tech companies are firing Americans after making them train their foreign replacements, all in the name of more profit. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-h-1b-visas-have-been-abused-since-the-beginning/
Yes
I used to work in the high tech industry and used to follow the issue.
It’s actually very easy for these companies to get away with hiring foreign Nationals. All they need to do is ignore any responses from Americans to position advertisements and Voila, no qualified Americans applied!
The whole thing is a joke.
Some of the bigger companies actually have entire divisions of people working full time just to find and make h1b arrangements for foreign workers.
Wright State University- Board of Trustees appointed by Kasich- have ongoing Fed oversight, related to alleged misuse of H-1B’s. The unexpected resignation of the President, last week, may, at some point be explained.
SomeDAM–I so very much agree w/your first paragraph, & I’ve thought so for years. I believe Erdogan had repeatedly asked that Gulen be extradited during the Obama administration, & the administration repeatedly refused to do so.
And that, despite F.B.I. raids in Gulen schools in a number of states.
Something is VERY wrong with this picture.
& waiting for you to write a poem about it!
I already wrote one
“The Shadow Knows”
The Shadow Knows ’bout Gulen schools
Gulen books and Gulen tools
The Shadow knows ’bout Gulen money
Gulen milk and Gulen honey
We don’t know, but the Shadow knows
‘Bout exiled Turks in the Poconos
I don’t know if you-all saw this but DeVos attacked Denver yesterday:
“But DeVos implied that without vouchers to pay for private schools (something Colorado’s state Supreme Court has twice ruled unconstitutional) and a sufficient supply of charter schools, Denver’s application process amounts to an optical illusion.
“The benefits of making choices accessible are canceled out when you don’t have a full menu of options,” she said, pointing to New Orleans as a better example of the choice ecosystem she’d like to see. “Choice without accessibility doesn’t matter. Just like accessibility without choices doesn’t matter. Neither scenario ultimately benefits students.”
Wow. Denver is VERY reform dominated. She objects to to the Denver “portfolio” because it includes public schools.
“The harsh criticism comes just weeks after DeVos publicly praised Denver’s efforts to solve a thorny challenge complicating school choice across the country: transportation. In a speech to the Council of Great City Schools, a group of leaders and school board members of America’s large school districts, she praised the “Success Express” that shuttles students in a handful of neighborhoods to both charter and district schools. But transportation challenges continue to prevent families from taking advantage of the options that do exist.”
It’s 100% privatization or nothing in ed reform now. They have gone VERY far Right.
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2017/03/29/weeks-after-devos-praises-school-choice-efforts-in-denver-she-slams-the-city-as-offering-accessibility-without-choices/
Chiara,
We fool ourselves if we expect her to evolve in her views. She is a choice zealot who might allow public schools to remain as places for the kids the voucher and charters schools don’t want.
She does real damage to the ed reform “brand” with the zealotry.
It validates every charge critics make about them.
They’ll regret making DeVos the face of the “movement”. She will be bad for public schools but she’ll be worse for ed reformers.
“Be careful what you wish for….” 🙂
Are they teaching religion? This is illegal.
That video is unbelievable, to think it is being shown in public schools is crazy!!!!
This video is not shown in classrooms. It is a piece of anti-Muslim propaganda that DianeMarie is promoting. The focus of the video is a curriculum produced by NYC’s public television station WNET (channel 13) to educate – NOT indoctrinate – students about this so easily villified religion. Here is a link to the Access to Islam website: http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/accessislam/lesson.html.
Read some of DianeMarie’s links above to posts she wrote (as Diane Kepus) for NewsWithViews.com, like the one where she ckaims Obama is a Muslim and, along with the CIA, in concert with ISIS to create the “NWO” (New World Order).
Thanks for the information, Sally. No trolls here.
BTW…today the LA Times has a Blume article right next to the Obits and not paid for by Eli Broad, featuring Arne Duncan extolling the virtues and giving his support to two of our LAUSD candidates for the BoE, both HUGELY financed by Broad and his band of billionaires, and both HUGE charter school supporters, Gonez who will probably win Ratliff’s seat, and Melvoin who will probably win Zimmer’s.
If any local voters in WLA and in Pacoima/Mission Hills, still are paying attention, and if you want to save our public schools, vote for Zimmer and for Padilla.
Zimmer and Padilla for LAUSD BoE..
This country will be free only when its citizens reject any and all mythologized gods, whether xtian, muslim, jewish, etc. . . .
The Gulen scandal should be a red flag to our nation that charter schools must be made financially accountable to American taxpayers whose money they today spend in secret, because just as there is really no such thing as a “public charter school,” there’s no such thing as a “non-profit charter school.”
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report that, because of their lack of accountability to the public, charter schools pose a risk to the Department of Education’s goals. The report finds that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its favorable reporting on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax dollars that are intended to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets and to the bottom lines of hedge funds.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools at all because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. That’s common sense to any taxpayer: Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money but have virtually no public record accountability of what they do with the tax money they divert from genuine public schools.
There are many tactics used by many charter school operators to reap profit from their schools, even the so-called “non-profits”, such as private charter school boards paying exorbitant sums to lease building space for their school in buildings that are owned by corporations that are in turn owned or controlled by the charter school board members or are REIT investments that are part of a hedge fund’s portfolio. There are many other avenues of making a hidden profit from operating private charter schools.
In addition to the siphoning away of money from needy schools, reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children of color; and, very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students. Based on these and other findings of racial discrimination in charter schools, the NAACP Board of Directors has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice.
Therefore, in order to assure that tax dollars are being spent wisely and that there is no racism in charter schools, charter schools should minimally (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that the charter schools are accountable to the public; (2) be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) be required to operate so that anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
Those aren’t unreasonable requirements. In fact, they are common sense to taxpayers and to anyone who seeks to assure that America’s children — especially her neediest children — are optimally benefiting from public tax dollars intended for their education. But, after the internal scams of charter schools become exposed to taxpayers through routine public reporting, the charter school industry will dry up and disappear, and the money that the charter school industry has been draining away from America’s neediest children will again flow to those in need.
There are a few exceptions, but the media seriously under-report the Gulen FBI raids, kickbacks, etc. PBS and other public media claim to be factual and unbiased, yet have barely mentioned Gulen charters. At least CBS, Dan Mihalopoulos at Chicago Sun Times, Philadelphia Inquirer actually operate as a free press, unlike npr.
PBS and NPR know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
On the whole, their reporting on Common Core, standardized testing and other school “reforms” over the years has also been the same “official stenography”
When NPR officials were trying to give NPR a facelift a few years ago, they made the claim that “NPR” no longer stands for anything.
They got that right!
Of course, what they really meant was the acronym NPR no longer stands for anything. But, on the contrary, there are lots of things it stands for: National Propaganda Radio, Nota Public Radio, National Presstitute Radio, etc.
The one thing it most certainly does not stand for any more is National Public Radio.
David Sirota labeled PBS the Plutocratic Broadcasting System, after a local affiliate took money from the anti-pension Arnold’s, for a pension program. The affiliate returned the money but, seemed unfazed by the ethical questions raised.
I don’t pretend to understand Turkish politics and, I won’t know if employees gave a substantial portion of their pay, back to the schools’ owner, as alleged, unless the FBI proves a case. If the story is true, it would seem a lot like the company towns of unethical business owners. And, if I was a Turkish citizen, I wouldn’t want to be governed by the business owners. On the other hand, I can understand that U.S. plutocrats would like that type of government in all nations.
Is there a record of letters, in which, Senators Brown and Portman, or senators in other states, have demanded FBI updates, related to years-long investigations into schools?
A fictional novel, making suppositions about the criteria that result in the locations,i.e. which states, are receptive to controversial school chains, would make for an interesting read.
My apologies. I had a memory lapse. I remembered a prior U.S. that was a democracy.