Bruce Baker writes here about the ingenious ways that charter schools extract money from their staff. The Gulen schools do it directly; Baker discovered that certain “no excuses” schools do it by requiring their teachers to enroll in the Relay “Graduate School of Education.”
https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2016/12/12/the-charter-school-company-store/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No way! Charter promoters and supporters are just better people than those who support public schools.
There is absolutely no chance there is any self-interest at all in this sector. They’re saint-like and above all that. Here’s just one example of the absolutely gushing biographies ed reformers churn out on a daily basis:
“While reporting the Rocketship book I spent hours with co-founder John Danner, a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who cashed in his software company and then decided to tackle education problems. To get experience, Danner taught in a high poverty school in Nashville.”
He’s an engineer! he went to Stanford! He’s rich! What more do you need to know?
BETTER PEOPLE. They don’t require regulation because they are so pure and good they are IMMUNE to the ethical failures of mere mortals UNLIKE those icky, dirty labor union members 🙂
https://www.the74million.org/article/whitmire-why-do-many-big-donors-prefer-charter-schools-hint-its-not-because-they-hate-unions
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There is no surprise that the “company store” manipulations would be part of charters. Charters are designed to exploit every nuance of our reckless promotion of market based education. Many charter operators are from the world of finance; these are the same people that helped almost destroy the economy in 2008. These are the type of people that look for every opportunity to exploit every loophole and profit generating scheme. Waste and fraud are rampant due to the lack of oversight and accountability in the charter industry. With the government failing to regulate, charter operators have been able to engage in shady practices such as costly lease agreements, and hiding profits offshore. That is why people like Michael Milken are in this racket; it is free easy money.
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The “company store” is an innovation that came with the Industrial Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
from wikipedia:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
“Company stores have had a reputation as monopolistic institutions, funnelling workers’ incomes back to the owners of the company. Company stores often faced little or no competition and prices were therefore not competitive. Allowing purchases on credit enforced a kind of debt slavery, obligating employees to remain with the company until the debt was cleared.
“Regarding this reputation, economic historian Price V. Fishback wrote that:
— ” ‘The company store is one of the most reviled and misunderstood of economic institutions. In song, folktale, and union rhetoric, the company store was often cast as a villain, a collector of souls through perpetual debt peonage. Nicknames, like the “pluck me” and more obscene versions that cannot appear in a family newspaper, seem to point to exploitation. The attitudes carry over into the scholarly literature, which emphasizes that the company store was a monopoly.’ [1]
“(The songs Fishback mentions include the popular folk song Sixteen Tons, which includes such lines as
” ‘Saint Peter, don’t you call me- I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.’ “)
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Cami Anderson tried to pull that b.s. in Newark, NJ by only sanctioning Relay as THE school to go to for further education. Cami is long gone, but not forgotten.
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Yep!
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This was how business was conducted during the late 19th century and early 20th-century era of the Robber Barrons when 40 percent of Americans lived in poverty.
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There are similar “company store” arrangements in some of the so-called “residency programs. See the details at the National Center for Teacher Residencies. The idea is that teachers need to be trained by and for a district or school that will hire them. A typical program has a token arrangement for a University to be the agency offering courses for certification when in fact almost all training is offered by “master teachers” already employed in the district or school that will probably hire the resident. The resident is paid for on-the-job training but must also pay for course work in order become certified and eligible for a full-time salary. The generic sales pitch is that teachers who enter teaching via a residency will be job-ready on day one. Gates and USDE were among early funders of these programs. More at https://nctresidencies.org/about/who-residencies-serve/
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