Charter schools lain they are public schools. They are not. What public school is part of a corporate chain? What public school operates for profit? What public schools charges fees for service?
The KIPP schools in Houston have been charging fees to poor parents. Now that the scam has been exposed, KIPP refuses to refund the money to parents who need the money far more than the multi-million dollar KIPP organization does. KIPP sgoukf ask its patron, the rightwing Walton Family Foundation, for a few more dollars, enough to reimburse the needy families that it ripped off.
The Houston Chronicle writes:
“Mary Courtney was one of KIPP Houston’s biggest advocates, even as she had to borrow money from relatives to keep up with payments to the charter school.
“She drove to Austin during School Choice Week, talking to lawmakers about why they should better fund charter schools. She volunteered on campus. She paid thousands in fees so her boys and other students could have access to books and science materials.
“But that was before she realized the fees she was paying were optional, something never mentioned by teachers or principals or on the fee agreement forms that the schools – KIPP Liberation College Prep and KIPP PEACE Elementary – tied to student registration. Now, Courtney and several other KIPP Houston parents are furious because they believe they were duped by the charter nonprofit system into paying for what they believe should be a free public education.
“At no time if I thought the fees were optional would I have paid for them, especially when I’m struggling to put food on the table or clothes on my children’s backs,” Courtney said. “It’s a lot to ask of a single parent, and it’s wrong for them to allocate fees from parents, especially knowing the demographic area where a majority of their school campuses are.”
“A Texas Education Agency investigation last year, a copy of which was obtained by the Houston Chronicle, found KIPP Houston schools violated the Texas Education Code by collecting millions of dollars a year in unallowable student fees. Its mostly low-income and minority families paid hundreds of dollars per student each year for things such as reading materials, classroom supplies and parent associations.”
KIPP Houston joins the Wall of Shame for taking advantage of poor families. KIPP should fully refund the money it illegally collected from parents.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m sure Betsy will tell them how fortunate they were to have the opportunity to have their children in the “system.”
Perhaps they can recoup their “fees” by selling Amway!
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Regarding this whole “optional fees” fiasco, KIPP put out a statement to parents:
http://www.kipp.org/events-press/kipp-houston-public-schools-statement-optional-school-fees/
In essence, the statement puts the blame on the parents, saying that it’s not KIPP’s fault that you got the wrong idea on whether or not the fees were mandatory. Just because our officials and teacher called those fees “mandatory” and never said otherwise at any point prior to the HOUSTON CHRONICLE expose doesn’t mean we were at fault. You should have challenged us on it, and read your handbook, but since you didn’t … oh well… finders keepers, losers weepers
What the statement did NOT say was something to the effect of:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
“Many of our KIPP parents paid money to the KIPP organization because they were misled into thinking that certain ‘optional’ fees were mandatory when they were not. We deeply regret this misunderstanding, and the resulting loss of money to those parents.
“Therefore, we are now announcing that any parent who paid money to KIPP under this false pretense can ask KIPP, Inc. for a full refund of this money, and, with no questions asked, we will gladly provide such such refunds to those parents.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
That’ll happen when Hell freezes over.
Mercedes Schneider did a deep dig into exactly how accessible these school policy “handbooks” — the ones clarifying which fees are “voluntary” — and discovered … ehh… that info is not THAT accessible:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MERCEDES SCHNEIDER:
“So, KIPP Houston leaves it up to its schools as to whether each chooses to charge fees related to cell phone confiscation, late student pick up, ‘etc.’
“But don’t assume that a prospective KIPP parent/guardian is able to use the internet to investigate those school-specific ‘etc.’ fees in order to make a better-informed decision about selecting KIPP in the first place.
“As of this writing, KIPP Houston includes 28 schools:
http://www.kipp.org/schools/kipp-school-directory/?q=77099
“However, the link to the ‘school websites’ takes one to a general page about each school. One cannot access any individual school policy pages in order to ascertain what, exactly, a parent or guardian might be charged by way of school policy fees that fall under the ‘etc.’ that is unique to each school.
“Also, googling a particular KIPP Houston school name along with ‘school policy’ yields nothing.
“School choice: Where franchised charter schools get to discipline parents and students via mystery fees or optional fees that may not be reimbursed when the ‘optional’ component is, uh, miscommunicated.
” ‘Knowledge is indeed ‘ power.
“So is withholding knowledge.
“Individual KIPP schools need to clarify their ‘etc.’ fees.”
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I read this piece twice, and both times I misread the last paragraph. I read, ” KIPP Houston joins Wall Street…” It was the third time before imacurally read it literally. Did I mean what you knew?
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See also Mercedes Schneider on how the fees are buried, not fully disclosed.
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Thanks for mentioning this. It really helps to provide a direct link to recommended readings. Mercedes’s article can be seen here: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/kipp-houston-and-its-etc-fees/
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Way too much like looking in the current big bank/financial institution How To Get Rich By Secretly Robbing Our Clients Through Hidden Fees mirror.
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Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money. So much taxpayer money is being skimmed away by charter school operators that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education reports that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets.
There are multiple scams used by many charter school operators to reap profit from their schools — even the so-called “non-profits” — such as by 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 Wall Street hedge fund’s portfolio. There are many, many other avenues of making a huge hidden profit by operating private charter schools with public tax money.
At the very least, taxpayers should insist that charter schools must file the same available-to-the-public detailed financial reports that genuine public school boards file under penalty of perjury, and no public tax money should be handed over to any charter school operators who don’t file these reports.
“Free market” charter schools collecting public taxpayer voucher money are proving to be a disaster for taxpayers, both financially and educationally, and such vast amounts of public tax money have already being skimmed away by charter schools and funneled into corporate and the private pockets of politicians’ cronies that 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.
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. The ACLU has called for a complete moratorium on charter schools.
So, 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.
If charter schools were required to file the same financial statements that public schools file, the skimming of tax money would stop and hedge funds would move on to their next target, leaving the charter school “movement” to dry up.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
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Please share this on FB.
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You said it.
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The FTC had the responsibility to stop the use of “public” in the false advertising of contractor schools.
The U.S. Dept. of Ed, state departments of ed and politicians had the responsibility to cease use of “public charter schools” and, to honestly refer to them as contractor schools.
BTW, Scisne, in Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled the assets of contractor schools belong to the operators, not the community.
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It’s a great idea, though it’s not really new. Since Preschool is not compulsory and most K-8 schools were not established with that age group in mind, when districts wanted to provide PreK to at-risk populations, many felt existing private Preschools were the best location for that, because they’re already setup to address the needs of younger children, so they outsourced to them. When states added Universal Preschool, many districts did the same thing. Typically, those Preschools remain private and districts refer to them as “subcontractors.”
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The publicly funded, private sector, for profit, corporate education sector is doing the same thing in countries all over the world and it fights back with bribes and in court in those countries when the people or the countries try to stop them.
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Blatant reverse-Robin Hood, self-serving public service. That just does it! How wrong can a private company be?
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Houston is where KIPP started in the early 1990s, and if either of these charters is among their flagship schools, you have to wonder for how long KIPP has been bilking poor parents there, as well as elsewhere. It should be looked into and very carefully scrutinized because we could be talking about MULTI-millions of dollars over the decades.
That was the very beginning of charter expansion, before non-profit companies had figured out how they could bend what few rules existed to funnel as much tax-payer cash as possible into their coffers. That was before scammers realized how easily they could double dip, such as by setting up shell companies for management and for real estate, charging the government and paying themselves high fees and rents. So, I suspect it was a design feature of their business plan, not a flaw or mistake, and all their charters should be audited going back to when each school was established.
I used to wonder how come the Noble charter chain in Chicago thought they could get away with charging fees to poor parents, which only came out because they were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just from what parents were charged for their children’s behavioral transgressions. Maybe these parent fees have been part of the No Excuses business model all along but we just didn’t know, so I would suggest looking very closely at other chains as well.
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Jay Mathews at The Post adores KIPP about as much as he does Advanced Placement.
So what does dear Jay have to say about all this?
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Ed. professors at Harvard also must love KIPP. They invite them to speak at symposiums.
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I’m crying the same river of tears for Courtney and her fellow parents that the people who took her fees are.
“Choice” is a marketing term for “let the buyer beware”- an excuse to target the most vulnerable.
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So as not to let anything get “lost in translation”:
When parents with pressing economic difficulties don’t want to and/or can’t pay “optional fees” then don’t doubt for a moment that that classic of Rheephormish makes its appearance:
“I don’t think your child is a good fit for our school.”
Because when all is said and done, this riff off of a variously attributed quote explains it all—
“$tudent $ucce$$ isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
😎
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I don’t know if they leave those fees up to the individual school or not, but I know that my previous school–Harmony School of Innovations Katy–in Texas, is now charging students $150.00 to join after school clubs. After school clubs only last 40 minutes one day a week, and the teachers usually provide the supplies. I don’t know if this is legal or not, but I know that parents were very upset about the costs of these so-called clubs.
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Harmony Schools… Soner Tamir was a spring 2017 Aspen Pahara Fellow.
Mercedes Schneider’s Deutsch 29 blog describes Gates-funded Pahara.
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Courtney is experiencing the corporate legislative initiative that Gordon Lafer describes in his book, The One Percent Solution. Privatization of public services eliminates a responsible public authority to address grievances. Complaints become customer service issues rather than policy problems that must be addressed by democratically accountable officials.
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Kipp DFW gets over $12,900 per student but only 62% of students pass all TEA tests. DISD gets thousands less in money per student but has 66% of students pass all TEA tests!!!
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Sounds similar to a contractor school praised by Hechinger Report (the site is Gates-funded). The Baltimore contractor school got almost twice as much per pupil in funding as the public school. And, the contractor school went to court to get more.
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This school is located very close to my public school. They have recruited quite a few students from my school. Coincidentally, the high achievers.
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Marcia, no coincidence!
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Here is what DeEtta from TEA had to said:
Hi Ms. Courtney:
Sorry for the delay in responding.
The TEA appointed Monitor will spearhead reimbursement to the parents. KIPP is tasked with identifying and reimbursing the unallowable fees.
Please let me know if you need anything else.
DeEtta
DeEtta Culbertson
Texas Education Agency
Division of Communications
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