This is a new kind of charter school scandal. A virtual school enrolled students already enrolled in Catholic schools and claimed full state tuition. The virtual school gave the Catholic school cash and laptops. Meanwhile, the parents paid tuition to the Catholic school. In effect, the students attended two schools.
Bizarre new world of profit-taking.
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-lennox-virtual-academy-20170920-story.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Same thing happened here in Arizona several years back. The “school” was a Christian Academy. They got their hands slapped as did the online school. NO money was returned to the state.
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But unregulated school service markets are great, Diane! Think of the innovation!
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LOL Chiara! One of my biggest complaints is the Arizona Christian Scholarship Fund which the Senate President of the AZ Senate owns and collects six figures from.
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None of the schools on the list are Catholic! Guess they don’t count as christian.
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I saw a good piece on the scam of siphoning off voucher funds –
running them “scholarships” and taking a cut.
Ed reform offers almost endless opportunities to skim. That’s why the claim they will regulate this stuff is a joke. They’d have to hire an army of regulators. As privatization grows so will the layers of middlemen taking their cut. They’ll make school districts look like models of efficiency.
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You really have to read ed reformers to see how little regard they have for public school families.
This piece is about how to “downsize” districts, because even the most charter-cheerleading cities have about half public schools.
But they offer absolutely nothing to the kids in public schools- other than a grudging acceptance that the schools probably should be allowed to continue to exist.
There’s nothing positive for public school kids at all- it’s all mitigating loss and tamping down opposition. What’s amazing is they don’t SEE it. There’s no effort at all to provide anything positive to public school families. The BEST people who choose public schools in these “portfolio” systems can hope for is ed reformers will let the schools exist.
This is really the mindset- in their ideal world there would be no public schools but they’re faced with the reality that our schools exist, so they offer public school families a menu of options all of which include losses. They’ve just decided that public schools will take the hit in order to nurture charters. The kids in those schools? No one cares.
There’s no “value add”. We’re supposed to accept these people as leaders of public systems but they offer nothing to public schools. Public schools are ONLY discussed in the context of whether they’re good or bad for charter schools- they assign public schools zero value. In places where 50% of kids are IN public schools!
https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-charter-movements-tipping-point-strategy-isnt-working-what-now?utm_source=Fordham+Updates&utm_campaign=0842d7a646-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d9e8246adf-0842d7a646-71526621&mc_cid=0842d7a646&mc_eid=49977d0501
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Oh, even in their “ideal world,” they would allow a very few public schools to exist, to take the kids that the charters just don’t want to deal with. The special needs kids, particularly those with more severe impairments. The English Language Learners, at least until they learn English well enough that the charters don’t have to provide ESL classes. The kids with severe behavior problems.
Of course, they would not give much money to these public schools because that would cut into their profits.
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You almost have to admire how clever they are with ways to line their pockets. This particular little scheme is nothing short of brilliant. In addition to the nice double dipping, it helps to silence one of the biggest critics of charters. Catholic schools have lost a lot of students to charters, so it’s been in their interest to oppose them. But if they can all share and share alike, well now, how Christian is that?
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Plus they act so HOLY, HOLY, HOLY. Gag me.
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This story, good Lord:
“After an avalanche of parent opposition, the Mountain View Whisman School District announced last week that it will end the controversial new digital math program Teach to One. But questions remain whether the district disregarded its own rules regarding pilot programs, and whether the superintendent erred in agreeing to an expensive, nearly half-million dollar classroom program without securing the funds ahead of time.”
“Yet before it was even tried out as actual school-year program, Time magazine touted “the School of One” as one of the 50 top innovations of 2009. It quickly garnered positive media in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Education Next. Bill Gates repeatedly has praised the value of this program, most recently in a April 2016 speech in which he said that New Classrooms “represents the future not only of math, but a number of subjects.”
“Before ending the program entirely last week, the district was already planning to cut back on Teach to One. After a district-run survey on the math program yielded hundreds of critical comments — one parent threatened to switch to a private school just to get away from it — the district office sent out a notice calling for a 50-50 split between Teach to One and traditional teacher-led instruction. Parents packed the Jan. 5 board meeting and told board members that the concession was not enough, and would effectively waste 50 percent of math class time instead of 100 percent of class time.”
https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2017/01/13/district-abruptly-drops-digital-math-program
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Sounds like a version of Arbitrage. From Wikipedia : “In economics and finance, arbitrage (US: /ˈɑːrbɪtrɑːʒ/, UK: /ˈɑːbɪtrɪdʒ/, UK: /ˌɑːbɪˈtrɑːʒ/) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a (imagined, hypothetical, thought experiment) transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs. For instance, an arbitrage is present when there is the opportunity to instantaneously buy low and sell high.”
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In this case, it’s a cost difference leveraged into being by a tech bribe to the catholic schools.
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Shell Corporation also comes to mind.
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smh
We’re all acquainted with the squandering of potential Education dollars for ulterior actions like, say, marketing, etc. But just imagine if all this evil genius were directed instead toward the problem of keeping disadvantaged kids engaged. It’s not just money that’s squandered. Them’s a lot of smarts being misdirected….
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Hi Diane, along this line, I wondered what you thought of the Gulan Turkish 125+ charter school movement… this is a religious school, paid by taxpayer money except it is promoting the Islamic religion. Thank you!
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Diane has written about the Gulen charter network dozens of times. If you will use the “Search All Posts” feature below, you will find them all. Diane has been, at best, skeptical of the network, generally leaning well toward the negative.
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Dienne,
I have never written a post praising the Gulen Network, nor even “leaning” positive.
To clear up any confusion, it is a sham and a scam.
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From edsurge: “As with most bizarre cases, the money trail tells the tale. The story suggests that Lennox, beset by years of declining enrollment, created an online program in 2016 to boost its numbers. Funding data reviewed by the Times suggest the district’s funding ‘increased by at least $3 million as overall enrollment rose, largely through students signed up for the virtual academy.'”
“Enrollment” for a prox 5000 pupil district increased by 400 virtual-academy students, for which the district collected about $7500 each in increased state aid [3million div by 5000].
First of all, could it cost anywhere near that per pupil to create/ administer/ update etc an online learning program? That’s 70% of the brick&mortar per-pupil amount!! (The overall district budget online shows about 54million for 5 thousand some kids or 10800 pp). Nice state funding formula.
But how peculiar! Instead of a for-profit corp sucking up taxpayer $, a local school district fattens its budget. All that gravy. They only gave the supt a 2% thank-you raise for this so maybe it all goes to the kids! ;-). Now, the thing w/the Catholic schools, that’s just greedy…
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Diane, you’ve published so many great posts in the last 3 days, but still licking my chops over this story– talking to myself now!
Really need to find out more about this new [2013] CA funding formula. From Lennox school district budget details online, looks like state assigns schools a flat per-pupil amount adjusted slightly for local demographics like spec ed pop. Notes clarify that the revenue is a complex five-way stream incl local taxes. Wonder if it’s even discussed locally.
This district intrigues me, being about the same size as mine. But here, we raise 90% of school budget from municipal taxes, so BOEd peddles annual budgets line by line to the public every spring thro PTO mtgs, local paper, website etc, to be haggled over at public/ televised BOEd mtgs, then we vote.
I fantasize a BOEd mtg here where we publically discuss grabbing more than our share of state funds by flogging a virtual academy, inviting reps of regional Cath schs to push grabbing extra by pimping them out!
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Anyone who supports the Catholic “Church” in any way deserves to be cheated. They enable those charlatans knowing full well that their “church” operates the largest pedophile group in the world.
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Los Angeles charter chains to seek LESS regulation, starting with fighting for the ability to deny services to special ed students:
http://beta.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-lashon-academy-charter-20171002-story.html
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Another reason Board Member/Criminal Ref Rodriguez has to be on the Got To Go List.
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