The Columbus Dispatch reports on the continuing financial misadventures of the Imagine charter chain.
Imagine Schools, a for-profit Charter chain, bought an appliance store in a building valued last year at $2.4 Million. It renovated and passed the bill to Ohio taxpayers for $7.7 Million, triple the buolding’s value.
The charter, Great Westerm Academy, will have 700 students.
“Under its finance deal, Great Western Academy had to come up with added lease payments totaling $7.7 million over the past decade to cover the renovations — $3.3 million above their actual cost — at times paying nearly $1 million a year in total rent.
“According to the Franklin County auditor, the property was valued at $2.4 million in 2017. In other words, the $7.7 million the school paid for renovations was more than three times the building’s value.
“The deal has raised questions about Great Western’s lease agreement with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools. SchoolHouse rents the space and sub-leases to Great Western. SchoolHouse also financed the renovations.”
This is the sweet part of the deal. Imagine rents the space, then subleases it to an Imagine school.
Do Ohio taxpayers care what happens to their money?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
John Kasich goes around lecturing America on every topic as if he is some sort of wise old man. He’s not. He talks a good game, but his work as a congressman, budget director and governor leaves a great deal to be desired. His positions on public education are downright scary. He’s leaving Ohio in a mess.
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The charter school scandals will hurt Kasich’s chances at national office. He’s in the political circles that he’s in, based on his wife’s wealth. You would have thought that her money would buy a higher quality mate.
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“The deal has raised questions about Great Western’s lease agreement with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools. SchoolHouse rents the space and sub-leases to Great Western. SchoolHouse also financed the renovations.”
Ohio actually already has a state Supreme Court case where the court described these “subsidiaries” as part and parcel of the charter school- that the subleases are just passing money around within one larger organization.
Ohio charters set up these elaborate shell games because state law forbids them being “for profit”, so they just spin off businesses.
When you read media analysis that says charters are “nonprofit” keep this in mind. You really have to delve into it to understand what’s actually going on here.
There’s a whole subcontractor industry now that sprang up around Ohio charters- they sub out everything. A lot of people are making a lot of money, there’s NO transparency around the private subcontractors, and every dime of it is public funding.
No one tracks this. It would be impossible for the public to track it. There’s simply no publicly collected or available information. All we see is what public money goes in- we don’t see where it goes OUT.
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Yost is the Ohio auditor and he’s running for election. He did absolutely nothing to track or record any of these charter payments until 1. he was running again and 2. Ohio newspapers started reporting on the rip-off deals.
We have to replace Yost. He’s directly responsible for a lot of these rip-offs. He simply refused to do his job when it came to charters. He protected them FOR YEARS.
They were and are big donors to his career. This situation hurt every single public school student in the state and no one in Columbus lifted a finger to stop it because they’re ALL captured by the ed reform “movement”.
This has been going on for more than a decade and no one in ed reform has done ONE THING to protect the citizens of this state from these blatant, outrageous rip offs.
Our public school students are owed tens of millions of dollars that were taken from them under ed reform governance. They threw public school kids under in the bus in their privatization campaign. 85% of the kids in this state paid for this.
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Whenever you hear one or another DC lobbyists babbling about “reinventing schools” remember Ohio.
THIS is the “governance” they “invent”. It’s garbage. Riddled with corruption and self-dealing, not transparent, deceptive to citizens.
When they sneer at public school governance and brag that they put in better schemes look at Ohio, where we have suffered under these arrogant know-it-alls for 2 decades.
These are the state schemes they write. This is what they came up with when they “reinvented” schools. They arrogantly and recklessly ignored everything we’ve learned about school governance over 150 years of hard lessons and threw it all in the trash.
It’s hubris. It’s people who are convinced they are the Best and the Brightest and who surround themselves with an echo chamber of cheerleaders.
These governance schemes are cheap, cobbled-together garbage. They’re FAR inferior to the public school schemes they’re determined to replace.
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When we built a new public school here we had to go to voters and get approval.
The first plan was too expensive and voters rejected it. After months of debate and a third plan, voters approved it.
The third plan was better. The debate was necessary and valuable.
Ed reformers dismiss this public consent and debate and approval process as “red tape”. They’re wrong. They’re bad at governance. If you let them draft your state law and handle public funds you will regret it. We regret it in Ohio. They have harmed our public education system.
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exactly true
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This is a perfect example of socializing the risk and privatizing the profits. Taxpayers are on the hook for charter fiscal decisions in which the public has had no say. Charter lobbies are working to make decisions happen at the state level, but all residents will wind up paying the price. Florida has a misleading amendment on the ballot this November that will eliminate local approval of charters. The League of Women Voters has filed a lawsuit claiming the proposed amendment is misleading. We need laws on the books to protect taxpayers from shouldering the cost of charter mismanagement or over spending. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/school-zone/os-lawsuit-amendment-league-women-voters-20180712-story.html
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Posted at OEN: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Ohio-Taxpayers-Charged-7-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-Schools_Fraud_School-Reform-180731-784.html#comment709265
WITH THREE COMMENTS which offer links to the most important articles here, on charter schools.
BELOW ARE TWO:
From the Ravitch blog: ” “The charter school “debate” is no longer about charter schools vs. public schools (charters are not public schools — that myth has been exploded), or even about “for profit” vs. “not for profit” charters (the evidence HERE suggests this is really a difference without a distinction).”
“No, the real issue here is about the true purpose of education, and whether continuing to support two separate but unequal, and inequitable, school systems is doing anything to improve education for all children. By any objective measure, the answer is a resounding “NO!”
“The charter lobby has attempted, through spending millions of dollars on PR and marketing, to redefine the purpose of education from one about producing well-rounded citizens who are capable of making valuable contributions to our society and leading fulfilling lives, to a business-driven agenda of producing workers for corporate America. The latter “purpose” now drives much of our state and federal education legislation, which is rife with references to “21st Century Skills,” and insuring that high school graduates are stamped as being “college and career-ready”
What the charter chains overlook is that the purpose of education is to prepare young people for lives of caring, compassion, and responsibility.”This is a radical repurposing of a public goal to meet the needs of private corporations, and is echoed in the mission and “vision” statements of the leading charter school management companies
MY second comment:
The Ravitch blog has links to charter school fraud! https://dianeravitch.net/?s=charter+school+fraud
Also see my series here https://www.opednews.com/author/series/author40790.html
“A new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and Action United is blowing the lid off the lack of public oversight at Pennsylvania’s 186 charter schools. http://populardemocracy.org/fraudandfinancialmismanagement
Jeremy Mohler, on behalf of “In the Public Interest,”explains why charter schools are a perfect fit for the Trump administration. They are a way of disinvesting in public schools.https://medium.com/in-the-public-interest/charter-schools-arent-progressive-they-re-a-way-to-avoid-funding-the-education-of-all-students-91419d236cee
MY third comment has many links charter machinations around the states! go to One
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Here’s a (typically) gushing piece on ed reform in Colorado:
https://www.the74million.org/article/elevating-expectations-in-the-mile-high-city-how-tom-boasberg-reshaped-denvers-schools/?utm_source=The+74+Million+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9d31ec0448-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_07_27_11_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_077b986842-9d31ec0448-176212473
This is the kind of “analysis” we got in Ohio for years. Written by ed reform lobbyists, promoting a privatization agenda, with no one outside the club ever heard from.
It took 2 decades for the truth to start to come out. We had to get past a wall of cheerleaders and lobbyists to just get ordinary, basic information on what was going on with charters and once that happened, once local media started printing it, the public started to turn on ed reform.
If your state isn’t captured yet count yourself lucky and don’t allow them to run government. Get another opinion.
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Charter school growth is declining. Enter the PR people from the charter industry, this nonsense from yesterday in my home town newspaper.
“OPINION: IT’S TIME TO IRRIGATE CHARTER SCHOOL DESERTS” by Amber Northern and Michael Petrilli, July 30, 2018, Cincinnati Enquirer. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/2018/07/30/opinion-its-time-irrigate-charter-school-deserts/837164002/
Begin Quote with my asides in parentheses
In a country built on the freedom to choose – whether that’s Verizon or AT&T, Hulu or Netflix, iPhone or Android – it’s hard to understand why we don’t give poor families the opportunity to choose their schools, just as middle- and upper-income families can do via private schools or buying into the right neighborhood. (Schools are not like retail purchases of tech or tech services. The authors know better.)
The advent of charter schools in the mid-1990s was supposed to change all of that by leveling the playing field for poor families. These are independently run schools of choice, meaning that students are not assigned to them because of where they live, but because families choose to enroll their child in them. (Deliberate lie about the original purpose and context for charter schools in order to fit the choice= charter narrative).
Many charter schools are specifically opened to serve disadvantaged youngsters in urban areas-and rigorous research has shown that most do a fine job on that count. (This is not what independent the research says). Yet, until last month, no one had ever determined whether we’ve been overlooking neighborhoods in America that are home to lots of poor children but lack charter schools.
Our organization’s new study, Charter School Deserts: High-Poverty Neighborhoods with Limited Educational Options, did just that. The lead author, assistant professor Andrew Saultz of Miami University, defined “charter school deserts” as areas of three or more contiguous census tracts with moderate or high poverty and no charter elementary schools. He found that, of the 42 states that allow charter schools, 39 of them have at least one desert each. (The Op ed conflates neighborhoods and census tracts and invents the idea that “educational deserts” exist unless there are plenty of nearby charter schools…oases, watering holes. The study referred to any census track with more than 20 percent of the population living at or below the poverty line a mid to high poverty district. The report is contrived to redefine poverty with three levels so charters can be marketed in suburbs and rural areas.)
The lying about charter schools is ugly. This absurd effort to create a market for charters reflects the desperation not of parents, but the billionaires backers of really corrupt charter school policies in Ohio.
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So what if they open and close like day lilies? Or if they get state money to plan an opening but never open? Or if they are frauds run by hucksters?
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Hasn’t Ohio had enough of charter scams?
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If Ohioans elect current Attorney General DeWine as governor (DeVos funds the attacks against Cordray) the answer is “no” they don’t care if they are ripped off or if Ohio government is corrupt.
Has Fordham expressed an opinion about the deal?
We know Gates wouldn’t take any ownership for his part.
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What are the people of Ohio drinking? Their water must be tainted.
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That was a really expensive paint job.
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The Columbus Dispatch has long been a Republican mouthpiece. There is a bittersweet justice to their powerlessness. Despite their articles, the fiscal exploitation by charters continues unabated.
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Would Fordham tell us how much the taxpayers are paying for the ubiquitous K-12.com ads broadcast on T.V. in Ohio?
A special shout out to CAP for recommending states authorize charters. (sarcasm)
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It’s not just Ohio, either. In Utah, those K-12 and Connections Academy (Pearson) ads run ALL spring and summer. My children scream when the ads show up on TV.
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A special shout out to Gates whose goal was explained by the founder of his New Schools Venture Fund, “different brands on a large scale”.
(sarcasm)
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Speaking of Ohio, LeBron James is getting covered in glory over at Daily Kos for opening a school for “at-risk kids” in Akron. I’m wondering from afar whether this is another celebrity charter school. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/07/31/1784860/-LeBron-James-opened-a-school-for-at-risk-kids-Good-thing-he-didnt-just-shut-up-and-dribble
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No. LeBron is opening a public school, not a charter.
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