Fethullah Gulen is in the news. General Michael Flynn had a deal with Turkey to kidnap and return him to Turkey. It is in the news daily.
But journalists describe Gulen as a simple Muslim cleric in exile. They never mention his $500 million a year empire of charter schools. Is he protected by the CIA? Does anyone care that a Turkish imam now controls nearly 200 “public” schools? Do his Turkish teachers teach civics? Do they understand the U.S. Constitution?
Do journalists ever google his name?
Just wondering.
Bill Phillis is a retired deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio and an expert on school finance.
He is a champion of public schools. He belongs on the honor roll of this blog for his tireless efforts to ward off privatization and support public schools.
In this post, he reports on the current status of the Gulen Charter Schools, the schools associated with a Muslim cleric who lives in seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. His organization has established some 200 charter schools, which are organized in chains with different names. They usually deny being Gulen schools but can be recognized by the number of Turkish board members and Turkish teachers.
Bill Phillis writes:
Imam Fethullah Gulen’s charter school footprint in Ohio
By the numbers:
· 17 charters (down from 19)
· 6,500 enrollment
· $50,000,000 annual revenue
· 833 H-1B visa applications 2001-2016
· 38 persons serving on 85 board positions
· 84% of the board members are of Turkish descent
Buckeye Community Hope Foundation sponsors nine of the 17 Gulen charters. The ESC of Lake Erie West sponsors the rest. The charters are located in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Lorain, Toledo and Youngstown.
Gulenists started two charters in 2000 and added charters as follow:
· 6 in 2005
· 2 in 2007
· 1 in 2008
· 2 in 2009
· 2 in 2010
· 2 in 2011
In 2002, Concept Schools was formed to manage Gulen charters. In 2003, Breeze Inc. was established to serve as a landlord for Ohio Gulen charters. Breeze, since 2005, has collected rent in the amount of three times the purchase price of the property one school uses.
Does this footprint concern any state official, charter school sponsor? The Gulen operation has taken advantage of Ohio’s severely flawed charter law.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Michael Flynn and his previous company are now being investigated over their association with Gulen and Turkey. Maybe all of this will come out in the open. It just seems a bit “off” that a Turkish cleric, living in exile in the Poconos of PA can have free will with the American education system (and it’s MONEY). This is government/CIA sponsored and it needs to end….and yes, it goes all the way back to the Obama administration.
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Off topic, but can anybody tell me about fountas and pinell readers? The system just got introduced into our school system. I wonder if it has something to do with the principal we hired from a Michigan charter school.
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Fountas and Pinell readers were developed in Australia. I have never used their materials. The program claims to integrate skills with reading comprehension. Teachers can do the same by having leveled libraries of real literature. Perhaps it saves the district money by purchasing a ready made program, or perhaps it is easy to use for teachers that are not skilled literacy teachers. Here’s a review of the program from a reading teacher. https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2014/12/fountas-and-pinnell-leveled-literacy-intervention/
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Thank you very much, retired teacher!
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I’ve made a number of (thus far futile) attempts to inquire of MSNBC (Maddow) as to why there continues to be no effort to convey the nature of Gulen and his organization, in the context of his recently elevated visibility as a player in the Trump scandals. He’s consistently portrayed as a benign ‘cleric’, living peacefully in Pennsylvania, and, at this point, this is how he is perceived by most people who have heard of him at all.
If there is to be any ‘political will’ found to address this, it has to be pushed to the fore by smart media, knowing that its complexity is beyond the attention span and demand for simplicity of our general culture.
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Everyone listens to John Oliver….and everyone knows of his Charter School piece. If anyone can do it, John Oliver can!
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Gulen should not be able to hire so many H-1Bs when there are comparable Americans available. A waiver should only be issued when qualified Americans cannot be found. Tech companies have abused and misused these visas to undercut American workers. Gulen must have some strong political “friends” that allow him to gain access to public money for schools of little value.
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That’s it right there.
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the fact that so much is never mentioned about Gulen’s schools is telling in itself
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Appealling to Rachel Maddow on anything involving public education is a waste of time. The question is why…
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Rachel Maddow never mentions public education.
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“Breeze Inc. was established to serve as a landlord for Ohio Gulen charters. Breeze, since 2005, has collected rent in the amount of three times the purchase price of the property one school uses.”
Ed reformers had an opportunity to stop charters from ripping off the public in 2014.
They passed. Instead they put some weak authorizer rules in.
It’ll get worse, too. The exact same people who brought you Ohio’s terrible charter sector were all re-hired. Many of them were promoted.
The same people who designed this lousy “governance system” are ALL still in charge.
They’ll be another ECOT. It’s inevitable. The governance system they invented guarantees corruption and self-dealing.
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Anyone who has any questions on these charter schools will need to contact the authorizer:
http://buckeyehope.org/
Authorizer’s get a cut of every charter dollar, supposedly to regulate and oversee these schools. Since the charter schools themselves are completely opaque and have no duty to respond to the public at all, the public’s only recourse is to contact the authorizer.
This is how politicians in Ohio successfully dodged responsibility and accountability for the expenditure of public education funds- they outsourced their duties to authorizers.
They all breathed a huge sigh of relief when they realized chartering meant they now get a complete pass on public education and oversight of public funds.
That’s why ed reform is so popular with the political classes- it means you don’t have to do anything regarding public education.
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I presume there is no publicly available record of dates of the overseer visits to the schools?
Do the authorizers have to comply with FOIA requests?
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How much of the $50,000,000 stays in the U.S. each year? The economic multiplier effect of dollars spent locally is an important factor in a community’s survival.
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Is the FBI still sitting on the results of its investigations or did they find nothing of note?
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I bet there is a CIA geopolitical aspect of this matter. What other foreign national in seclusion is allowed to educate our children?
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Thank you for covering. St Louis has three Concept Gulen schools and local media have given no coverage to FBI raids on Concept school headquarters.
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