Mercedes Schneider reports on her examination of Joe Biden’s brother Frank and his role in the charter industry in Florida.
Let me begin by saying straight out that I don’t judge people by what their relatives do. I have seven brothers and sisters (five living) and I am not responsible for their decisions and activities, as they are not responsible for mine.
Having said that, I think the public needs to know where Joe Biden stands on charter schools such as the ones in which his brother was deeply involved, as we should know where every candidate stands on the privatization of education.
The facts that Schneider has assembled are vastly Important as they reflect on the shoddy oversight of for-profit charters in Florida. Forget the famous name involved. Read this fascinating account to see how children and taxpayers are being bilked by shady operators who know nothing about education. Lousy results have no impact on the bottom line.
An awful lot of people are cashing in on kids and on the infinite gullibility of the public and the cupidity and greed of politicians who enable these for-profit frauds.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, we are not responsible for what our relatives do and say, and Biden like all other candidates has to pushed to say where he stands explicitly on the looting and decimation of public schools by the chartists.
P.S,–Forgot to say–Mercedes’ investigative reporting is outstanding here–she is a brilliant asset to all of us, thank you.
The Chartists were actually a working class English political group that began around 1838. Irony there, no?
“Mavericks’ story begins in Akron, Ohio, with a wealthy industrialist who loved to wear big cowboy hats and donate millions of dollars to Republican politicians. In 1998, David Brennan launched White Hat Management. His charter schools were housed in strip malls, and the students herded in to sit at computers for three shifts a day. This was an education model Mavericks would later call the “next generation in education.” But state auditors weren’t so fond of the company.”
They used to give them those cheap, draw string backpacks with the company logo on the side, so the kids were walking advertisements for Brennan’s company. The schools weren’t actually operating in any real way, so the students would be wandering around unsupervised. It’s amazing there wasn’t a tragedy, where one of them got hurt. Dumb luck.
“But state auditors weren’t so fond of the company.””
I wish this were true, but it’s not. State auditors were apparently very fond of the company, since they did absolutely nothing about what was blatant fraud and theft for 15 years. They still haven’t recovered a dime of the money, and no one has been held accountable in any way. Brennan is deceased so I imagine his heirs are enjoying their ill-gotten gains since Ohio seems to be incapable of recovering funds for some reason.
Bill is not responsible for Roger, and Jimmy isn’t responsible for Billy. We cannot judge candidates by their relatives. but, make no mistake, Frank Biden is a shady character. He has profited from Florida’s run away train of privatization despite recent efforts to cover up with association with unscrupulous profiteering. Frank has been a very active participant in fleecing the taxpayers of Florida whether by failed, shady credit recovery programs or grabbing of public real estate. What is clear is that Frank has been stuffing his pockets for years with public dollars. Kudos to Mercedes for digging and unearthing the dirt on dirty Frank Biden.
I’ll vote for Biden if he’s the nominee, because Republican ed reformers are openly hostile to public school students and families, while Democratic ed reformers completely ignore us, and neglect is better than abuse, but it seems a shame public school students can’t find an actual advocate among all these powerful people. That seems like a really low standard we’re accepting.
The thought of the 3rd US President in a row NOT supporting or in any way valuing the schools 90% of students attend seems nuts to me, but here we are. Maybe it doesn’t matter. The bad part is they don’t lift a finger on behalf of public school students. The good part is they’re increasingly irrelevant to public school students or families, so they can’t do much damage, either.
I, too, am at this point, leaning towards supporting Joe Biden…BUT he absolutely must clearly show support for public schools, and not be wishy- washy on the topic.
Chiara, if they had left us alone that would have been fine. Bush & Obama’s admins have done major, active, serious harm to US public schools. (Trump hasn’t equaled their disasters, but he has some time left.) I do not expect the next president to turn the ship around; I’ll be happy w/a major change in the conversation & a nudge in the right direction.
It’s how I feel about the election: candidate must, first priority, be able to beat Trump, which I expect to be done by calling for major change in economic priorities targeting re-expansion of the middle class/ public goods/ labor opportunities. That pro-labor conversation must include a pro-public school/ anti-privatization/ pro-union plank in the platform.
The Biden brother thing does not concern me much. He’s a big boy. It’s not like young Beto w/his activist pro-charter wife changing El Paso schools under his nose.
Did any of you that awful PBS Special on dyslexia last night? Made me sick.
Stephen Krashen wrote a response and it’s stellar. Please pass this on. Scary, scary stuff…but good for Charter schools.
The PBS News Hour misrepresents the phonics debate.
Stephen Krashen
https://tinyurl.com/y3towjnf
The PBS News Hour (April 30) included a segment, “What parents of dyslexic children are teaching schools about literacy.” Unfortunately, these parents (and PBS) are teaching schools the wrong thing.
The segment claims that “explicit” and “comprehensive” phonics instruction is necessary, which means teaching students all the rules of how letters are pronounced.
But very few rules of phonics can be studied and learned: The rules of phonics are often very complicated and have numerous exceptions. Even highly competent readers are usually aware of only the most basic phonics rules.
Also, there are far more phonics rules than any child (or teacher) can master. Most of our knowledge of phonics, that is, our ability to read out loud, is absorbed (or acquired) through reading.
Contrary to the claims made in the National Reading Panel, mentioned on PBS, children in classes with more instruction in the rules of phonics do not do better on tests of reading comprehension. Students who do well on tests of reading comprehension are those who have read more.
“Teaching reading” is not teaching the rules of phonics. It is helping children understand what is on the page, and introducing them to books they will want to read.
Research supporting this view has been published in professional books and journals for decades. Begin with the classics: Frank Smith’s Understanding Reading and Kenneth Goodman’s Phonics Phacts. I have summarized some of the research here: Krashen, S. Phonics wars 2019. http://tinyurl.com/y4ob9c9c
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-parents-of-dyslexic-children-are-teaching-schools-about-literacy
I totally agree with Krashen. Students do not need “intensive systematic instruction in phonics” before they can be competent readers. However, from my experience they can learn sound-symbol correspondence while they are actually reading. Students learn to read by reading. (Frank Smith) Unfortunately, the preoccupation with phonics often leads to over classification of many students including ELLs. Students need to master the systemic aspects of letters and sounds, but they may learn a great deal of these skills through shared and group reading. They do not benefit from isolated skill and drill phonics. We must always emphasize meaning in reading as that is our ultimate goal. Reading is thinking. (Frank Smith)
Nancy Bailey have an insightful post on this topic several weeks ago.
“When I first started teaching, I honestly didn’t know how to teach kids to read. I didn’t. I taught them some sight words. I taught them the letters and what sounds they make.” This says it all right here. Well-trained K-3 teachers are taught a number of solid reading-instruction techniques & they use them all. (An AK problem? They are ranked in bottom 10 for ed quality; bottom 15 for per-pupil spending.) The argument as framed by PBS is ridiculous: focus exclusively on phonics, vs throw them in the deep end.
Two of my three siblings had profound dyslexia (inherited from our Dad). The elder of the two was too early for diagnosis/ SpecEd etc—he never finished hisch. 7 yrs younger, my sis’s disability was picked up in midsch & she received intensive instruction (in the mid-‘70’s). She graduated hisch & college, & got 2 masters’ while teaching SpecEd & later leading the dept; today she is asst principal at a big prestigious hisch.
The idea that a focus on phonics in K/1 is a panacea? Silver-bullet talk. That bro & I had the same K/1 teacher during the ‘50’s resurgence of phonics popularity: we got more“sound it out” than Dick&Jane sight words. Dyslexia is a challenging disability & requires intensive SpecEd support.
One thing that I am not seeing in the discussion of these schools is that they take on very challenging student populations. As I understand it, the Mavericks Education schools provide alternatives to kids who haven’t made it in traditional schools. These are often kids who have scored very badly on tests and have truly horrible grades, who have histories of disciplinary problems and/or extreme truancy, who have had interruptions in their K-12 schooling due to pregnancy or problems with the law, who are at risk. In other words, it’s my understanding that these are what are often referred to as “Last Chance Schools.” One would not expect graduation rates in such schools to be very high, and I’ve noticed that Mavericks runs continual ads for teachers, which suggests that turnover is might be quite high, which is often the case in programs dealing with adolescents who have experienced severe issues in the past.
According to the website, one of the services offered at these schools is GED coaching, which can be a key part of getting such kids back on some track that leads from school to a job rather than from school to prison. GED coaching has become a LOT more pressing an issue since Pearson took over the GED, retooled it to align it with the abominable Common [sic] Core [sic], made it much more difficult to pass (so that a lot of kids have to pay Pearson to take it numerous times), and thus screwed with the former means by which kids with troubled pasts could get that rubber stamp of high-school equivalency that would enable them to enter into a Community College or a post-high-school voc ed program in auto mechanics or welding or whatever. The headline to a story about the new Pearson GED in the Morning Call says it all: “GED now more of an obstacle than gateway for some.”
I would love it if there were ubiquitous alternative ed programs within public school districts to meet this need. It’s a serious one. We can either pay to meet it now, or we can pay to meet it later, as the Reverend Jessie Jackson has often said. A 2012 study by the Vera Institute found that, of 40 states surveyed, total per-inmate annual direct costs to taxpayers averaged $31,286 and ranged from $14,603 in Kentucky to $60,076 in New York, and the US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. But public schools have been very seriously underfunded now for many decades. Nurses, libraries, arts programs, voc ed programs, and so on have been drastically curtailed. And alternative programs, which were common in the 1950s and 1960s, are harder and harder to find.
The real answer to all this, of course, is for state legislatures to rediscover the fact that they have public schools in their states and that these serve almost all their students and have to be well funded so that they can do things like create solid alternative school programs to serve special populations.
These are the kinds of students that charters should be createdfor, instead of cherry picking the easiest to educate. But the for-profit angle means that state money is going to investors, not Instruction and counseling.
As usual, Diane, you go to the heart of the matter. There are better ways to deal with this issue, but those require legislators to rediscover their support for public schools. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your tireless support of public education!!!
Let me say, also, that I do not intend my comments to be an endorsement of Mavericks Education practices, about which I know very little. I read a couple newspaper articles years ago that claimed that Frank Biden was telling investors that he was not really in the education business but in the real estate business. By taking state per pupil dollars and spending those on facilities, one can turn taxpayer monies into private equity, which can be a problem. I don’t know if that’s the truth of the matter here, but it’s an issue.
But it’s entirely possible that Mr. Biden puts this together in his own mind in the following way: here’s a need, and here’s a free-market solution. That’s more understandable than simply being driven by greed, though, of course, in this, as in many other areas, free-market solutions are not the answer. The folks who want to everything to be privatized–healthcare, education, defense, the building of infrastructure like interstate highways–are extremist ideologues who completely ignore the existence proofs provided by better public sector solutions to provision of public goods.
And even that comment about not being in the education business but in the real estate business could be understood, in context, as a way to appeal to a certain audience–right-wing investors–to get them to support an important cause. Investors want to see returns on their investments. I can see Mr. Biden thinking, here’s a need that the public sector isn’t meeting, and here’s a way to meet it. Given the need and its importance, one can understand if not condone this.