Blogger Michael Kohlhaas continues to pore through the treasure trove of leaked emails that he received concerning the charter industry in Los Angeles. There apparently are thousands of them, and he reports them as he finds interesting ones.
One thing shines through his reports: The charter industry is greedy, self-interesting, and not at all interested in education, only in growing their market share.
Apparently there is no “waiting list” for the new Ganas Academy. There are not thousands of children lined up to enroll. Kind of knocks a hole in the charter marketing plan. The charter was not able to find enough students and it will not be opening.
The school wanted to open in a community that opposed it.
The community celebrated its victory over a charter that had to pay a recruiter $850 a head to find students.
Kohlhaas writes:
Somehow, even though it makes no freaking sense whatsoever, we are continually asked by innumerable mobs of kool-aid-drunken pro-charter ideologues to believe that somehow their damnable publicly funded private schools are more efficient1 than publicly run public schools. Thus, the argument goes, we are lucky to be able to funnel public money and other valuable assets to them for their supernaturally efficient use in the pursuit of what they’re pleased to present as public goods.
But just logically, theoretically, even without reference to facts, how could this possibly be true? Like how does it make sense to pay the supreme commander of some random charter school out in Northwest Zillionaireville a significant fraction of a zillion dollars in exchange for her skilled elite commandery when we’re already paying Austin Freaking Beutner an equally significant fraction of a zillion dollars for his equally elite equally skilled commanderistic talents? How many damn commanders do we even need?…
Like for instance, this link to a contract between Sakshi Jain, supreme commander and founding heroine of the lately placed-on-hiatus GANAS Academy, and some guy named Ed, whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as an educational consultant. The purpose of the contract is to engage Ed’s services to recruit students to attend Jain’s star-crossed but nevertheless self-proclaimedly world-class private school. And what is most amazing to me is that Ed is to be paid per piece. Not a joke. Eight Hundred And Fifty Freaking Dollars per student signed up.
And not only that but every student that signs up after the contract is signed is to be attributed to Ed. Is this normal? Does anyone out there know if this is how charter schools actually get students? Like they actually pay some guy named Ed $850 per student that signs up? This, obviously, is completely incompatible with any argument whatsoever that giving public money to private charter schools is more efficient than…well, than anything….
Also she hired Ed to do PR for her infernal school and to find them some other location so they wouldn’t have to co-locate on the campus of Catskill Elementary which is why everyone hated her in the first place and why she was rapidly lapsing into outright lunacy. Which he evidently was not able to do. He was also supposed to change the anti-charter narrative and find supporters in the community, which he really failed at. I don’t know yet whether Jain paid the guy any money, but we are certainly well-rid of these fools.
The “Ganas” charter school apparently is using the word associated with Jaime Escalante and the movie “Stand and Deliver,” where he told his students they needed “ganas,” desire, motivation, grit, to succeed.
The story doesn’t end here. Kohlhaas subsequently released the document that Ed-the-recruiter sent to the charter school founder to describe his plans to recruit students at a supermarket called “El Super.”
Kohlhaas seems to have a large supply of documents and emails. Everyone interested in Los Angeles education is waiting for the next shoe to drop, with the expectation that Kohlhaas has a whole closet full of them.
The L.A. charter school lobby’s numbers just don’t add up.
82% of LAUSD charter schools are under enrolled — i.e. enroll less the capacity they claimed they could take in on DAY ONE.
In the last five years, 50% of the LAUSD charters opened are at less than 50% of the enrollment they claimed — in their charter proposal, based on a non-peer-reviewed study that they paid for — that they would have from DAY ONE …
HOWEVER …
… at the same time, the same charter lobby — in its press releases and various public comments / interviews / political campaigns in electing pro-charter LAUSD Board Members, etc. — still repeatedly trot out this mythical 100,000 child waiting list composed of hordes of Los Angeles students & families desperate to get into new charter schools, but thwarted because LAUSD is not authorizing and opening charter schools fast enough to keep up with this 100,000-strong waiting list demand.
Hence, you needs slobs such as this Ed Rodriguez to be paid godawful amounts of taxpayer money — sent to charter schools, and then paid to Ed — to annoy people while they go grocery shopping, or do whatever …
The message should be to the charter industry … to paraphrase Jack Nicholson from AS GOOD AS IT GETS …
“Go sell charters someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
Here’s that clip (and yeah, I know that Jack’s character, and that the rest of his character’s dialogue is racist and sexist … comically so, imo … I just like the tine ABOVE that is part of the dialogue):
JACK: “Go sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
(at 0:58)
For the 100,000 charter school wait list to be accurate, that means that the other 18% of charter schools NOT under-enrolled must have 100,000 students on those schools’ wait lists.
Not bloody likely.
I call this: “Snake Oil” salespeople.
When unneeded charters are imposed, we need to get the word out to parents in the community. They should understand that signing up for the charter hype usually results in disappointment. Parents need to be fully aware of all the rights they are relinquishing. Corporate management with profit motives is not local governance. Communities should boycott unwanted and unneeded private charter schools.
Considering what most states spend on each student per year, $850 to get a student to enroll in a charter is cheap. The charter school gets that back 5, 10 or even 20 fold in some states.
I bet this “arrangement” is not at all unusual.
And those multipliers are if the student only stays one year. The original multiplier also gets multiplied by the number of years beyond one that the student remains in the charter, of course.
Kohlhaas is amazing and the subject of this latest info drop is an outrage. Outrageous! We’re giving public money to private contractors to buy students? Those are tax dollars, are they? Is that what our taxes are for, buying students? Seriously? Are private prisons spending public dollars to buy inmates? Are private military contractors being given money by Congress to start wars? Are private firefighters being given public funds to buy gasoline for arsonists? No, no, and no. This is criminal.
“Are private prisons spending public dollars to buy inmates?”
In a sense, yes, that’s already happening.
According to the chilling “Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Delinquents: PA Child Care” section of the 2009 Michael Moore movie “CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY”, this was no hypothetical scenario.
A privately-managed prison corporation in Pennsylvania, one geared towards teen delinquents, was not making a profit, and was about to close. You know, not enough teen inmates, and the small number they had were truly hard-core, and labor-intensive to manage … thugs, for want of a better word .. both male and female.
SOLUTION: pay huge bribes to judges, in exchange for those same judges sending every single teen that comes in front of their benches to a long term — no matter how trivial the charge, no matter how docile the defendants, no matter how well-regarded the families or how repentant the teens were, no matter if it was the first time offense, no matter if prior precedent let these kids with similar charges and evidence off with no prison time, etc.
PROBLEM SOLVED: a flood of comparatively rather well-behaved, first-time-offender inmates comes through the gates, and SHAZAM! Profits soar.
PROBLEM CREATED: *a little collateral damage, as the veteran male and female teen thug inmates beat, brutalized, and raped the much less hard-core newer inmate teens, traumatizing them for life, driving some to suicide.
Mind you, this was a problem exacerbated by the cost-cutting in the number, training, past experience, and overall quality of the unregulated, privately-managed prison guards, thanks to the lack of regulation in a privately-managed prison (hmm … sound familiar? TFA maybe ?) where they could cut back on the cost, with less guards and less qualified guards.
Moore tells this mind-boggling, true life horror story here
Here’s the money quote from this piece above.
NARRATOR MICHAEL MOORE:
“Any time a governmental unit turns over to a profit-making corporation the duties that IT should be performing, WHAT do you EXPECT to happen?”
Looking at you, charter school industry, and the pro-charter, bought-and-paid-for LAUSD Board Members!!
(the quote is at 3:53)
Lct
You are simply looking at it wrong.
You have to put on your Wall Street hat
It’s not “buying students”
It’s “investing in students”
Here’s a shocker….GANAS was approved at the June 5, 2018 LAUSD BOE meeting. That late approval guaranteed that GANAS could not open for the 2018/19 school year. However, it also meant that they had a year’s head start to recruit students. Since the district doesn’t make a preliminary offer of co-located space until Feb.1, GANAS had a head start of almost 9 months to recruit before they were informed that the offer would be at Catskill. Clearly, they were having trouble finding willing students to enroll.
That’s what parent activist Carl Peterson noted as well, identifying this aspect from one of the emails Kohlhaas brought to light. Peterson did so in an article on Peterson’s own blog.
http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2019/07/19/once-again-public-school-students-are-left-holding-the-bag/
CARL PETERSON: “According to documents obtained by michaelkohlhaas.org, GANAS hired a consultant on May 6, 2019, to assist with their efforts as they were still 75 students short.”
Another wrinkle to this story that eluded Kohlhaas (and myself as well), but NOT Peterson, thankfully was the “$415,300” in LAUSD taxpayer money going to “facility renovation costs” that Ganas received and presumably spent (since Peterson notes that Ganas withdrew from the school just last week, July 11, 2019.) to prepare for the Ganas invasion / co-location of Catskill Elementary, with school just a month away from starting.
Peterson also wonders whether there will be further costs incurred to return the Catskill Elementary classrooms that LAUSD and Ganas paid “$415,300” to “renovate” back to their original state for use by Catskill Elementary when school starts next month. (LAUSD has a mid-August start.)
CARL PETERSON: “Forced by Prop 39 to remove space being used by students of public schools, the district offered the school facilities at Catskill Elementary School and set aside $415,300 of public education funds to perform the facility renovations required by law.
” … ”
“Whatever work was completed prior to GANAS’ withdrawal represents a loss of funds that were supposed to be used to educate students. Additional funds will be wasted as the district must now return the rooms to their previous state. Without any students, GANAS will not have the ability to reimburse the district, so it will be LAUSD students who will bear the brunt of the economic loss.”
All that citizen taxpayer money … down the frickin’ tubes, and the Ganas charter school never educated a single student.
Peterson notes other aspects of this fiasco:
— Ganas’ and Sakshi Jain’s illegal private meeting where they decided to bail on Catskill was a violation of the Brown Act, which charter school orgs must follow when making such decisions:
— another Brown Act violation: the $850-per-child bounty contract to Ed Rodriguez was not discussed or noted in any of the public meetings Ganas held, and is not mentioned in any of the minutes of those meetings — another illegality.
— Ganas got the go-ahead over a year ago (June 2018) to start recruiting students, but only accepted the offer to invade and co-locate at Catskill in January 2019, EVEN THOUGH JAIN AND THE OTHER GANAS HONCHOS KNEW THAT THEY HAD BEEN HAVING TROUBLE MEETING THE PROMISED 120-student ENROLLMENT TARGET WHICH THEY CLAIMED IN THEIR CHARTER POSITION … that’s 7 or 8 months struggling to make the target (and necessitating the $850/child contract with Ed Rodriguez in Spring 2019). They could have asked for another year … i.e. an August 2020 start for their school, which probably would have been a better idea than accepting the co-location offer for Catskill at that time.
Again, read Peterson’s piece here:
http://thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2019/07/19/once-again-public-school-students-are-left-holding-the-bag/
I found and examined a page with links to all the Ganas Public Meetings and Agenda (Damn that Brown Act!), and yep, Peterson’s right. Both the $850-per-child bounty contract with Ed Rodriguez, and the decision to withdraw from Catskill were not on either any agenda or minutes for any of those meetings, and thus would be deemed illegal in a court of law.
Anybody with some free time on their hands this lovely Friday night can do likewise, and examine this stuff here (follow the links, and note where certain meetings “Minutes” do not have links):
https://www.ganasacademy.org/board-meetings-minutes
Regarding the Brown Act, all important decisions must:
1) be posted ahead of time on an agenda on the internet
2) allow public comment and input for such decisions
3) once the decisions are made, must be posted later when the minutes are posted for those meetings.
In a decision earlier this year, the California Attorney General (or Secretary of State … I forget) ruled against the charter school industry’s wishes, and said that charter school operators must follow the Brown Act the same as any other public school district .. .and that’s what a charter school’s governing board is … its own school district.
Jack: Thanks for highlighting the points that I made in my article. The violations of the Brown Act are not surprising from an organization that invited interested parents to a meeting at a Denny’s and then called the police when people opposed to their charter showed up. Not sure why the person who made the call hasn’t been charged with filing a false police report!
There were some other irregularities in the minutes but I have to do some more checking to verify that they were actual violations of the Brown Act. It may take a little while as I will have to write up some Public Record Act requests.
Jack: Thanks for highlighting the points that I made in my article. The violations of the Brown Act are not surprising from an organization that invited interested parents to a meeting at a Denny’s and then called the police when people opposed to their charter showed up. Not sure why the person who made the call hasn’t been charged with filing a false police report!
There were some other irregularities in the minutes but I have to do some more checking to verify that they were actual violations of the Brown Act. It may take a little while as I will have to write up some Public Record Act requests.
Jack: Thanks for highlighting the points that I made in my article. The violations of the Brown Act are not surprising from an organization that invited interested parents to a meeting at a Denny’s and then called the police when people opposed to their charter showed up. Not sure why the person who made the call hasn’t been charged with filing a false police report!
There were some other irregularities in the minutes but I have to do some more checking to verify that they were actual violations of the Brown Act. It may take a little while as I will have to write up some Public Record Act requests.
Here’s a great story about another for-profit educational institution, where the teachers’ jobs was mostly to recruit students, not teach ….
TRUMP UNIVERSITY
This is pretty funny stuff:
The interviewer questions this guy about his professor’s bio, on the Trump University website, and it did not go well:
You say you once lived in Beverly Hills? There is no record of you ever having lived in Beverly Hills.
… uhhh..
You say that you were a former licensed broker who, at 29, was one of the top 1% of brokers in the country. There is no record of you ever having a broker’s license anywhere.
… uhhh …
You say that you owned a company that built homes in Atlanta, Georgia. Did you ever build any homes in Atlanta?
I’m not prepared to answer those questions right now.