The San Diego Union-Tribune featured a front-page top-of-the-fold story by Kristin Taketa about the deepening troubles of the “Inspire” charter chain, which is growing across the state despite academic and financial woes.
The headline: “Inspire Charter Schools Grow As Results Lag.”
The Inspire network of 12 home charter schools is quickly spreading its reach across California as some are calling into question its educational, organizational and financial practices.
At the heart of the Inspire network is a corporation whose CEO makes about $380,000 a year and who helped create the Inspire schools, which now pay his corporation 15 percent of the taxpayer funds they collect.
Inspire has grown in part by advertising that parents can decide how to spend$2,600 or more a year toward their child’s education, with a teacher’s approval. Inspire operates on the idea that parents should have freedom to decide how their children are educated.
Inspire parents have been able to spend state-provided money on expenses they say are educational, from Disneyland annual passes to private ice skating coaching. The list of places where Inspire parents could spend school funds has included Costco, Amazon, Big Air Trampoline Park, Medieval Times, Guitar Center and the DNA testing company 23 and Me, according to Inspire’s list of approved vendors.
Meanwhile, Inspire students are required to meet with teachers and turn in assignments once a month.
The charter network is based in Duarte and enrolled 23,400 students last year.
State data show that Inspire schools underperformed academically. Last year, all Inspire schools performed below the state average in English and math test scores, with some schools showing as few as 16 percent of their students passing math and as few as 25 percent passing English. The state average is 39 percent for math and 50 percent for English.
Put together, Inspire schools had an average graduation rate of 69 percent last year and produced seven graduates — out of 209— who met California state college or university admission requirements.
Why does the State Education Department tolerate this waste of children’s lives and taxpayers’ money?
When will the Legislature crack down on these sham schools?
The good news is that a major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is assigning excellent reporters to cover these scandals, which are especially flagrant in California due to the state’s weak charter law, which assures that charters will be unregulated and unaccountable. In the past, the Union-Tribune was considered a conservative paper. It may still be. Conservatives should be outraged by this fraudulent education and blatant misuse of public funds.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
I CHUCKLE at the name for the charter schools … MARKETING!
Quick! Get your money and run! CBK
“especially flagrant in California”…because the Gates-funded New Schools Venture Fund and Pahara Institute are located there. The founder of the two said the goal of charters was “…brands on a large scale” and, nobody salivates more about that than hedge funders like Loeb and tech tyrants like Reed Hastings.
Remember- ed reformers built these “governance” systems from scratch. This is all their creation. This is the quality of the work that comes out of the 5000 ed reform lobbying groups and university departments.
This is what they envision for all states, and all schools. This absolutely lousy “governance” that is so ideologically driven it doesn’t work at all, and they just keep doubling down on it.
These rapacious privatizers will keep failing upward as long as there is money to be made, money behind it, little to no accountability or oversight and laws on the books that promote privatization. When is the public going to get sick of paying for useless parallel schools that fail to provide a meaningful education for students and waste a boat load of public money in the process? Those of us that have followed these operations have watched the endless “dance of the lemons” go from state to state or to different parts of the same state like well oiled grifters that guzzle public money and move on to greener pastures.
To some extent the public has been numbed by the number of these occurrences. It is a betrayal by their representatives who either go along with these things or work to create them.
The public feels there is little they can do, or that the effort is too great to make.
Yes, and in any area of the government when current leadership now so transparently allows it: the privatizers will keep failing upward as long as there is money to be made
These recent reports on virtual charter scams including the A3 indictments out of San Diego should be ringing the alarm bell at the state level. It’s time for the CA Superintendent of Public Instruction and our governor, to demand a full investigation as is happening in Oklahoma with EPIC charters. BTW……EPIC operates a charter in Anaheim, CA. Who knows how many other scammers are laughing all the way to the bank.
Shady! I love how Inspire spun off its schools into separate entities, but rigged it so that they’d have to fork over 15% of their income to (and probably buy everything from) the mothership which is neither a school nor a charter management organization but rather the deceptively-named “Inspire District Office” –immune from even the minimal transparency that charters must provide. Shame on the Democrats who enable this corruption.