California is paying a high price for its notoriously lax law for authorizing charter schools, which was revised in recent weeks.
Tom Ultican sees a striking similarity between the Inspire charter chain, which enrolls home schoolers, and the A3 chain, which went up in flames with a loss to taxpayers of at least $50 million.
Inspire Charter School mirrors the methods of A3 Education. It employs practices strikingly similar to those that led to May’s 67-count indictment against A3’s leaders. Furthermore, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) took the same unusual step of sharing concerns about Inspire and A3 with California authorities. They are virtual schools that concentrate on obtaining authorization from small school districts. These systems have a similar structure in which a central organization controls the schools that are contracting with it and they transfer funds among multiple organizations making it difficult to monitor their activities. Students at both Inspire and A3 struggle academically.
The Acton-Aqua Dulce Unified School District is infamous for authorizing suspect charter applications while not having the resources to adequately monitor those schools. It has 1085 public school students and 14,734 charter school students. Acton-Aqua Dulce authorized Inspire’s first charter school which was located in Los Angeles County. Strangely, Inspire Charter grew from 151 students in the 2014-15 school year to 4,321 students in the 2018-19 school year and then closed up shop this June 30th.
Founder Nick Nichols needed a program that would service his target audience of home school students. The Inspire 2016 tax form shows that he purchased curriculum from Academic Arts and Action for $149,625. This is notable because the chairman of Academic Arts and Action was Jason Schrock and the President was Sean McManus. That is the same Schrock and McManus indicted in the A3 scandal.
The education writer for the San Diego Union Tribune (UT), Kristen Taketa, has been relentlessly pursuing the Inspire story. She explains one of the the charters selling points,
“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.”
Inspire provides each parent $2600 to $3000 to spend on field trips and other educational resources.
Last year Nick Nichols oversaw nine schools with 23,300 total students. In the 2016-17 school year, Inspire took in $76,018,441 yet their debt was skyrocketing. Their pay for officers went from $65,318 for the 2014-15 school year to $2,011,898 in the 2016-17 school year. Nick Nichols did especially well.
Data from Inspire Tax Documents
The UT’s Taketa reports, “Inspire expects to pull in $285 million in state funding this school year.”
Inspire just secured another $50,000,000 loan from the California School Finance Authority. With booming student daily attendance income and large financial backing from the state, it is strange that Nick Nichols chose now to take a temporary leave of absence. Former Mount Diablo Superintendent and Inspire’s chief operating officer, Steven Lawrence, is taking over as executive director.
As Ultican shows, Inspire’s students have very poor academic results.
How much longer will this charade continue with state money? Will someone wake up the taxpayer’s and legislators?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Haha … I can’t but help notice the names of Charters like ‘inspire” and “promise” … the “MARKETERS of charters” sure know how to SPIN words. There nothing “inspiring” or “promising” about charters.
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Yes: and in some cases the names are fully in step with the aggressive religious purposes behind them
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The funniest part is that the current CEO of Inspire came from Mount Diablo!
Where else?
The Promise of Inspire
They promise lots of money
Inspiring flim-flam men
In Land of Milken* honey
The charter strikes again
After fraud King Michael Milken
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Nick Nicoles tore a page from Trump’s playbook. When Trump’s Atlantic City casinos were going broke and never taking in enough revenue to meet expenses, Trump, the CEO, kept increasing his pay every year even as the revnuew stream was shrinking until the U.S. banks that lost a billion dollars from that Trump bankruptcy refused to extend his credit unless he stepped down as CEO and the banks selected someone to replace him.
By then, it was too late for the U.S. banks to turn Trump’s biggest failure around and they lost while Trump walked away with more money from all that CEO pay he was paying himself as the LLC’s debts piled up and Trump hiding behind the LLC, refused to pay what he owed contractors, workers, suppliers, and banks.
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It’ll be good when it’s “Expire”…
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Why hasn’t CA yet repealed its crazy charter law allowing small remote cash-strapped towns, staffed only to monitor quality of their own districts, to collect fees as “authorizers” of charter schools attended far away or even online across the state? A law clearly set up to allow charters to get away with murder at taxpayer expense, enabled by decades of underfunding public ed so that hundreds of districts are “cash-strapped”.
“The Acton-Aqua Dulce Unified School District is infamous for authorizing suspect charter applications while not having the resources to adequately monitor those schools. It enrolls 1085 public school students and 14,734 charter school students .” Obviously state actors are getting payoffs to allow such a risible status quo.
But what about CA voters? Are they just stupid? Or could it be that they’re actually saving $ by underfunding public ed generally, while allowing such tax-siphoning schemes to prop up otherwise bankrupt districts? Aside from the obvious immorality of providing bottom-of-barrel ed to those in most need of advancement, inquiring minds would like to see spreadsheet.
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I’ve studied the California Charter School conundrum very carefully for a while now. It is much more nuanced than many think. There are actually many good things coming from it, though the bad apples certainly get more air time. Work is being doing by state and charter school leaders to fix holes in the legislation without gutting it completely. Charter schools save the state millions every year and most of them out-perform the local district schools. If they can be honed as the law originally intended instead of simply given up on, we my have something truly revolutionary on our hands. If anyone has specific questions I’d be happy to address them.
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Rachel,
What makes you think that accountability and transparency would “gut” charter schools in California? My hunch is that it might save charters from the constant embarrassment of charter scandals.
What makes you think that it would “gut” the charter schools if they had to be authorized by local districts, not by little rural districts hundreds of miles away that can never oversee their finances and academics?
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Rachel,
Would you be willing to share some of the “many good things” coming from charter schools that help public schools? Other than taking money away from them?
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