American Leadership Academy, an East Valley charter school chain, paid this past fiscal year at least $46.8 million to companies owned or co-owned by founder Glenn Way or his relatives, newly released financial records show.
The payouts include more than $30 million to the management company that employs the schools’ teachers and staff, millions to another firm for operational services, and almost half a million to an apparel firm for school or athletic uniforms. Way or one of his relatives is a co-owner in all of those businesses.
In total, the payments to so-called related parties made up more than half of ALA’s annual $79 million budget.
Arizona is fortunate to have the Arizona Republic looking out for frauds and corruption because the state doesn’t care.
Arizona also has Curtis Cardine of the Grand Canyon Institute, a former superintendent of both public and charter schools. Cardine became so incensed about endemic corruption that he has studied the finances of every charter school in the state (except those that keep their book secret). He reported in a book called Carpetbagging America’s Public Schools that nearly 3/4 of the state’s charter schools do business with “related” companies, companies connected or owned by the charter owner.
The hard-right Governor Doug Ducey is a stand-in for the Koch Foundation. His elections were funded by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other billionaires who hope to eliminate public education.
Parents and teachers managed to defeat their last attempt to expand vouchers by fighting for a referendum, in which vouchers were overwhelmingly rejected by voters.
Someone needs to demand accountability and transparency for charters.
Arizona is the only state that openly endorses for-profit charters. The other states ban for-profits, but allow for-profit management companies to operate nonprofit charters, which is a shell game.
Writing in the Mississippi Business Journal, Rev. Flowers makes the moral case for funding public schools and supporting their teachers. She writes that it is time to invest in our children, our families, and our teachers.
She writes:
I am the product of the Mississippi public school system.Both of my parents were public school teachers in Mississippi, and my husband currently works within the public school system in Mississippi.My three children are receiving their education within our public schools, and my oldest has been in 3 different public school districts since she began kindergarten.
This is what I know.My children are loved and supported by wonderful teachers, and are being shaped in a positive way by their experience within our community public schools.
This is what I know.90% of all school age Mississippi children are educated within our public schools.Supporting public schools is a faithful response to my call as a person of faith to love my neighbor.Every child has the right to an education and the best way for this to be fulfilled is for us to support public policies that ensure access for all children to free public school.
This is what I know.Mississippi is not currently providing adequate funding to meet the needs of every child because Mississippi is not adequately funding our public schools.
This is what I know.In the last seven years, Mississippi public schools have suffered their worst underfunding ever.By underfunding MAEP, our Legislature is fostering inequity, and every child in every community deserves equitable, fully funded public education.
This is what I know.Mississippi pays our teachers less than any of our neighboring states.
This is what I know.Funding matters.I am always amazed at what our teachers and our schools do for our children with the limited resources available.Just imagine what fully funded public schools and supported teachers could do.
Pastors for Texas Children has organized clergy across the south to advocate for children and public schools. The other bpnew organization is Pastors for North Carolina Children. These pastors are dynamic. They are motivated by love of God and people, and they can’t be stopped. They bear witness and demand justice. It is exciting to see them supporting the important American tradition of separation of church and state.
DEDHAM — Hundreds of striking teachers took to the streets Friday in this suburban town, holding placards, marching with students and parents, and cheering fresh support from high-profile Democratic politicians. Meanwhile, signs emerged that stalled negotiations could resume this weekend.
The first teachers strike in 12 years in Massachusetts followed an overwhelming vote of 275 to 2 on Thursday to walk off the job despite a state ruling that the strike is illegal. Public schools were closed Friday in this community of 25,000 people, bordering Boston.
Timothy Dwyer, president of the Dedham Education Association, called the strike “a last resort” after nearly two years of failed negotiations over salary increases, health insurance, and other issues such as sexual harassment grievances and cellphone use in the classroom.
Teresa Hanafin, who writes “Fast Forward” for the Boston Globe, offers some new information:
> Tim Morrison, who works in the White House on the National Security staff as a top adviser on Russia, is scheduled to give a deposition to House impeachment investigators next week, and is expected to corroborate much of what Ukraine diplomat William Taylortold lawmakers earlier this week.
Taylor testified that Trump refused to release $400 million in desperately needed military aid to help Ukraine fend off Russian incursions unless Ukraine’s president publicly announced that his country was investigating the Bidens. Trump also refused to invite the new Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to the White House.
Morrison is significant for a few reasons: He’s the first White House employee to testify. He listened in on that infamous phone call in which Trump told Zelensky he wanted him to investigate Joe Bidenand his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, while his father was VP. He also was mentioned in Taylor’s testimony several times.
> Trump’s former national security adviser (which one, you may ask), John Bolton, reportedly is in negotiations with Democrats to testify as well. Bolton, ousted in September, supposedly raised alarms repeatedly about the shadow diplomacy in Ukraine being carried out by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and others.
> Trump and his bootlickers are focusing on the quid pro quo aspect of the Ukraine affair, even though it’s kind of irrelevant: The simple fact that Trump asked a foreign leader to investigate one of his political rivals is the problem. Adding pressure by withholding military funds is just icing on the cake.
Nonetheless, the Trumpsters have been claiming that no quid pro quo could have existed with Ukraine because Ukrainian officials had no idea that Trump was withholding the military aid that Congress had allocated. (That’s a little like saying that attempted murder isn’t wrong because the victim didn’t die.) But The New York Times reports that Ukraine knew about the aid block as early as the first week of August. Time for another excuse!
The Education Department’s Rip-Off Schemes Radicalize Its Own Staff
Billionaire daughter-in-law to the Amway fortune Betsy DeVos probably contracts with the U.S. Mint to exclusively reissue $100,000 bank notes so she can light them on fire to light candles in her office. But she’ll have exactly one less, after a federal judge in San Francisco fined her exactly that amount, because the Education Department continues to collect on fraudulent loans issued to students of shady for-profit college network Corinthian Colleges.
Around 16,000 students have been affected by DeVos collecting on illegal loans, so that’s $6.25 each. Nevertheless, seeing any personal liability at all for an Education Department that not only failed to stop Corinthian from lying to students and saddling them with debt for worthless diplomas, but then kept trying to squeeze those students for unlawful payments, must offer at least a little solace. The Education Department resisted compensating Corinthian students at all, until they went on a debt strike. Under Arne Duncan, students ripped off by for-profit colleges were allowed to assert “defense to repayment” to get the loans canceled.
That process moved at turtle-like speed, with only one-fifth of Corinthian students made whole by the time DeVos took over. She instituted hurdles to prevent loan forgiveness, which Judge Sallie Kim ruled unlawful. This ruling is stayed pending appeal, but DeVos’s department kept trying to collect loan payments anyway, despite the dispute. Three thousand borrowers made these payments. The Education Department even garnished wages on 1,800 students, which it had no right to acquire.
Essentially nobody abused by Corinthian has had loans canceled during DeVos’s tenure. However, she has created momentum for mass loan forgiveness—inside her own department. A. Wayne Johnson, whom DeVos appointed as chief operating officer for the Office of Federal Student Aid, resigned this week, calling the system “fundamentally broken.” He’s now running for Senate (as a Republican) in Georgia, endorsing the cancellation of $50,000 in student-loan debt for every borrower, while adding a $50,000 tax credit for everyone who had already repaid their loans. This is a more robust student debt cancellation proposal than Elizabeth Warren’s (because it includes no means testing), from a Republican DeVos appointee who’s actually seen the student debt crisis up close. That’s how radicalizing it is. The way we finance higher education cannot sustain itself, and everyone to the left of Betsy Hundred Thousand DeVos ought to demand a reset.
Tom Ultican has been writing a series of brilliant studies of cities where the Destroy Public Education Movement is busily undermining and privatizing its public schools, usually because of an unwarranted admiration for the efficiency of market forces. In their unalloyed love of the market, the DPE forces ignore the fact that markets never create equality; instead, they have a few winners and a lot of losers. They forget that the American education ideal is equality of educational opportunity, not a vast sorting machine that leaves most children behind.
In this post, he analyzes the city of Dallas, where business leaders, in league with the city’s leading newspaper, are determined to privatize public schools.
The business leaders think they are innovative, but in fact they echo the same stale cliches as corporate reformers in other cities. The slogan of the moment is that Dallas (and apparently all of Texas) wants “a system of great schools,” not “a great school system.” When I came across this chestnut in Ultican’s article, I nearly spit out my coffee because I had heard the same words uttered by Joel Klein in New York City in 2003. Is there a Corporate Reformer hymnal where they learn all the same phrases, then pretend they made them up themselves?
Ultican’s history of Dallas education in the crosshairs of the Privatization Movement is richly detailed, too much to summarize briefly. It involves the brief tenure of a Broadie who arrived with great fanfare, then departed without having accomplished any of his grand goals.
It is safe to predict that nothing positive will come of the money lavished by elites to privatize the schools. It hasn’t succeeded anywhere else, and it won’t succeed in Dallas. When they finish playing with the lives of Other People’s Children, they should all be horsewhipped, an old Texas tradition. That would be real Accountability.
My daughter had bad news for me yesterday at dinner.
She turned to me with all the seriousness her 10-year-old self could muster and said, “Daddy, I know you love Bernie but I’m voting for Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth Warren?” I said choking back a laugh.
Her pronouncement had come out of nowhere. We had just been discussing how disgusting the pierogies were in the cafeteria for lunch.
And she nodded with the kind of earnestness you can only have in middle school.
So I tried to match the sobriety on her face and remarked, “That’s okay, Honey. You support whomever you want. You could certainly do worse than Elizabeth Warren.”
Jennifer Berkshire writes in the New Republic that Betsy DeVos is deeply unpopular in swing-state Michigan. Voters in Detroit can see a district disrupted by a generation of failed reforms. Suburban voters like their public schools and don’t want charters or vouchers. Berkshire notes that the Democrats are picking up unlikely victories in districts where education is a big issue.
In 2016, Darrin Camilleri was 24 and teaching at a Detroit charter school 20 miles from where he grew up, when Michigan lawmakers took up a measure to implement more rigorous oversight of the city’s charter schools. Seemingly anyone could open a charter in Detroit, and the schools closed just as suddenly as they opened. From his classroom on the city’s southwest side, Camilleri watched the reform effort fail. “Watching that play out really showed me the downside of deregulation,” he told me. “No one is holding anyone accountable.” That year, he decided to run for state representative in southern Wayne County, a largely blue-collar area that shades rural at its edges. Rather than hewing to standard Democratic talking points—health care, for instance, or Donald Trump’s erratic comments—Camilleri made charter school oversight and school funding his central issues, and in 2016, he became the only Democrat to flip a Republican state house seat in Michigan.
In the three years since Trump turned Michigan red, education has emerged as a potent political issue in the state, thanks to a steady stream of grim studies and embarrassing news stories. Between 2003 and 2015, the state ranked last out of all 50 for improvement in math and reading. According to a recent study, Michigan now spends less on its schools than it did in 1994. Republicans have slashed funding to give tax cuts to big businesses. And the number of people who choose to become teachers has fallen dramatically….
Consider the political climate in Michigan’s suburban districts. In 2018, when Padma Kuppa challenged a Republican state representative, she homed in on the GOP’s role in undermining public education and won, claiming a seat in Troy, an affluent suburban district north of Detroit that Democrats had never held before. Suburban districts like the one in Troy regularly top “best schools in Michigan” lists, with high test scores and graduation rates, and loads of AP offerings. “People here like their public schools, regardless of what party they belong to,” Kuppa said. The GOP’s steady expansion of a largely unregulated charter school sector has very little to offer voters in communities like hers.
Matt Koleszar, a high school social studies and English teacher, won his race for state representative in suburban Plymouth with a message of what he describes as “tenacious support for public schools.” His call for adequate school funding resonated in this “purple” district, he told me, but so did tying his opponent, Jeff Noble, to Betsy DeVos. Noble had scored an endorsement from the education advocacy group DeVos founded, and raised thousands from her extended family. In 2018, he even backed a controversial law to give charter schools a cut of any property tax increases at the county level. “When I went door to door, explaining to people that this meant that their taxes were going to some for-profit charter school headquarters that’s not even in the district, they were outraged,” Koleszar said….
That relationship could backfire on Trump not only in Michigan’s suburbs, but also in rural areas, where the GOP’s education policies have even less to offer voters. There, the local schools are foundational community institutions, and the conservative push to privatize public services has transferred bus drivers, janitors, cafeteria workers, and even some coaches on to the payroll of private contractors that pay less than the state does while providing fewer benefits. “When you’ve gutted all of the insurance for these jobs, they’re not that attractive,” said Keith Smith, the superintendent of schools in rural Kingsley, Michigan. Cuts have forced school districts like his to ax “extras,” such as music, counseling, and the vocational programs that prepare students to work in skilled trades….
The success of candidates who yoked their opponents to DeVos in 2018 should provide valuable lessons for the eventual Democratic nominee, not only in Michigan but also in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, where the GOP has embraced her agenda. For Democrats who have spent much of the last decade teaming up with the GOP to expand charter schools, a new strategy could prove fruitful. Trump, after all, may have trouble distancing himself from DeVos’s legacy: He announced his reelection bid at Orlando’s Amway Center, named for the multilevel marketing company that has so enriched her family.
The most important thing to know about the Broad Academy is that its “graduates” are central to the Disruption Movement, that they specialize in closing schools, that they promote privatization, and that their big ventures (e.g., the Education Achievement Authority in Michigan) have collapsed in failure.
A federal judge found Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in contempt of court and fined her Department $100,000, which is less than a slap in the wrist. It won’t begin to cover the losses suffered by students who were hounded by the Department to repay fraudulent student loans for a fraudulent education at for-profit colleges. DeVos believes it is her duty to protect the fraudsters, not the students.
A federal judge on Thursday held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt for violating an order to stop collecting loan payments from former Corinthian Colleges students.
Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco slapped the Education Department with a $100,000 fine for violating a preliminary injunction. Money from the fine will be used to compensate the 16,000 people harmed by the federal agency’s actions. Some former students of the defunct for-profit college had their paychecks garnished. Others had their tax refunds seized by the federal government.
“There is no question that the defendants violated the preliminary injunction. There is also no question that defendants’ violations harmed individual borrowers,” Kim wrote in her ruling Thursday. “Defendants have not provided evidence that they were unable to comply with the preliminary injunction, and the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 