The IDEA charter chain has ambitious plans to expand, with the help of more than $200 million from Betsy DeVos’s charter slush fund (also known as the federal Charter Schools Program, which was created to help start-ups, not to expand corporate empires).
The IDEA profile is a business model, not a public school model. It pushes into new markets aggressively and spends lavishly on executive perks, like leasing a private jet, first class travel, self-dealing, and season tickets for sports events. And paying huge salaries to leaders. Betsy DeVos loves the model, but it didn’t play well to the public.
When the news broke about its free-spending ways, public reaction was swift and negative.
The chain, which currently operates 92 charters and is set to expand in Houston and elsewhere, funded by taxpayers with a mission of “disrupting” and replacing public schools, was co-founded by Tom Torkelsen and JoAnn Gama.
The board rewarded them handsomely. In 2018-19: Torkelsen was paid $817,395, CFO Wyatt Truscheit received $507,887, Gama collected $482,930 for Gama, and six others earned at least $250,000. When Torkelsen recently stepped down as CEO, he was promised severance pay of $900,000. Not exactly the kinds of salaries paid in the public sector. IDEA gets high test scores the usual charter way: by recruiting the students it wants and setting standards high enough to push out those it doesn’t want.
The Houston Chronicle wrote:
When the leaders of IDEA Public Schools gathered last December to vote on an eight-year lease for a private jet, the charter network’s then-board chair, David Guerra, thought of the nearly $15-million deal in business terms.
As president and CEO of International Bank of Commerce, Guerra and his team had used six corporate jets to grow the multibillion-dollar company’s business beyond its Laredo-area headquarters. The same premise would hold true for IDEA, he reasoned, as the charter school network based in the Rio Grande Valley rapidly expanded across Texas, Louisiana and Florida.
“We cannot fulfill our commitment to such a large geographic area without having this type of transportation,” the retired banking chief told IDEA’s governing board in December.
IDEA board members unanimously approved the lease, but reversed the decision two weeks later after charter school opponents and some of the network’s supporters denounced the aircraft as an irresponsible extravagance.
The episode triggered a wave of headlines, oversight changes and soul-searching at the state’s largest charter school, which now is grappling with how to maintain its corporate-like culture while abiding by some more-traditional expectations about how public school districts should be run, IDEA leaders said last week…
Beyond the charter jet lease, IDEA has drawn scrutiny in the past several months for multiple financial practices: spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on tickets and luxury boxes at San Antonio’s AT&T Center; making business deals with members of IDEA’s leadership and their relatives; and reaching a separation agreement with co-founder and CEO Tom Torkelson that will net him $900,000 following his resignation in May.
IDEA officials do not appear to have violated any laws, and the charter’s leaders have defended each practice at various points.
Still, IDEA’s governing board announced several reforms last month. They include banning private air travel, curbing executive benefits, ending business deals with leaders and family members, and requiring additional spending approvals from the governing board and chief financial officer.
“We don’t want to have execution that’s just like a traditional school district, because we want to have innovation and take some risks and be more aggressive,” IDEA Board Chair Al Lopez said. “But after 20 years of policies and practices helped us get to the point we’re at, we felt like we were at an inflection point.”
The stakes are high not just for IDEA, but the entire charter school movement.
Advocates for traditional public schools have seized on IDEA’s spending as an example of lax oversight of charters, which largely are funded by taxpayers. Texas American Federation of Teachers leaders blasted IDEA officials for the jet lease, accusing them of “flying adults around the state” instead of directly funding classroom programs. State Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, deemed IDEA’s practices “nonsense” that “absolutely underscores the problem…”
“IDEA has operated outside the public eye with little transparency while still receiving taxpayer dollars — and it shows,” said Patti Everitt, an education policy and research consultant who monitors Texas charter school operations. “IDEA can’t have it both ways…”
The charter’s leaders credit IDEA’s success, in part, to a culture that borrows from the business, nonprofit and higher education worlds. The organization employs a regimented, highly centralized model that emphasizes student and employee performance data.
Critics, however, argue the network indirectly screens out children with greater academic and behavioral needs by emphasizing advanced-level courses, inflating the organization’s results. As an example, they note IDEA’s enrollment of students with disabilities totaled 5.4 percent in 2018-19, compared to 9.6 percent in other Texas public schools.
Still, IDEA schools remain in high demand, helping fuel the network’s ambitious approach to expansion. IDEA added more more students in the past five years than any other Texas charter operators, and it plans to hit 100,000 students across the southern United States by 2022-23.
Diane Ravitch's blog 