Carl J. Petersen, a parent advocate for students with special needs in the public schools of Los Angeles, wrote here about the failure of the LAUSD school board to monitor graft in the charter sector.
He writes about the deliberate negligence of board members supported by the charter industry:
As Community Preparatory Academy (CPA) approached the end of its charter, it was $820,303 in debt. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) was a major creditor, with invoices that were about two years old totaling $82,240. The school had not resolved the majority of the Notices to Cure that the LAUSD Charter School Division (CSD) had issued, some of which involved health and safety violations. “Since CPA [had] opened in 2014, the school [had] not earned a rating higher than a ‘2’ (Developing) in the area of governance” on its annual oversight visits. Despite all of these problems, CPA requested that the LAUSD renew its charter.
Speaking in favor of rejecting CPA’s charter renewal, I noted some of the financial irregularities in the school’s governance and asked: “Was this school [Executive Director Janis] Bucknor’s personal piggy bank?” Yesterday, Bucknor herself provided the answer when she “agreed to plead guilty to embezzling $3.1 million in school funds that she spent on her personal use”. These funds were stolen from students “to pay for personal travel, restaurants, Amazon and Etsy purchases and private school tuition for her children” along with “more than $220,000…spent on Disney-related expenses, including cruise line vacations and theme park admissions.”
Central to my comments before the LAUSD board was the assertion that CPA’s charter should have been revoked long before it was up for renewal. This opinion is now strengthened the serious corruption that has been exposed by Bucknor’s guilty plea. How much of the $3.1 million could have been saved for use in the education of students if CPA had been shut down from the moment the school refused to resolve the concerns brought forward by the district? Instead, the LAUSD allowed the charter to continue operating with Bucknor having unfettered access to public funds.
Ignoring the almost five years of misbehavior by the charter that was allowed to continue without interruption, Board Member Nick Melvoin mocked my concerns by claiming that “we need to point out and be consistent of [sic] people who are saying that this board doesn’t hold charters accountable at a meeting where we are closing two schools”. He also said the board should “look at themselves in the mirror” and they should “be thinking [about] how are we holding ourselves accountable both academically at the school level and fiscally.” A good start would be to ensure that scarce funds are not taken from students in order to finance a charter school administrator’s Disney vacations.
Melvoin stated that he thought that the LAUSD would not “be comfortable with [a] conversation” that compared public schools to privately run charter schools. This is an easy position to take when he and other charter industry-financed board members like Monica Garcia, Caprice Young, and Ref Rodriguez have ensured that this competition does not take place on a level playing field. Instead of demanding accountability as they allowed public funds to flow into private hands, they built a bureaucracy that ensures that charter schools do not have to follow the same rules as their public school counterparts. The charter school industry will spend millions more this year on the campaigns of Marilyn Koziatek and Tanya Ortiz Franklin to ensure that their underregulated operations continue without interference.
The charter school industry would like you to believe that the corruption that occurred at CPA is an isolated incident. They said the same thing when Vielka McFarlane of the Celerity Educational Group “agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to misappropriate and embezzle public funds” and when El Camino’s former Executive Director David Fehte was caught charging personal expenses to his school credit card. Even after these cases of misconduct became public, the CCSA fought against measures that would make charter schools accountable. This makes them complicit when the corruption continues. The same can be said for politicians like Melvoin who have stood in the way of reforms.
Don’t board members have a duty to represent the people who elected them, rather than the California Charter School Association that funded their campaigns?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’ll get much, much worse before it gets better. They don’t regulate the vouchers at all. There’s already a new batch of cheap, unregulated “voucher schools” in Ohio. Ed reformers like Betsy DeVos spend whole work days on the public dime marketing and promoting them.
The level of corruption is going to skyrocket with ed reform’s lockstep cheerleading for vouchers, and that doesn’t even include all the ed reform groups that are pushing for investing billions in unregulated “tutoring” programs. One of their newest lobbying efforts is pushing for billions in public funding to be funneled to private companies to provide “tutors”- no requirements for the tutors at all. Just form an LLC, provide X number of 10 dollar an hour “tutors” and you too can be a government contractor.
It’s really an amazing business model. They create publicly funded jobs and then hire each other to fill them.
Chiara,
Sadly, as the voucher schools multiply, it becomes harder to find the corruption. They receive public money and have no accountability and no oversight.
“unregulated tutoring programs.” There’s the new opportunism frontier
Yes, they are definitely trying to use the pandemic to fill backpacks full of cash. I just read an article by one of the LA Times charter cheerleaders yesterday in which a parent was complaining that the state should pay her for keeping her child home from the school campus instead of paying the school district to provide online services. They want the funding freed up to be spent by consumers so that businesses can grab the backpacks full of cash. But the pandemic will end one day, and education needs to be a right, not a choice.
The thousands of ed reform groups and tens of thousands of full time paid ed reformers haven’t contributed anything at all to the public schools that are attempting to grapple with this crisis, but they’re hard at work.
They haven’t done anything practical or useful for public schools because they spend their days “reimaging” schools, which always involves cutting funding to public entities and spending billions on private contractors:
“An antifragile system would embrace that open-endedness and turn it into an asset. Patches for fall would become the foundation for a new configuration of service delivery. Some antifragile components come quickly to mind:
Instructional “pods” (online and off), consisting of manageable numbers of kids and good-enough content guides/helpers. In district schools, these are the grade-based cohorts being organized to reduce class sizes and make remote teaching manageable, with district-sponsored teachers as instructional leads. Let’s also support pods organized by parents, teachers, community and informal learning spaces, and others who opt out of or build on top of district arrangements.
Free public-facing instructional “genius bars,” organized by districts or nonprofits to support the pods and backstop anyone in the community—parents, childcare providers, museums, libraries—who enable kids’ learning and well-being. These can be staffed by a wide range of qualified people, not just active school personnel.
To support their teachers and principals, districts should create back-office teams that analyze attendance and engagement data in real time to create instructional and administrative interventions. No student, classroom, or school should fall through the cracks.
Safe physical spaces of any and all kinds to host in-person pods and to get kids out of the house, for God’s sake.
Nontraditional, unconstrained assumptions about how to partner, staff, train, and finance these services. Cast the widest possible net of individuals and organizations to ensure that traditional system staffing constraints do not limit the support available to schools and families. Create local and state “CovidCorps” for both public service and employment opportunities.
Lean, transparent, real-time monitoring, inspection, and audit mechanisms for all of the above, including health and facilities checks for all participants. Demonstrate that government can enable responsive, effective, community-based solutions.”
Nothing for actual public schools or the 90% of students and families who use them. No, that’s too dull for the geniuses of ed reform- too much like real work. Instead they will neglect and ignore and denigrate our existing systems and replace them with a stale collection of corporate buzz words.
We have had thousands of people involved in full time work on “ed reform” for the last 20 years.
Yet we cannot open our schools. We cannot even give students school remotely, because half of them don’t have reliable internet access.
NCLB, RttT, Trump’s promotion of charters and vouchers- billions and billions of dollars plowed into ed reform and ed reformers. And nobody worked on internet access for public school students.
No one was interested in investing in that simple and basic infrastructure. Not “disruptive enough. They could have put every kid in the country online 5X over with what they’ve spent on teacher measurement systems alone.
In my county we have an elaborate teacher measurement system, and 15 kids sitting under the covered walkway at the public library, doing their homework.
Can we hire a few people in government who have some interest in actually performing some practical, useful WORK? How about don’t “reinvent” anything this work week. Just get the internet to all of them.
Nobody that hasn’t spent at least a decade in a classroom should be trying to “reinvent” education.
HBO filmed a movie about a very rare instance of embezzling in a public school district in Long Island. It was called ‘Bad Education.’ Carol Burris should pitch HBO a whole new series about embezzling in the charter industry. It can be called ‘Worse Education.’
Our young and our FRAGILE democracy have been and are being “dissed” and “used” for PROFITS by charter schools and vouchers. So SICK.
It’s important to note that California passed AB 1505 which strengthens a district’s ability to not renew a charter. Before, as long as academics were deemed reasonably acceptable, the charter was allowed to continue to operate, even given the kinds of violations reported on this charter. That’s about to change. This will be a very interesting year as LAUSD, for example, will have to reassess how they used to judge charters and ultimately non-renew those that have been extremely derelict in how they operate.
Good point. Even with the new laws, however, if we don’t keep the pressure on the LAUSD Board, they will find ways to rip off Los Angeles. Great thanks to Carl Peterson for helping put that pressure on. Melvoin is completely intransigent, but he is becoming an outlier out of step. We must keep the pressure on Gonez and Garcia, and (re)elect the team our schools need: Goldberg, Schmerelson, McKenna, and Castellanos.
“Don’t board members have a duty to represent the people who elected them, rather than the California Charter School Association that funded their campaigns?”
The answer is the same one for this question?
“When Donald Trump lied while taking took the Oath of Office to become President, didn’t he swear to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies both foreign and domestic instead of becoming one of those enemies himself?”
Every Donald Trump supporter is a traitor like him. Trainers support traitors. Crooks support Crooks.