Federal officials arrested Seth Andrew, founder of the Democracy Prep charter chain, accusing him of taking money from the schools’ bank account to lower his mortgage rate on a new home. Andrew launched Democracy Prep in 2005; he left in 2013 to work the Obama Department of Education but retained financial ties with the charter chain. He severed his ties with the chain in January 2017.
Federal officials say he withdrew more than $200,000 from one of the schools’ accounts in 2019.
He is accused of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false claims to a bank.
CNBC reported:
Andrew, 42, was busted in New York City, where he and his wife, CBS News anchor Lana Zak, have a residence valued at more than $2 million.
The founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools is accused of using more than half of the allegedly stolen money from that network to maintain a bank account minimum that gave him a more favorable interest rate for a mortgage on his and Zak’s Manhattan residence. Zak was not charged in the case.
Prosecutors said Andrew in 2019 — more than two years after severing ties with Democracy Prep — looted a series of escrow accounts he had previously set up for individual schools within Democracy Prep’s network, and then used their funds to open a business account in the name of one of the schools at a bank...
Andrew’s criminal defense attorney, Michael Yaeger, told CNBC that Andrew “will be entering a plea of not guilty” in the case. He declined to comment further.
Arne Duncan, who as then-President Barack Obama’s Education secretary supervised Andrew, declined to comment on the criminal case.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, as the saying goes. No tears here.
They are so used to stealing money and stepping over boundaries that they don’t even know they are doing it anymore or maybe they just don’t care? Chutzpah!
Exactly.
WTH?? He wanted a more favorable mortgage rate and decided that why not use his charter school to help him get one?? Because it’s HIS, after all.
Seth Andrew didn’t NEED to do this. He isn’t living in poverty. He did this because he felt ENTITLED to do it. No doubt he rationalized that he could help himself without hurting the students. Just like so many of the people who run and work at charters and so often promote and benefit their own needs first, and rationalize it by saying that all their work is really about the students.
It is everything that is wrong with charters. The people who run them refuse to be part of the larger public school system that would stop them from putting their own personal needs — whether it is promoting themselves as saviors or generously compensating themself or just getting a better mortgage rate — first.
That’s why those who financially benefit from promoting ed reform would rather bash and try to demonize the NAACP than actually take a hard look at the policies that hurt so many children.
Their needs are always first. But the reality is that they have decided that helping children is only valuable if you can also help yourself, and the actions that might help children but not you are not worthwhile.
Exactly! “It is everything that is wrong with charters. The people who run them refuse to be part of the larger public school system that would stop them from putting their own personal needs — whether it is promoting themselves as saviors or generously compensating themself or just getting a better mortgage rate — first.”
Privatizing education is tearing apart the social fabric of communities. The people who promote privatization are so far removed from the communities they pretend to save, there’s little empathy for the families & children they hurt.
Democracy Prep, somehow, recently bought the Marlboro College campus, a couple of towns over from my current residence. A friend of mine who lives over there, knows erstwhile Marlboro faculty, and is marginally involved in town politics, told me that that the financial bona fides Democracy Prep submitted showed it had no assets and no charitable income. Weird. Yet somehow they paid millions for the property, though considerably less, apparently, than fair market value.
Come on over to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro country.
Kleptocracy Prep (Perp works too)
Colonoscopy Prep . . . Andrew is full of crap.
Thanks for the image of the doctor snapping on his rubber glove.
Any time, as long as it’s an attack against stupidity and privatizers. An ass_____ is an ass______.
Charter schools = fraud playgrounds. It’s a feature, not a bug.
The worst of the worst
Another entitled white guy fails upward.
Affiliated clubs?
The billionaire-funded, charter school-loving, Center for American Progress, Eric Schmidt’s New America Foundation or, the John Arnold-funded Urban Institute (It’s a limited listing of those organizations erroneously assumed to be leftist. A listing on the right side would have so many entries, it wouldn’t fit on the blog.)
I just hate entitled white people.
Is there anyone who worked in the Obama Administration who didn’t come out of the ed reform echo chamber?
Really diverse crowd there, guys. Why, the ideas range all the way from privatizing public schools to universal vouchers!
90% of kids in this country attend public schools and for some reason the federal government can’t find a single employee who actually values and supports their schools. It’s ridiculous and it’s an insular echo chamber. It’s musical chairs in there- they go from ed reform think tanks to the federal government and then back again.
I get that they’re all pro-charter and pro-voucher and they’re all clearly too brilliant to have any interest in “government schools” or “factory schools” or “the cartel of public schools” but if you’re not serving 90% of students because they attend the schools you’ve determined should be pitched in the trash you’re not doing your job.
The worst thing Obama did was outsource public education policy to the ed reform echo chamber.
It was a lost decade for public schools, if you include the Trump Administration, and you should.
They simply don’t serve students who attend public schools. They’re doing other things- privatizing, reinventing, reimagining, starting nonprofits and making themselves the CEO…
Other than testing can any public school student anywhere point to anything that was even relevant to their schools?
There was the Rube Goldberg teacher measurement device, I suppose, but students probably weren’t aware they spent a billion dollars measuring the “value add” of their teachers.
True and we should include the Bush administration with the noxious NCLB scam.
NCLB Scam. There it is.
The Democrats haven’t stopped privatizing public ed, they just mask their actions with euphemisms like “equity”. They then turn around & support running candidates from their inside circle of ed-reformers. (e.g., John King is running for gov of MD; they never go away, do they?)
Case in point: DFER’s website: We fight for better public education opportunities for all students in Washington D.C. and in seven states across the country. Select a chapter below to learn more about each state chapter and their recent work on behalf of their state’s students and families.” https://dfer.org/chapters/
Democrats are offering nothing to public school kids & parents. Channeling Karen Lewis: “Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The Dems haven’t stopped privatizing public ed, they just mask their actions with euphemisms like “equity”. They then turn around & support running candidates from their inside circle of ed-reformers. (e.g., John King is running for gov of MD; they never go away, do they?)
Case in point: DFER’s website: We fight for better public education opportunities for all students in Washington D.C. and in seven states across the country. Select a chapter below to learn more about each state chapter and their recent work on behalf of their state’s students and families.” https://dfer.org/chapters/
Ed reformers are offering nothing to public school kids & parents. Channeling Karen Lewis: “Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The wealthy get involved with public-private partnerships where they socialize the risk and privatize the profit.
Regarding the purchase of Marlboro College, the 100-year lease of the campus for the Marlboro Music Festival appears to have been part of the attraction for Andrew (see article in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper). The College has been in decline for several years, and had a previous merger arrangement with Emerson College in Boston, which fell through because Emerson only wanted Marlboro’s programs, not the campus.
I would appreciate hearing additional details anyone might have, as I lived in the area many years ago.
I live in Bennington at the moment, but have a fairly long history in southern Vermont (I first came here in September of 1978 to work the apple harvest the Scott Farm in Dummerston). One of my best and oldest friends lives in Marlboro; he operated the Bear Bookshop on Butterfield Road, which you may recall from your days here. The Music Festival just spent some big money on the campus renovating the parts of the property it uses, and it does hold a long-term lease there. My friend is connected with former faculty from Marlboro, and everyone over there is mystified as to how the Democracy Prep chain pulled this off. These folks got a look at one of the forms Democracy Prep must publicly file as the type of charity it is, and it wasn’t a reassuring picture. I do know the charter chain paid considerably less than market value. You’re right about Emerson–it wasn’t interested in operating Marlboro at its Vermont campus. Interestingly, Emerson walked away with Marlboro’s relatively miniscule–$30 million–endowment. There is now a “Marlboro Institute” at Emerson. Mr. Andrew, if the allegations prove true, is apparently an unscrupulous fellow.
I live in North Adams,MA . . . only 35 minutes from Bennington, and charters have spread their poison into my next doors town, Adams.
Oh, I like North Adams, Robert, and it is on my radar screen as a place to at least look for a job. That said, I was surprised–and disappointed, of course–to find when I drove through the town in the fall of 2019, after having not been there since 1996, to find a charter school right in the middle of downtown. Last Sunday, on my way back here from Russell, Massachusetts, I drove through Springfield (I lived there and worked at the dismal High School of Commerce during the 2018-2019 school year), then Chicopee, where I was also surprised to find a new charter school. Didn’t Massachusetts vote overwhelmingly a few years back to limit charter growth?
Yes, Massachusetts voted down an audacious proposal in 2016 to open 12 new charters every year forever. But at the time, there were still open slots for new charters.
Thanks, Diane. I know about this law, I am sure, because you wrote about it here at the time. Incidentally, the the charter school I passed in Chicopee? It is named for Paolo Freire. I found that offensive. Good to have you back! I hope all is well and you are on the mend.
Berkeley Beacon, the student newspaper of Emerson College, posted an article 4-29-2021.
It seems unlikely that Democracy Prep would want bad publicity over $200,000.
I’d like to know more about Type 1 Civilization Academy. One article about the Seth Andrew story reported documents show the organization is American. Another claimed it’s Canadian.
Only $200,000? That’s chump change compared to what most of these charter types walk away with. Methinks Mr. Andrew simply annoyed the wrong person or didn’t grease the right palm.
Seth Andrew, also cofounded Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, RI with the current RI governor who took over from raimondo and he @GovDanMcKee…is a big time supporter of charters.He was the director of Blackstone Valley Prep before he became lieutenant governor under Wall Street capitalist raimondo.
It seems that friend Seth Andrew was the “golden boy” for current RI governor Dan McKee who is a strong charter proponent. Apparently when McKee was mayor of Cumberland, RI, he recruited Andrew to run McKee’s new mayoral academy then called Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley (now called Blackstone Valley Prep). The quote from the Providence Journal this morning says, “This matter has no relation to Rhode Island, He had no involvement with Blackstone Valley Prep.”
Seems we were able to unload one charter proponent to the Commerce Department only to get another one in her place.
See the link: https://providencejournal-ri.newsmemory.com/?token=e283164d0aee7d92e4caaead9ebd62a4_60896201_e02eea9&selDate=20210428
What’s the name of the new person?
“A central theme to what I’m trying to do in this project and my whole career is break down monopolies and cartels that don’t want innovation and new ideas because that’s what hurts the most disenfranchised communities the most,” he said on a podcast last year.”
The Obama Administration hired a person who believes public schools are a “cartel” to direct public school policy.
I mean, come on. It’s anti-public school and it’s deliberately and aggressively so.
Do we really think these people set out to “improve” something they absolutely loathe? Of course not. The plan is to replace it with their chosen model.
Why not tell the public that? Then we could have a debate on whether we should or should not privatize K-12 education. Is it fair to public school students to pretend you’re “supporting their schools” when you’ve actually pitched the whole model in the trash?
All the underlings in Biden’s DOE are from a market based mindset as well. As for Cardona, he largely seems as though he wants to be a member of the “get along gang.” He is posing as Switzerland in the privatization war, and he believes that testing offers equity. That is why he was appointed so he can play nicely with the charter lobby.
Cardona was chosen because he wasn’t a lightning rod — yet.
Thank you filthy Bastards Bill Clinton, GW Bush and Obama for accelerating charter schools . . .
Seth Andrew will probably end up with a fine under $10K and at most a few months in jail before he’s free to return to his life of lies and fraud.
The biggest problem in this country is that the ruling class has little to no morality and the working class has little to no intelligence.
It’s not that most people are dumb , it’s that they have a Christian propensity to forgive even the people who have robbed them blind.
It’s the same propensity that lets deformers like Bill Gates off the hook for their “failures” (Common Core, VAM, standardized testing, etc)
Forgiveness is a very bad policy when those you are dealing with repeatedly exploit your desire to forgive.
An eye for an eye
An eye for an eye
Is simply best
For charter guy
Who steals the chest
You can’t steal what you can’t see
Many working class people are extremely busy, and they tend to vote based on their impression of a candidate without really examining the issues. I am sure some people in other groups do the same thing.
Throw the legal book at a few of these people (with long jail sentences) and I suspect that the fraud would greatly diminish if not disappear.
SDP,
In my mind, forgiving those who oppress, rob, steal, and dominate in the name of commoditization, privatization, and monetization is DUMB.
Dumb is as dumb believes as dumb does.
I guess it is dumb by Forest Gump’s definition “Stupid is as stupid does”
Robert: Forgiveness benefits the person who forgives. Accountability is quite another thing. All should be forgiven. All should be held accountable.
Forgiveness was invented
To nullify the blame
While many have repented
A fraction know no shame
And actually, repentance should be a basic requirement for forgiveness.
Thats actually in keeping with most religious beliefs.
Claiming “not guilty” when one is guilty is an indication of non-repentence.
Roy Turrentine,
Sorry, but if you punch me in the face for no valid good reason, I’m not forgiving you. Exceptions are a truly good reason or someone who truly repents and changes their orientation about hitting people and never repeats it again. . Other than those, you’ll be on my my #@Q%Q list permanently and should stay away from me and my loved ones if you know what’s good for you . . . Capsici tu?
SDP: “Throw the legal book at a few of these people (with long jail sentences) and I suspect that the fraud would greatly diminish if not disappear.” I don’t agree. The legal book, i.e. many states’ charter laws, are full of lacunae allowing fraud to flourish long enough for canny somebodies to take the $$ and run. This attracts gamblers.
I suppose the real news is that CNN reported the real news about a charter scandal. I wonder how many of them go unknown.
NPE uncovers weekly scandals that the media ignore. The reason Andrew got attention is because he worked in the Obama administration.
His wife is a journalist, so maybe that made it more newsworthy to CNN.
Are you talking about known unknowns?
Or unknown unknowns?
Or don’t you know?
“We know where the charter scandals are. They’re in the area around NYC and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
The real news is not only that CNN reported on a charter scandal but one involving a Democrat who worked for Obama.
This is a clear failure of the vetting process at CNN.
Maybe they have a Fox mole among their editors.
A Fox in the henhouse
Diverts CNN house
From Dem party line
It’s really a crime!
Title:
“A Fox in the CNNhouse”
That rhyme is admirable: CN-enhouse
Remember Tony Rezko? He was convicted of 16 counts in an influence-peddling scheme that reached the highest levels of Illinois state government. Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought the neighboring lot then sold a portion of the undeveloped lot to the Obamas, enlarging the senator’s yard.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25496822
Mistakes were made. “The mistake, by the way, was not just engaging in a transaction with Tony because he was having legal problems. The mistake was because he was a contributor and somebody who was involved in politics.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-obama-rezkomar15-archive-story.html
That Andrew even set up those escrow accounts known only to himself indicates his nature. The guy always had crooked tendencies, and no surprise ends up being a crook. Clearly, the way he set up the school finances shows no concern for accountability/ transparency. But that also illustrates the idiotic nature of most state charter laws. Somehow, being free from selected regs in order to encourage innovation and competition gets equated to being free from the ordinary bookkeeping required to keep any private business owner out of jail. Much less the sort of public scrutiny of how tax dollars are spent.
Much is made of the ‘corporate veil’ as the reason why charter owners are legally able to avoid financial transparency. I don’t buy it. Corporations routinely expose their finances to the IRS– not to mention the public at large, as way to get favorable (say D&B) ratings which help them get contracts. Embezzlers get found out and arrested through ordinary accounting practices and audits. Charter laws apparently have loopholes you can drive a double-semi through.
Without accountability, it is too tempting to dip into the till. Charter School officials aren’t the only ones who embezzle funds – it seems to be a universal problem throughout society. At least this one got caught, many find ways to get away with it and legally abscond with money which they haven’t earned.
How do we teach morality and honor to our children so they don’t grow up to be crooks,
An FYI that Seth Andrew just received permission to move back to Rhode Island while out on bail awaiting his criminal trial. See https://www.dropbox.com/s/1vkhp8dfv5jaktz/Seth%20Andrew%20Docket.pdf?dl=0