Someone recently asked me for a definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah. Here it is. Two smart entrepreneurs create a virtual charter school in Oklahoma. Their public funding enables them to become millionaires. When the state auditor requests their financial records, they refuse to turn them over. The state auditor sues them and wins. The two entrepreneurs exhibited chutzpah.
A reader in Oklahoma sent this note:
Epic Charter Schools’ founders last week not only lost their hold on the school system that made them millionaires, but they also apparently lost their fight in court to block the Oklahoma state auditor and inspector from reviewing their bank and credit card statements.
According to public records filed in Oklahoma County District Court on Friday, a judge has directed Epic Youth Services, the for-profit school management company owned by Epic co-founders David Chaney and Ben Harris, to turn over all records of purchases and bank statements related to Epic’s Learning Fund for student needs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“but they also apparently lost their fight in court to block the Oklahoma state auditor and inspector from reviewing their bank and credit card statements.”
Can you imagine? The people who want to “reinvent” school governance wrote and passed these charter laws. The laws are garbage. Yet they still insist they should completely revamp every public school governance scheme in the country.
They can’t even govern their own privatized systems properly and they’re demanding to privatize every public school system in the country. We want public schools to be less transparent and less accountable? Is that why we should let the ed reform echo chamber “reinvent” schools? So we have to sue to get a bank statement out of a publicly funded entity?
Wait until they try to get records from the private schools they’re funding with vouchers. Those schools won’t have to turn over anything to the public. Completely opaque and publicly financed. That’s the “system” these self-proclaimed geniuses designed.
The whole echo chamber are currently policing every public school to see how the schools spend stimulus funds. Just public schools. They do no policing of the charters they all promote. They couldn’t get the information out of charters even if they wanted to police them because they wrote these laws so charters don’t have to turn anything over.
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“That was separate from the $45.9 million in fees — a 10% cut of every dollar of revenue received — the company was paid for its management contracts for Epic’s two charter schools during that same time period”
Every time a charter promoter and cheerleader tells you people who work in public schools are “self interested” so therefore cannot advocate on behalf of public schools, ask them why the charter industry is not “self interested” when they lobby for more charters.
Why is there a double standard? If all public school advocates are “self interested” because they’re paid by public schools then the entire reform echo chamber are also “self interested’ because they’re paid by the charter industry.
Lots and lots and lots of people are employed full time in either working at charters, getting a cut of charter funding, or lobbying for charters. If all public school advocates are “self interested” than all charter advocates are too.
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Yep, and a LOT of those people working for charter organizations are state legislators (and probably some national legislators, too).
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Just checking in to see what the huge ed reform lobby has actually accomplished for public school students this year in Ohio:
“Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
The lead sponsor of Ohio anti-CRT bill could not summon one example of CRT in school but was “responding to voter concerns”
As ever, conservative rage over curriculum is often disproportionate to the presence, much less radicalism, of the pedagogy itself ”
They got absolutely nothing for practical or useful worth done, but they have managed to promote a ridiculous moral panic about “critical race theory” in public schools.
This is what they get done for your kid if your kid attends a public school- nothing.
The state legislature in Ohio hasn’t gotten anything done for public school students in years- it’s all this political garbage and posturing. They perform no actual work on behalf of students in public schools.
People who do no work on behalf of public school students and don’t support public schools – in fact, they spend all their time bashing our schools and promoting charters and vouchers- now want to dictate what every public school teacher says in every class.
How is it fair to public school students that ed reformers who seek to abolish their schools also set policy in their schools?
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that’s a scary summation: setting policy in the very schools they seek to remove
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