I remember the original promise of charter schools when the idea was first floated in the late 1980s. They would cost less than district schools because of no bureaucracy. They would be more accountable than district schools because they would lose their charter if they didn’t meet their academic goals. We now know that none of this is true. Charter leaders demand the same or more funding than their public counterparts. Although many charters close every year, many low-performing charters are not closed. And now we find that there is no financial accountability, that religious schools may become charters, that white-flight academies may become charters, and that some charter leaders pay themselves far more than district superintendents.
The latest example of charter refusal to be accountable is the Cornerstone charter chain in Detroit, where a major donor is battling in court to see a financial audit. The donor is especially interested in a jump in the charter leader’s salary from $500,000 to more than $800,000 in a two-year period, following the death of the original donor.
The story begins
A fissure has erupted between Clark Durant, the founder of Detroit’s Cornerstone charter schools, and the executors of the trust and estate of the schools’ largest funder: the late Bill Pulte Sr.
Last week Mark Pulte, the son of Pulte Sr. and a co-trustee of the William J. Pulte Trust, submitted a complaint to the office of Attorney General Dana Nessel. In it he called for an investigation into Durant as, well as the New Common School Foundation (NCSF), a non-profit Durant created to raise funds for the Cornerstone schools, a group of private, religious schools he opened in the 1990s, and subsequently transitioned into public-charter schools.
“I have grown increasingly concerned that NCSF, which is ostensibly a Michigan non-profit public charity whose mission is to educate disadvantaged students, is actually operating as a for-profit entity with the primary purpose of financially benefiting Mr. Durant,” Pulte, whose father has donated tens of millions of dollars to the foundation over the last two decades, wrote in the Nov. 30 complaint obtained by 7 Action News.
Pulte’s complaint comes in the midst of an already tense legal battle between the trust and the foundation.
In March, following a 7 Action News investigation into ethical questions surrounding rental contracts between Cornerstone’s public charter school boards (which Durant advises as CEO of the Cornerstone Education Group) and the NCSF (which acts as landlord, as well as a charity fundraising for the schools), the trust requested an audit from the foundation.
“The trustees remain confounded why your client refuses their reasonable request for an audit regarding the funds they have donated to the New Common School Foundation,” a trustee attorney wrote in a Mar. 12 email to the NCSF’s chairman Jeffery Neilson.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The transparency issues on charter budgets are particularly galling because ed reformers spend a lot of time demanding reporting from public schools.
I agree that publicly funded entities should be transparent and should have to report expenditures. I wish ed reformers also agreed, but they don’t, because when they design these privatized systems they don’t force transparency. They could. They write the laws. They choose not to.
It’s yet another of the endless examples of the double standard they hold for public schools and the private and charter schools they prefer and promote.
If your issue is transparency and you’re writing editorials about how public schools must post how they spend the Biden funding, you have to apply that same demand to the private and charter schools that are publicly funded or your issue isn’t “transparency”, it’s harshly policing public schools and ONLY public schools.
We seem to have thousands of full time, paid critics of public schools. Oddly none of them ever apply any of the same standards to the schools they prefer and promote- charter and private schools.
In some cases state legislators are in cahoots with privatizers. The legislators’ job is to keep the money flowing and fight any effort to provide accountability. The result is exorbitant salaries at the top of the charter chain, waste, fraud and sometimes embezzling. Taxpayers often remain oblivious to the fact they are being fleeced unless some type of audit reveals discrepancies.
It’s just rank hypocrisy and bias though. If you’re genuinely interested in the public having information on school expenditures you don’t write laws for private and charter schools that allow them to evade public accounting and audits.
Ed reformers write the charter and voucher laws. These are the systems they designed and hope to replace public systems with. They’re not transparent.
The voucher funding is even more opaque. Good luck finding out where any of that is going. They set it up so there are 3 layers between the funding and the schools.
There will be a huge voucher finance scandal in the next 5 years. Guaranteed. It’s inevitable. It is as predictable as the charter scandals. The governance system they designed is junk. It was designed along ideological anti-regulatory lines, not accounting or auditing. The ideology drives the bus.
Privatization is a way to move cash out of the accountable public sector and move it into the unaccountable private sector. The public schools suffer as a result, and the politicians don’t seem to care enough about it to do anything about it. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the already wealthy.
Ed reformers can collect a LOT of information on public schools and public school teachers, which is why you see the outraged editorials about teacher discipline or absenteeism or public school expenditures. They know how many public school teachers have issues because the teachers union/district reports that information.
You don’t see any of the same for charter chains, because charter chains don’t report any of it. Ed reform treats the absence of negative information as positive information, which is just ludicrous and obviously anti-public school bias.
How many teachers are absent over a given year in a charter chain? Where would I find that out? How many teachers in a charter chain have been disciplined or fired for cause and what was the cause? It’s a mystery.
People who weren’t biased would ask about this, maybe pass regulations to mandate it, but ed reformers never do. Interesting omission from such data fanatics, right?
Here’s the ed reform covid recovery project.
Funded by the Walton Foundation and completely stacked with ed reform echo chamber members.
https://turnthepageproject.com/
Would it be too much to ask to have a couple of people who actually work in or run public schools running public school policy? I remain baffled by how public schools somehow ended up taking orders from people who either don’t support their schools or are actively working to replace all of them.
Don’t accept this. If they want to police and direct your schools insist they let you sit at the table.
We now have the American Enterprise Institute and The Walton Foundation- two anti-public school groups- micromanaging the public schools they didn’t and don’t attend and don’t believe should exist. Thanks ed reform! That’s just great.
The expert on public schools is an economist from an Ivy League university:
https://turnthepageproject.com/story/emily-oster/
Ivy league universities are wildly inequitable, completely unaffordable for 90% of people and larded with special privileges for legacies and private school students. Perhaps once they finish criticizing public schools they could clean up their own side of the street.
Maybe it’s just me but I think I’ll ask someone who has ever actually entered a public school to weigh in on them. Reading the school website doesn’t count.
I posted a long reply that disappeared, so not sure if it will eventually appear.
Emily Oster is one of the most overhyped “experts”. She has benefited from the amnesia where the media has conveniently forgotten her previous errors when she was a PhD student, and conclusions she made in a career-boosting paper were hyped and she ignored the scholarly critics who pointed out flaws in her research.
Three years after being overpraised in the media for writing a paper that turned out to have completely false claims based on incomplete data that she wrongly claimed provided clear and compelling evidence for her thesis, Oster wrote a new paper retracting the previous paper. I didn’t notice a public apology to her critics but I will give her the benefit of the doubt that she had the integrity make one.
When her first erroneous paper was being hyped, Oster seemed to completely disregard all the scholars who pointed out the serious flaws in her conclusions. The fact that Oster got praised for finally writing a new paper that completely retracted the findings of her old paper is an example of privilege. The critics that she had ignored for years were right and Oster was wrong, but Oster got credit for finally (after 3 years) retracting her work!
The NYT included a mention Oster’s flawed research in an April 17, 2013 story “A History of Oopsies in Economic Studies”
If schools reopen without taking the proper mitigation of risk, is it just another “oopsie” for Oster?
Would the idea of eliminating bureaucracy have worked if it had been accomplished by limiting administrative salaries and audited properly to assure teachers were paid and god ideas discovered were spread through the public system? I thought that was the way it was supposed to happen.
If charter school leader’s salaries were limited to those of public school principals, there would not be so many charters.
YES
The allegation – Began as religious schools for the poor and turned into “profit” opportunities. Paint me surprised.
Big administrative salary- guess Durant’s age, sex and race. Nah, the answer is too easy.
Republican, Clark Durant, was interviewed in 2016, “…found himself confronted with a decision- should he keep following his conscience toward the Catholic church…” He was impressed by “the witness” of “Catholic leading lights at Notre Dame” as well as those working in the Reagan administration.
Please keep speaking up about this. I could tell you stories for days about what happens inside that building.
Please send in your stories