This is the third in the series of investigative articles about Washington State’s largest charter chain, written by Ann Dornfeld for Station KUOW in Seattle.

As we have seen over the dozen years, Bill Gates is an accountability hawk. He wants everything measured. He wants teachers and principals to be held accountable, usually by the test scores of their students. He has invested heavily in charter schools. But as Dornfeld shows, the charter schools that Bill Gates created in Washington are accountable to no one.

Will anyone hold Bill Gates accountable? Of course not. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley (the billionaire who famously said that “only the little people pay taxes”), accountability is only for working stiffs, not for billionaires.

She writes:

Over seven months, KUOW interviewed 50 current and former Impact staff and parents, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents from Impact and state agencies, including enrollment records, staff resignation letters, court records, charter contracts, nondisclosure agreements, and internal emails.

KUOW’s investigation revealed a charter school chain that state officials have allowed to grow rapidly even as, staff allege, it failed to identify and serve students with disabilities, offered little to English language learners, and where crowded classrooms are largely led by inexperienced teachers without the usual credentials. Many students were recommended to repeat a grade based on test scores.

Records show that staff members and parents have, for years, taken their complaints about how Impact serves students to the many agencies assigned to oversee charter schools. They emailed the Impact board of directors, testified to the Washington State Charter School Commission, and reported concerns to the State Auditor’s Office. Little, if anything, came of their efforts, they said.

After Impact’s first school, in Tukwila, opened in 2018, the state approved new branches in Seattle, Tacoma, and a Renton location set to open next year.

As the state’s charter school law requires, Impact promised to focus its mission on marginalized students, and its demographics reflect the communities around its schools.

The charter chain’s students are mostly children of color from low-income families. Black students make up the largest percentage, including many from East African immigrant and refugee families. Twenty-one percent of students are learning English, state records show.

Jen Davis Wickens, Impact Public Schools co-founder and CEO, declined multiple interview requests for this story and agreed only to respond to emailed questions via a spokesperson.

Impact spokesperson Rowena Yow said by e-mail that the state’s primary K-12 education agency, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, “conducts a thorough annual audit of our [special education] program and services, and we have received approval since our inception in 2018.”

“Our special education program meets the highest standards,” Yow said, adding that the same is true for its English language learner program for the schools’ large number of students from immigrant and refugee families. Twenty percent of its students are learning English, state records show.

Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of public instruction, said his agency has relied entirely on what Impact claimed that it provides to special education and English language students.

“Most of what we do is ask districts to make attestations about their use of funds,” Reykdal said.

“Periodically, the state auditor will do a deep dive on a performance audit. But that’s very, very rare, especially for a new school.”

Reykdal said his agency oversees so many school districts that it often takes a complaint from the community to trigger the agency to take a closer look at school practices. As of March, when Reykdal was interviewed for this story, he said his agency had not received complaints about Impact’s special education and English language services.

Reykdal said that if Impact is not meeting its obligations, as parents and staff allege, “that’s alarming.”

The State Auditor’s Office has a significant lag time in completing school district audits — often two or more years — which means issues are often caught only in hindsight.

To date, the agency has issued one audit report for an Impact school, the Tukwila location: it reviewed the 2018-19 school year, its first in operation. That accountability audit looked at a handful of standard items, including whether the school had accurately classified students as needing special state-funded services, like English language lessons. The audit did not look into whether those services were actually provided.

With so many layers of oversight, the roles and responsibilities for each of the many agencies tasked with overseeing charters can be murky — both to the public, and to the agencies themselves.

Few of the 29 Impact parents KUOW interviewed pursued formal complaints regarding their concerns about how Impact schools run. More often, after raising issues at the school level, they gave up — or withdrew their children and enrolled them in their neighborhood schools.

Several Impact parents told KUOW there was no clear way to file a complaint about their concerns with the school — the website gave no clear path. Two said their emails to Impact’s public records address bounced back.

An extra layer of state oversight

The eight appointed members of the Washington State Charter School Commission authorize new charter schools, renew or revoke schools’ charter contracts, and are meant to ensure schools follow the law and their contracts.

The agency has a staff of six and a $1.8 million annual budget — money that comes almost entirely from fees paid by the charter schools it oversees. Because each school pays 3% of its state funding to the commission, the agency’s budget is directly tied to charter school enrollment.

Each additional school the commission approves — and each student who enrolls at that school — grows the commission budget. Conversely, if the commission limits a school’s growth, or revokes a school’s charter contract, the commission’s budget takes a hit.

Impact Public Schools paid the commission approximately $485,000 in fees this year, more than any other charter school or network, and about one-quarter of the agency’s budget.

The commission is supposed to produce annual reports on each charter school, as voters were promised: their academic success compared to traditional public schools, as well as the schools’ financial and organizational stability. The commission has not completed a charter school performance report since the 2018-19 school year, three school years ago...

In May 2020, former Impact teacher Claire Leong wrote to the Charter School Commission, imploring the agency to deny Impact’s efforts to add another two schools to its network.

Leong said the disciplinary system at Impact’s Tukwila school had been “abhorrent,” and that teachers were required to send students to another classroom after several minor infractions.

“This could be not looking at the speaker, not sitting up straight, not walking silently,” Leong wrote. “My students often missed learning time because of these marks, and were instead in a buddy class or with the admin team,” Leong said, adding that Black boys missed the most instruction.

“Impact Public Schools should not be allowed to open any more schools, and should have their current school audited to highlight the discrepancies between the values that they tout and the malpractice that is occurring when no one is there from a foundation or commission to see everyone on their best behavior,” Leong told the commission.

Several Impact staff and parents also testified in support of the school expansion.

Several weeks later, the Charter School Commission gave Impact the green light to open new schools in Tacoma and Renton.

When asked why the commission allowed Impact to open more schools despite serious concerns voiced by parents and staff, Commissioner Christine Varela, who serves as the agency spokesperson, said that the commission is required by state law to base its decisions for new schools “on documented evidence collected through the application review process…”

Impact parents said when they have complained to the commission, the commission often directed them to instead raise their issues with Impact’s board of directors.

A different kind of school board

Unlike traditional public school boards, which are elected by local voters, Impact’s board members are appointed.

When parents wrote to the board, they said board members often told them to complain instead to Impact co-founder and CEO Jen Davis Wickens, to voice their concerns during public comment at a board meeting, or to file a formal complaint with Impact.

Speaking during public comment at a board meeting can be difficult, because the meetings occur during work hours. It can also be intimidating for parents at Impact schools, said Jimmy, a parent at its Tukwila school — especially for its many immigrant and refugee families. He asked to use only his first name to protect his child’s privacy.

“Our voice is small,” Jimmy said. “English is our second language. If we want to say something, it’s hard, you know?”

At six Impact board meetings KUOW attended over the past seven months, unanimous approval of all agenda items was the norm, with little, if any, discussion. Meetings are typically over in 30 minutes.

Impact board members declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story, or to address any of the issues raised by parents and staff that KUOW shared with the board.

Although few people know more about the charter network than its staff, many former Impact educators told KUOW they were afraid to speak up with their serious concerns about the schools because they had signed non-disclosure agreements.

Impact has most departing staff sign an agreement barring them from sharing any information that “may cause harm to the employer.”

Some staff sign more stringent agreements that ban them from making “disparaging” remarks about Impact or divulging the reason for their resignation.

“Employee will simply state ‘I decided to pursue other opportunities,’ or something similar, and will make no further comment,” an Impact severance agreement reads.

Asmeret Habte, whose children, nieces, and nephews attended Impact’s Tukwila location this year, contacted the school, the board, and the state Charter School Commission about concerns about overcrowded classrooms at the school last fall.

As many as 38 students per class were eating at shared desks in one of the most Covid-affected areas in the region, and Habte and other parents worried the school was not doing enough to mitigate risk.

Krystal Starwich, then the commission’s interim executive director, told Habte that while the commission would ask Impact some questions, parents should go through their school’s established complaint and appeal processes.

Habte eventually gave up, and unenrolled her children from Impact. “Where is the accountability?” she asked. “There is no accountability, even though it’s public dollars” that fund Impact Public Schools, she said...

Reach Ann Dornfeld at adornfeld@kuow.org or 206-486-6505.

Bill Gates is singularly responsible for introducing charter schools into Washington State. He proposed the idea four times, and three times the voters said no. In 2012, he swamped the election with millions of dollars and glorious promises, and the measure passed. How are things working out for Bill and his friends? Not so well. Station KUOW in Seattle launched an investigation of the state’s largest charter chain and what the writer Ann Dornfeld found was broken promises.

In this post, she describes the charter chain’s cruel method of holding kids back in order to raise the chain’s test scores. Made the school look better at the expense of the students who were held back.

Dornfeld writes:

Art Wheeler’s daughter and son were thriving in the fall of their second year at Impact Puget Sound Elementary, a charter school in Tukwila, Washington. Their grades were high, Wheeler said, and they got glowing reports from their teachers.

“Your kids are standouts,” he recalled teachers saying. “They’re a pleasure to have in class.”

But two months into the school year, in November 2019, Wheeler said letters arrived from Impact saying his children were failing, and may have to repeat the year — the year that had just begun. Wheeler was confused. “They messed up,” he thought. “This is for somebody else’s kids.”

The holdback letters were, in fact, for Wheeler’s children. Others in their first- and second-grade classes had gotten them, too, teachers told him the next day, based on a single test, rather than students’ overall abilities. The teachers looked stricken, he said. One cried.

Three teachers told KUOW that they’ve had up to one-third of their students on the “promotion in doubt” list.

Impact said that its grade-retention practice is meant to ensure students master the material. Parents make the ultimate decision about whether to hold a child back, they said, and ultimately, only nine returning students — fewer than 3% — “chose to repeat a grade” in 2021.

But Baionne Coleman, a former Impact administrator, said its policy of sending grade-holdback letters was connected to funding.

Coleman said that Jen Davis Wickens, the co-founder and CEO of Impact, had been adamant that low-scoring students repeat the year.

“This is going to affect our third-grade scores,” Wickens said, according to Coleman.

Third grade is when students first take the state standardized reading and math tests. The state — and funders — use those test scores to determine whether a charter school has met its performance goals.

The tests are high-stakes: In 2021, Impact received a $10.1 million property loan from Equitable Facilities Fund, an organization focused on lending to charter schools. Loan documents include a covenant that students at Impact’s Tukwila school must outperform students in the surrounding school districts on the state math and reading tests.

Wickens declined multiple interview requests for this story and agreed to answer questions only via email through a spokesperson.

Hey, Bill Gates, this is a form of cheating. Are you proud of what you created?

For years, Bill Gates pushed charter schools in his state of Washington. The voters said no three times. Parent organizations, civil rights groups, labor organizations, and others who objected to privatization at Gates’ whim opposed his offer. But in 2012, Gates poured millions once again into his personal crusade for charter schools, and the measure squeaked through. At first, his charter schools were denied public funding because the state’s highest court said that charter schools are not public schools, because they do not have an elected school board. Gates and his buddies ran a campaign to defeat some of the justices at the next election, and when the charter funding issue came back again, they allowed the charters to draw from lottery money, not from the state public school fund.

A decade has passed, and what hath Bill wrought?

Ann Dornfeld of Station KUOW in Seattle investigated the state’s largest charter chain and found a string of broken promises.

In the first of the series, the story focused on the chain’s failure to provide appropriate services to English language learners.

A charter school chain promised a world-class education. Instead they billed the state and let kids ‘sit there quietly’

It began:

For Senait Ogubamichael, an Eritrean refugee, it was the American dream: Her daughter would get a stellar education and grow up to pursue any kind of career.

“Whatever she like,” Ogubamichael said. “If she like music, if she like being a doctor.”

Ogubamichael was drawn to Puget Sound Elementary, a charter school in Tukwila, because of its promise of instruction tailored to each student. Puget Sound is part of Impact Public Schools, the largest charter school chain in Washington state.

Ogubamichael’s family speaks Tigrinya at home, and her daughter, who is in second grade, is learning English. Five months into the 2021-22 school year, Ogubamichael realized that her daughter was barely making progress in English — and that she wasn’t getting services for English language learners, as had been promised, and which is a federal requirement.

Meanwhile, records from the state schools office show Impact Public Schools has billed the state more than $857,000 in the last four years for funding for English language programming. But teachers told KUOW that English language instruction is essentially nonexistent.

KUOW spoke with 50 parents and staff who voiced concerns about Impact’s treatment of its most vulnerable students — a pattern, they said, that has persisted since the first school opened in 2018.

Of those interviewed, 13 teachers said that Impact’s three schools also failed to provide specialized instruction for many students with disabilities, or those who are highly capable — even though that, too, is legally required.

Impact called the allegations regarding lack of English language services “completely false,” and said it follows the law on that and special education.

“We have been in full compliance with special education requirements this year and every year,” said Rowena Yow, spokesperson for Impact Public Schools. “We offer a full inclusion [English language learner] program that meets all state requirements.”

Jen Davis Wickens, co-founder and CEO of Impact schools, declined numerous interview requests, and agreed to answer questions only over email, via a spokesperson...

The charter chain’s students are mostly children of color from low-income families. Black students make up the largest percentage, including many from East African immigrant and refugee families. Twenty-one percent of students are English language learners, state records show.

Students learning English are entitled by federal law to special lessons from teachers certificated or well-trained to work with them.

At most schools with sizable immigrant populations, English language specialists work one-on-one or in groups with students who are still learning the language.

At Impact, however, there are no dedicated English language teachers, state records show. Six of about 100 classroom teachers have professional endorsements to teach English learners, but it is not their focus.

Open the link and read the story. It is indeed a story of broken promises.

You flunk, Bill.