Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Arizona: Governor Ducey, Facing Election, Decides It Is Time to Curb Charter Corruption

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2018 //
12

Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona has been a stalwart champion of unregulated charters and vouchers. He has looked the other way when members of the legislature pass laws to enrich themselves while running charter chains and voucher programs. He has ignored conflicts of interest, nepotism, and self-dealing because, hey, that’s how unbridled capitalism works!

But the state is now knee-deep in scandals committed by privatizers, and guess what? Governor Ducey says it is time to reign in the corruption!

In a debate with his Democratic opponent, David Garcia, Ducey claims he wants to reform charter law. Is it because of the latest scandal, where a legislator (Eddie Farnsworth) sold his for-profit charter chain to a nonprofit and cleared at least $11.8 million in profit plus a contract to manage the nonprofit chain?

Laurie Roberts of the Arizona Republic is outraged that the government is indifferent to charter fraud.

She writes:

Farnsworth says he’s just a businessman who took a risk, followed the law and is now reaping the reward.

“Charter schools have been lucrative to me because I’ve done what every other business has done to make money: I had an idea,” he told Harris. “I put the business plan into place. I followed every law and every contract. I provided a product that is a good product that people wanted.”

“It doesn’t hurt that for most of the last two decades, Farnsworth, along with other legislators who own charter schools, has helped write some of those laws. In his 16 years as a legislator, for example, Farnsworth has voted 12 times to boost “additional assistance” to charter schools (read: himself).

“But there is no conflict, we are told.“

Garcia is an education professor. He has pledged to eliminate the profiteering from the charter se tor. His own children have attended an arts-focused charter school, so he is not opposed to charters on principle, just to the rampant fraud that makes Arizona a national laughing stock.

Despite his support for charters, the Network for Public Education Action Fund Endorses Garcia because Ducey is an ALEC stooge and a voucher proponent. Garcia opposes vouchers and has pledged new dedicated funding for public schools.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Arizona, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

California: Marshall Tuck Campaign Demands a New Headline, and It is Worse Than the Original

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2018 //
25

At 10 am I posted a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about Marshall Tuck, who is running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The original headline said that Tuck lowered standards to get a higher graduation rate.

This was the original:

Marshall Tuck, candidate for California schools chief, lowered the bar for graduation to make struggling schools look better

I just learned that the Tuck campaign complained about that headline, and the newspaper agreed to change it.

Now it reads: “TEACHERS AT 8 OF 10 SCHOOLS TUCK OVERSAW REJECTED HIS LEADERSHIP.“

Same story, new headline. He might as well have stuck with the original.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry

California: Marshall Tuck Lowered Standards to Raise Graduation Rate

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2018 //
8

For the future of American education, the most consequential election this November will take place in California, where charter school champion Marshall Tuck faces off against pro-public school candidate Tony Thurmond.

The billionaires and the Republican Party have joined forces behind Tuck.

The California Teachers Association and the state Democratic Party Support Tony Thurmond.

Both men are Democrats, but Thurmond received the votes of 95% of delegates to the annual meeting of the state Democratic Party. Tuck has been endorsed by Arne Duncan.

Marshall Tuck was in the financial industry, then took over the Green Dot charter chain, then ran Mayor Villagairosa’s chain of schools. Thurmond is a social worker and a state legislator.

The billionaires have donated nearly $14 million to Tuck’s campaign, compared to the nearly $4 million that the CTA has given Thurmond.

Erika Jones writes here about Marshall Tuck’s claims to fame, and how he raised graduation rates by lowering standards.

Jones writes:

“Tuck was a Wall Street banker before taking over as the chief operating officer for the Green Dot charter school chain. In 2008, Tuck left Green Dot to become CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a small group of public schools that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took over after his failed coup to take over all Los Angeles Unified schools.

“Despite receiving millions in private funding, Partnership schools underperformed compared to the district’s schools with similar demographics during Tuck’s tenure in 2009. Tuck’s failed leadership resulted in landslide votes of “no confidence” from teachers at eight of 10 schools he oversaw.

“Tuck claims to have significantly raised graduation rates at Partnership high schools, but the truth is that he just lowered the bar for students to graduate, rather than improving student learning.

“While the graduation rate at Santee Education Complex increased from 56.34 percent in 2009-10 to 69.29 percent in 2012-13, what Tuck did to get these numbers was to lower standards. So it’s not surprising that readiness for college dropped from 61.9 percent to 21.9 percent under Tuck. At David Starr Jordan High School, a similar pattern emerges: graduation rates improved 12 percent between the 2009-10 and 2012-13 school years, but college readiness dropped from 63.7 percent to 18.6 percent.

“At the biggest school in his district, Roosevelt Senior High, graduation rates fell from 67.43 percent in 2009-10 to 53.44 percent in 2012-13, while college readiness dropped from 52.8 percent to 21 percent.

“Due to Tuck’s unreasonable and inflexible mandates, parents at Ritter Elementary School, together with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed a complaint in 2009 after Tuck cut dual language immersion programs. Ritter’s student population was 42 percent English learners at the time.

“This year, Tuck was forced under pressure from Equality California, the largest state LGBT organization in the nation, to return a campaign contribution from the major backer of Proposition 8, which temporarily made same-sex marriage illegal in California in 2008.”

Every parent of a child in public school in California, every teacher, every graduate of a public school, every progressive, every citizen committed to the public good should vote for Tony Thurmond. He is committed to improving public schools whose doors are open to all students, not to the expansion and enrichment of the privatization movement.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

How Charter School Chains Make a Profit

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2018 //
17

In this post, journalist Stephen Rosenfeld explains how charter operates make a profit. He has only scratched the surface. Some make profits through clever real estate deals, where they buy or lease a space, renovate it at public expense, then charge the state exorbitant rental fees. Some embezzle. Some use their school credit card like an ATM. Some set up “related companies” and divert funds to those companies, which they happen to own. Some hire contractors and get kickbacks. There is no end to ingenuity when no one is watching.

Rosenfeld begins with the interesting question: In what way is Enron like the charter industry? (One of the major funders of charter schools is John Arnold of Texas, who made his fortune as an Enron trader, before it imploded).

On the surface, Enron was in the energy business. But behind closed doors, it was engaged in an array of dubious investments and transactions that helped its top executives amass wealth. The charter schools cited in their report similarly present a public face of being alternative public schools. But their founders also used an array of financial tactics, especially involving school real estate deals, to become rich by diverting millions from their classrooms.

Nationwide, 43 states and the District of Columbia have 6,800 charters serving 2.9 million students. They comprise 6 percent of K-12 public school enrollment, which has increased six-fold in the last 15 years. When states approved the first charters in the 1990s, the idea was to nurture locally accountable experimental schools. However, since then a K-12 privatization industry has emerged that is dominated by companies seeking to create regional or national brands, akin to any other corporate franchise. These larger charter operations tend to have non-profit and for-profit arms, which can mask an array of complicated financial relationships.

The charter industry’s largest operations often are run by what’s called educational management organizations, EMOs, which “now control 35-to-40 percent of the industry with an estimated 45 percent of charter students,” the scholars said. These sophisticated operations can attract private investors because they can use their status as schools to get large tax breaks, which, in turn, are applied to a range of profit-making ventures that have nothing to do with educating under-served communities.

“Charter schools attract investors because of the potential for new revenue streams,” the authors said. “For instance, the New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) program provides investors the opportunity to make profits from charter-school real estate transactions. Enacted as a component of the Community Relief Tax Credit Act of 2000, the NMTC was designed to encourage investment in low-income communities. The NMTC accomplishes this goal by providing investors in a community development entity (CDE) a 39% tax credit over a seven-year period.”

But the biggest way to grab seven-figure sums in the privatized education sphere was through shady real estate transactions, they said, saying their for-profit arms can “obtain revenue from charter schools through lease payments for the use of the facilities.” The authors them gave five stunning examples, where the school’s founders could not stop themselves from grabbing millions.

Read about his five examples.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

California: Antioch Unified School District Approves Two Charters, Gives Up $25 Million for Its Own Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2018 //
13

The school board of Antioch Unified School District in California had an extended discussion about whether to approve two new charter schools. The discussion was often heated. The district made the decision knowing that the two charters will draw away $25 million from its own public schools. The board staff urged the board to reject the charters.

It makes for interesting reading.

The lead petitioner stressed the district’s low test scores and the urgency of change.

On Wednesday, the Antioch Unified School District approved charter petitions for East Bay Tech Middle School Academy and High School Academy on 3-2 votes in a meeting that lasted more than 5-hours.

As a result, District staff anticipate losing $25 million in revenue over the next several years.

In favor was Debra Vinson, Chrystal Sawyer-White and Walter Ruehlig. Opposed were Gary Hack and Diane Gibson-Gray.

The vote came after staff recommended the Board deny the petition based on an analysis by legal council in which numerous deficiencies were identified in the petition along with concerns related to the petition and the proposed Charter School’s operations. HE also stated that that more than one of the legal grounds for denial were met. Specifically, the petition does not provide a reasonably comprehensive description of several essential charter elements and the petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the proposed education program.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

California: Charter School in Contra Costa County Mired in Financial Mess

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2018 //
8

The Clayton Valley Charter High School was audited, and the results were appalling. Actually, they were what you would expect when a private organization gets public funds and is unsupervised and when the state law ignores conflicts of interest and nepotism.

The article appears in the Mercury News Behind a paywall. It begins like this:

CLAYTON — The married top leaders of Clayton Valley Charter High School raked in almost $850,000 in less than two years before leaving the school last spring, a county investigation found.

The probe also revealed that the couple misused school funds, hired people in secret and created positions without the school board’s approval.

An audit report released Friday evening as part of the agenda for the Contra Costa County Board of Education’s Oct. 3 meeting states that the charter school “has not been following best practices” when it comes to “management hiring practices, vendor service contracts, legal fees and credit card purchases.”

The report expresses “concern” over former executive director David Linzey’s salary and benefits and states that his contract was vulnerable to potential “manipulation.”

Signed by a school board member, Linzey’s contract included a base salary of $23,986 per month, plus 10 “floating” work days at $1,115 per month, for an annual package of $301,212. According to the audit, an amendment in 2015 eliminated payments for health benefits and a car allowance and instead added that money to the salary base, which would have potentially increased pension benefits upon retirement.

An annual salary increase of 3 percent a year and a clause that ensured Linzey would get a raise whenever employee unions got them were also worked into the contract, the audit says. Linzey’s compensation between July 1, 2016 and May 5, 2018 totaled $555,109, and while a provision in his contract called for board “evaluations” of his performance, there is no record that ever happened, according to the audit.

The audit also notes that the school board approved the hiring of Linzey’s wife, Eileen Linzey, as chief program officer without posting the open position or holding interviews. Her income from February 2017 through May 2018 totaled $296,047. The Linzeys’ household income from July 1, 2016 to May 15, 2018 totaled $849,776.

In addition, according to the audit, there was no record of the board creating the assistant superintendent position that Concord City Council member Ron Leone took in December 2017 and held during the first half of 2018 for $681 a day while running for county superintendent of schools. After failing to win the seat in this year’s primary, Leone resigned from the position in the same month.

Linzey signed Leone’s employment contract in November 2017 — when hiring was supposed to be approved by the school’s governing board — and no interviews were held or job listings posted. There was no record of the board approving the hire, the report found.

The audit also discovered that of the school’s five listed management positions — operations director, fiscal director, admissions officer, SIS coordinator and human resources director — all except the admissions officer were paid more than the salary schedule’s “highest range.” The management salary schedule was also not recorded as having been approved by the board.

The auditing firm hired by the county, Christy White Associates, recommends that the charter school requires board approval of new positions, hiring and terminations, as well as salary changes. It also urges the school to be more transparent about salaries and more competitive in its hiring process.

The Contra Costa County Office of Education hired the firm last May to audit the charter school’s financial and hiring practices, just as news broke that the Linzeys had left amid long-running criticisms from parents and school staff over questionable spending.

At the time, the school declined to state the nature of the Linzeys’ departure, but the audit report states the couple “resigned” in June.

The report also reveals that upward of $40,000 in school money was used to pay lawyers who helped create a new charter school in Antioch — East Bay Tech Academy.

The audit also found that the charter’s California Credit Union credit cards incurred $610,000 in expenses between July 1, 2016 and May 15, 2018, despite an annual group limit of $50,000. And, the report found, school staff bought supplies without submitting receipts and purchased gift cards without identifying recipients. Receipts for meals were not itemized to show whether alcohol was purchased.

In response to the audit, a letter from the Clayton Valley Charter High School board of directors notes that some of its recommendations have been followed — including implementing a public and competitive hiring process for management and ensuring the board approves all hires — and it is addressing the others. The letter says school officials will publish a new management salary schedule and remove the executive director’s ability to pay more than the amounts listed.

The school board in its letter also said it is working with the newly formed board of the East Bay Tech Academy to “codify in writing” a plan to reimburse Clayton Valley for the legal fees it paid to set up the new school.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Scandals

Ohio: Vote for Louise Valentine for State Senate, District 19, Defeat one of Ohio’s Worst Legislators

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2018 //
4

If you live in District 19 in Ohio, I urge you to vote for Louise Valentine.

She is running against Andrew Brenner, chair of the Senate Education Committee, who despises public schools. Under Brenner’s malign leadership, Ohio has supported corrupted charter operators and ineffective vouchers, which drain money from public schools that belong to the community. With Brennan in charge, Ohio’s taxpayers have been bilked of billions of dollars that should have gone to public schools but ended up in the pockets of profiteers.

Louise Valentine has pledged to support high-quality public schools and to insist on charter school accountability.

Vote for her, volunteer to help her, send her money.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization

Georgia: Iconic Charter School Is Closing Its Doors

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2018 //
7

Ivy Prep Gwinnett Charter School is not reopening. It was once held up as an example by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal as proof of the charter school success story. Charters come and go like day lilies.

“Ivy Preparatory Academy, a once-esteemed Gwinnett County charter school, will not reopen next year, and signs point to permanent closure.

“In a unanimous vote on August 16, 2018, the school board reluctantly decided to end all planning efforts to reopen,” says a statement from a spokesman.

“The decision was reached after “an exhaustive” review of the financial situation that led the charter school’s board to conclude that reopening next year, as a former director and the board had previously told parents would happen, is not “a viable option.”

“The decision marked a sharp turnaround from early in the decade, when the all-girl school became a symbol of the charter school movement. Girls, in their iconic green blazers, filled the halls of the state Capitol to lobby lawmakers.

“In 2012, Gov. Nathan Deal used the school in his argument for passage of a constitutional amendment for charter schools, writing in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it was “a great example” of superior performance relative to traditional public schools.

“Voters were convinced, and that November they changed the constitution to create the State Charter Schools Commission.

“For a time, the future looked bright, as Ivy Prep expanded to DeKalb County, opening a second campus. Then, last year, the AJC revealed problems at the Gwinnett campus, where the academics were slipping, enrollment was plummeting and costs were outpacing revenue.”

The students were abandoned and left to find another choice.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Georgia, Privatization

Texas: IDEA Takes the Lead in the Destroy Public Education Movement

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2018 //
18

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced math and physics, has been reporting on the aggressive plans and spectacular failures of the Destroy Public Education Movement.

In this post, he details the explosion of funding to increase privatization of public assets in Texas, most notably carried out by the IDEA charter chain.

He begins:

“First it was KIPP, then it was YES Prep and now IDEA has become the point of the destroy public education (DPE) spear in Texas. KIPP flourished because GAP founders Don and Doris Fisher gave them big money. YES Prep so excited Oprah that she presented them with a million dollar check during a TV interview. Now, John Arnold has given IDEA $10 million to expand into Houston and the El Paso based Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development has pledged another $10 million for IDEA to expand into El Paso.

“The oddest DPE inspired plan of all comes from Austin, Texas. In 2016, the Austin American Statesman reported that the relatively small KLE foundation is committing $16 million to IDEA. Odd because that represents more than half of the foundation’s assets and is 20 times greater than any previous grant. The Statesman article says, “The financial gift … will more than double IDEA Austin’s previous expansion plans by 2022, and the charter school says the donation will help it boost enrollment to 20,000 students, more than 12 times as many as it has now.”

“A recent article in the Santa Fe New Mexican says about the IDEA growth initiative, “Those plans include expanding to 173 pre-K, elementary, middle and high schools from Texas to Louisiana and Florida by 2022 — a goal of serving 100,000 students compared to 35,595 today.”

“YES Prep, KIPP and IDEA have many similarities. All three charter school systems were started by Teach for America (TFA) alums. None of the founders had more than three years experience teaching, nor did they have any education training other than a five week TFA summer course. It is perplexing when industry leaders like Walton, Fisher, Broad and Gates lavish inexperienced and untrained school founders with millions of dollars.”

The IDEA chain won $29 Million from Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top.

Ultican reviews the research about IDEA, which features boasting, high attrition rates, and careful selection of students.

He details the finances of the IDEA chain, which includes a bevy of high-paid executives and a staggering asset value.

He writes:

“At the end of 2016, IDEA’s asset value climbed to $680,172,540 and their year’s income was $332,775,059.”

This is big business. It has mastered the art of gaming the system. It is leading the march to Destroy Public Education in Texas.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas

Linda McNeill: Charter Schools’ Lavish Spending vs. Public Schools’ Budget Cuts

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2018 //
3

Linda McNeill is a professor at Rice University who writes about funding, testing, and other education policy issues.

In this post, she describes her reaction when she received a beautiful invitation to a dinner to raise money for charter schools in Houston. The invitation came from one of Houston’s existing very well-funded charter chains. (Coincidentally, IDEA just announced plans to expand in Houston, as well as a plan to saturate El Paso with 20 IDEA charters).

She writes, in part:

The thick envelope gave a hint of elegance inside. An invitation. Colorful graphics, fine card stock, strategically placed photographs, “bold face” names inside the folds of this multi-layered, professionally crafted solicitation. A separate card, two-sided on high quality card stock, lists in bold contrasting colors the details of the events. Also inside, a return envelope for the enclosed commitment card suggesting “underwriting opportunities” from a mere $500 to levels of $50,000 and $100,000.

An invitation to a museum gala or symphony fund-raiser? A call to join the restoration of our Harvey-flooded opera house? The funding categories would seem to so suggest.

No, this was an invitation to a fund-raiser for a corporate charter school chain. A private company that has added “public” to its name because it is one of the corporate entities that takes taxpayer dollars (the “public” part) to fund its schools.

My first inclination was curiosity: who are these people? I looked over the names of the funders already listed on the invitation: the usual anti-public school billionaires, some names of really good people who should know better, and some people I didn’t recognize who probably have been sold on the idea that only by contributing to these charter chains can they save the city’s poor, minority children.

My next reaction was anger. This invitation – fancy graphics, elegant card stock, thick white envelopes – was expensive! Each one must have cost several dollars, even accounting for a bulk order discount. I turned each piece over to try to find the printing company that produced it. No designer or graphics company attributed, but a line that caught my eye: contact the charter chain’s “manager of special events” for more information. Really??

Manager of Special Events! I know of no public school, no neighborhood school, that has a manager of special events – much less the budget to hire one. But they all could use that $100,000 for a long list of needs after years of underfunding.

Then I immediately knew the source of my anger: the inequity of it all. These charter chains are privately incorporated, but they not only take our tax dollars out of our public schools – the public’s schools, but they may be using our tax dollars to pay their special events managers and printers to advertise against our public schools! Our tax dollars enable their “marketing” in competition with the public’s own schools. I took the invitation to a high-quality stationery store to ask if they had produced it and what it might have cost. The woman said they hadn’t produced it but confirmed it was definitely expensive and each would have cost “several dollars” even if, as I had suspected, several hundred or thousand had been printed and mailed out (yes, add the mailing costs). And even if the printing had been donated by an individual or corporation, those dollars would still have been taken from our public schools as a tax-deductible, “charitable” contribution.

So the first inequity is that all of these “contributions,” from the modest $500 (mere seat at luncheon) to the ‘naming rights’ (I’m not making this up!) for donors giving $100,000, all of these dollars end up subtracted from the public treasury.

The second inequity: the costs of those invitations. I suddenly realized each one must cost more than many of our teachers have for school supplies and instructional materials on any given day. So I asked some teachers. A 7th-grade biology teacher new to her current school was hopeful: “They say I’ll have the supplies I need for labs and we’ve ready sent in the order for frogs for the kids to dissect, so we’ll see. So far, so good.”

The next answer was less optimistic: “I’m told I have to require every student to bring a ream of copier paper; when that runs out we won’t get any more, so I’m trying to be careful to plan ahead.” From a high school teacher: “No, we don’t get to buy paperbacks for our classrooms. We have some on hand but if we want to assign other titles, the kids have to buy their own. If they can’t afford it, I see if I have an extra copy at home or maybe I just buy it for them.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Inequity, Privatization, Texas
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