Archives for category: Charter Schools

The National Education Association issued an appeal for educators and other concerned citizens: Raise your voice to stop the federal funding of corporate charter schools!

Now is your chance to be heard.

NEA writes:

Email the U.S. Department of Education to advocate for the end of corporate charter schools and support accountability and transparency for all schools taking our tax dollars.

All schools that receive public funds should be held to the same excellence, equity, and transparency standards as district-run public schools. The original intent of charter schools was to provide a space for educators to be more flexible and innovative.

Instead, big business boards and billionaires turned it into a money-making machine that benefits only themselves. The growth of these corporate charters has undermined local public schools and communities—taking taxpayer money with no oversight or any overall increase in student learning and growth.

The U.S. Department of Education is taking these very real issues seriously and is proposing an end to the support of corporate charter schools. We applaud this effort, but there will be loud voices paid by the billionaires running these schools to speak out against this positive step.

That’s why we need your voice. You can speak out in support of the Department of Education’s proposal to ban for-profit schools from applying for grants and receiving funds to open charters, and demand that charter schools be held to the same standards as traditional public schools.

You may use the sample message provided, but we encourage you to share your personal stories and examples. Tell the U.S. Department of Education how important it is to you personally that for-profit charter schools be held to the same accountability and transparency rules as public schools.

What is the federal comment period and what can I do to help?

The Department of Education is seeking comments from the public about the proposed standards. When you send your letter through this form, it will be added to the federal register as part of the official request for comments and be made public. Written comments on this final rule should be received on or before April 13, 2022.

You can help by writing a personalized letter detailing stories and examples. The more personal the better!

Open the link to see the sample letter and instructions about contacting the Department of Education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit

Billy Townsend: Ron DeSantis And His Corrupt Friend Are a Gift to Trump

By dianeravitch

April 8, 2022 //

Billy Townsend remembers Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s servile devotion to Trump while he was president. Now DeSantis is positioning himself to run for President against the old fool in 2024. But Ron D. has a serious liability: his continued friendship with a corrupt lobbyist for the charter industry.

DeSantis…banished Ralph Arza in 2018 from the sight of his campaign with much public dudgeon, for a pretty good reason: Ralph is a convicted criminal witness tamperer kicked out of the Legislature for making drunken, threatening, racial-slur filled phone calls. Ralph also happens to be director of governmental affairs for the Florida Charter School Alliance (FCSA) and chief political hit man for the Florida charter school industry…

Since DeSantis appointed Richard Corcoran, Ralph has been acting as the de facto second in command at the collapsing DeSantis Florida Department of Education, which has been run by disgraced, outgoing Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran. Corcoran once told me face-to-face he considers Ralph a “friend.”

Ralph is also a crucial figure in the ongoing DoE/Jefferson/MGT consultant bid-rigging scandal. Four of Ralph’s relatives worked for the Academica-owned charter school that Sen. Manny Diaz and Richard Corcoran forced on Jefferson County before it quit. And Ralph was present for no good reason during a potentially corrupt official meeting last fall, first reported by the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald. Full rundown of Ralph’s still not fully explained role in it here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit

Billy Townsend: Florida Pol Blames Community for Failure of His Employer’s Charter School

By dianeravitch

April 8, 2022 //

Billy Townsend is an acerbic critic of Florida charter scandals and the state commissioner Richard Corcoran, whose wife runs a charter school. He never runs out of material.

In this post, he tells the story of a politician, Manny Diaz, who works for a charter chain, blaming a struggling community for the failure of his employer’s charter school, which was launched with much razzle-dazzle.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Lies

“In the Public Interest”: Time to Regulate the Federal Charter School Slush Fund

By dianeravitch

April 7, 2022 //

The nonprofit, nonpartisan group “In the Public Interest” explains the need to regulate the $440 million federal Charter Schools Program, which is awash in waste, fraud, and abuse.

Did you know that the federal government spends $440 million every year to help start privately run charter schools?

Did you know that some of that money ends up in the hands of people who never actually open schools or open them and quickly close them? And that some goes to charter schools run by for-profit organizations in communities that do not want them.

Some even goes to charter schools with a history of worsening racial segregation and others that exclude, by policy or practice, students with disabilities and students who are English Language Learners.

That’s why it’s a big deal that Department of Education just proposed new rules to reform its funding program.

And why YOU, as an individual and/or an organization, need to send a comment in support of the department’s proposed changes.

Please open this link and comment or attach a letter (the deadline is April 13).

Make sure you write that you support the proposed changes. Try to personalize it as much as you can. Talk about how charter schools are impacting your school district or how they might if they started opening and taking away public school dollars. (Here’s a post from education historian Diane Ravitch with more on what to write.)

If you’re short on time, just say who you are and that you support the changes.

Here are the most important proposed reforms:

A proposed charter school would need to divulge how it will impact the local school district, including finances, demographics, and educational needs.
A proposed charter school would need to demonstrate how it would serve the local community.
Charter schools operated by for-profit organizations would no longer be eligible for funding.

The charter school industry is fighting the new regulations with all they’ve got. Opinion pieces are echoing across right-wing media.

Let the Department of Education know they are supported. Comment before April 13. It will only take a few minutes.

If you need help writing a comment, don’t hesitate to email us.

Keep in touch,

Jeremy Mohler
Communications Director
In the Public Interest

P.S. We have a new website!!!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, U.S. Department of Education

Tom Ultican: D.C. Educators Fired for Opposing Relay “Graduate School” Ideology

By dianeravitch

April 7, 2022 //

Tom Ultican, chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement and retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, investigated a strange occurrence in the District of Columbia: Two respected, experienced black educators were fired for refusing to adopt the practices of the so-called Relay “Graduate School” of Education. Relay is not a real graduate school. It has no campus, no research, no graduate programs. It was created by charter schools and recognized by their allies so that charter teachers could teach the tricks of raising test scores to other charter teachers and enable them to get a “master’s degree” from people who had never earned doctorate degrees. Relay’s textbook is Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion.” Relay does not offer the wide range of courses offered in real graduate schools.

He begins:

School leaders and teachers in Washington DC’s wards 7 and 8 are being forced into training given by Relay Graduate School of Education (RSGE). West of the Anacostia River in the wealthier whiter communities public school leader are not forced. When ward 7 and 8 administrators spoke out against the policy, they were fired. Two of them Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King and Marlon Ray, formerly of Boone Elementary School are suing DC Public Schools (DCPS) for violating the Whistleblower Protection Act and the DC Human Rights Act.

Jackson-King and Ray are emblematic of the talented black educators with deep experience that are being driven out of the Washington DC public school system. They are respected leaders in the schools and the community. When it was learned Jackson-King was let go the community protested loudly and created a web site publishing her accomplishments.

In 2014, Jackson-King arrived at the Lawrence E. Boone Elementary school when it was still named Orr Elementary. The school had been plagued by violence and gone through two principals the previous year. Teacher Diane Johnson recalled carrying a bleeding student who had been punched to the nurse’s office. She remembered fighting being a daily occurrence before Jackson-King took over.

In 2018, Orr Elementary went through a $46 million dollar renovation. The community and school board agreed that the name should be changed before the building reopened. Orr was originally named in honor of Benjamin Grayson Orr, a D.C. mayor in the 19th century and slave owner. The new name honors Lawrence Boone a Black educator who was Orr Elementary’s principal from 1973 to 1996.

Jackson-King successfully navigated the campus violence and new construction. By 2019, Boon Elementary was demonstrating solid education progress as monitored by the district’s star ratings. Boone Elementary is in a poor minority neighborhood. It went from a 1-star out of 5 rating when Jackson-King arrived to a 3-star rating her last year there….

Marlon Ray was Boone’s director of strategy and logistics. He worked there for 13-years including the last six under Principal Jackson-King. Despite his long history in the district, Ray was apparently targeted after filing a whistleblower complaint over Relay Graduate School. Ray questioned RGSE’s relationship with DCPS, the Executive Office of the Mayor and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. He implicated Mary Ann Stinson, the DCPS Cluster II instructional superintendent who wrote Jackson-King’s district Impact review that paved the way for her termination. In the lawsuit, Ray alleges that DCPS leadership responded by requiring him to work in person five days a week in the early months of the pandemic while most of his colleagues, including Jackson-King’s replacement Kimberly Douglas, worked remotely. This continued well into the spring of 2021.

In October of 2020, Ray joined with about 30 Washington Teacher’s Union members, parents and students to rally against opening school before it was safe. Ray reported that he received a tongue lashing from a DCPS administrator for being there and then 2-hours later receive a telephoned death threat. He reports the caller saying, “This is Marcus from DCPS; you’re done, you’re through, you’re finished, you’re dead.”

Ray’s position was eliminated in June, 2021…

In Washington DC, the mayor has almost dictatorial power over public education. Therefore, when the mayor becomes convinced of the illusion that public schools are failing, there are few safeguards available to stop the policy led destruction.

In the chart above, notice that all of the key employees she chose to lead DC K-12 education have a strong connection to organizations practicing what Cornell Professor Noliwe Rooks labeled “segrenomics.” In her book Cutting School (Page 2), she describes it as the businesses of taking advantage of separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education to make a profit selling school. Bowser’s first Deputy Mayor for Education, Jennifer Niles, was a charter school founder. Her second Deputy Mayor, Paul Kihn, attended the infamous school privatization centric Broad Academy. She inherited Kaya Henderson as DCPS Chancellor and kept her for five years. Kaya Henderson, a Teach For America alum, was the infamous Michelle Rhee’s heir apparent. The other two Chancellors that Bowser chose, Antwan Wilson and Lewis Ferebee, also attended the Broad Academy and both are members of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change….

The State Superintendent of Education who awarded $7.5 million in public education dollars to five private companies was Hanseul Kang. Before Bowser appointed her to the position Kang was a member of the Broad Residency class of 2012-2014. At that time, she was serving as Chief of Staff for the Tennessee Department of Education while her fellow Broadie, Chris Barbic, was setting up the doomed to fail Tennessee Achievement School District. In 2021, Bowser had to replace Kang because she became the inaugural Executive Director of the new Broad Center at Yale. Bowser chose Christina Grant yet another Broad trained education privatization enthusiast to replace Kang.

For background information on the Broad Academy see Broad’s Academy and Residencies Fuel the Destroy Public Education Agenda.)

Bowser and her team are in many ways impressive, high achieving and admirable people. However, their deluded view of public education and its value is dangerous; dangerous for K-12 education and dangerous for democracy.

“Teach like it is 1885”

The root of the push back against Relay training by ward 7 and 8 educators is found in the authoritarian approach being propagated. NPR listed feedback from dismayed teachers bothered by instructions such as:

“Students must pick up their pens within three seconds of starting a writing assignment.
“Students must walk silently, in a straight line, hands behind their backs, when they are outside the classroom.
“Teachers must stand still, speak in a ‘formal register’ and square their shoulders toward students when they give directions.”

Dr. Jackson-King noted, “Kids have to sit a certain way, they have to look a certain way. They cannot be who they are. Those are all the ways they teach you in prison — you have to walk in a straight line, hands behind your back, eyes forward.”

RSGE does not focus on education philosophy or guidance from the world’s foremost educators. Rather its fundamental text is Teach Like a Champion which is a guidebook for no excuses charter schools.

In her book Scripting the Moves Professor Joanne Golann wrote:

No excuses charter school founders established RGSE. In the post “Teach Like its 1885.” published by Jenifer Berkshire, Layla Treuhaft-Ali wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite….”

‘“Ultimately no-excuses charters schools are a failed solution to a much larger social problem,’ education scholar Maury Nation has argued. ‘How does a society address systemic marginalization and related economic inequalities? How do schools mitigate the effects of a system of White supremacy within which schools themselves are embedded?’ Without attending to these problems, we will not solve the problems of educational inequality. ‘As with so many school reforms,’ Nation argues, ‘no-excuses discipline is an attempt to address the complexities of these problems, with a cheap, simplistic, mass-producible, ‘market-based’ solution.’” (Page 174)

Legitimate education professionals routinely heap scorn on RSGE. Relay practices the pedagogy of poverty and as Martin Haberman says,

“In reality, the pedagogy of poverty is not a professional methodology at all. It is not supported by research, by theory, or by the best practice of superior urban teachers. It is actually certain ritualistic acts that, much like the ceremonies performed by religious functionaries, have come to be conducted for their intrinsic value rather than to foster learning.”

So these two courageous black professionals were fired for refusing to accept the harsh “no excuses” pedagogy designed for black children, designed to make them servile and obedient.

Their jobs should be promptly restored. Mayor Bowser has been captured by the forces of privatization and conformity. She should wake up. Some of the “no excuses” charter schools have recognized the harm they do to black children by treating them as clay to be molded, instead of human beings with vitality and interests who need to discover their talents and the joy of learning.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Fake, Racism, Teachers and Teaching

Carol Burris: What the Proposed Regulations for the Federal Charter Schools Program Really Say

By dianeravitch

April 7, 2022 //

Charter school lobbyists have poured out lamentations about the U.S. Department of Education’s proposals to regulate the federal Charter Schools Program, which gives out $440 million to open new charter schools or expand existing charter schools. These lamentations are false, because the regulations have no effect at all on the 7,000+ existing charter schools. They are a good faith effort to clean up a program that has been riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, a program in which nearly 40% of the funding goes to charter schools that either never open or close soon after opening. The CSP under Betsy DeVos was a slush fund for large charter chains, which was far from its original intent in 1994, when it offered a few million to help jump-start mom-and-pop charters or teacher-led charters.

Carol Burris writes here, on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, about the falsehoods now promulgated by the charter lobby in their desperate effort to protect for-profit charter schools and to avoid the need to analyze the impact of new charters in the community where they intend to locate.

Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes:

For the first time since the federal Charter Schools Program was established in 1994, the U.S. Department of Education is setting forth meaningful regulations for its grant applicants. While these proposed rules are aimed at ensuring greater transparency and control on how nearly a half-billion tax dollars are spent each year, charter supporters oppose them. We’ve also seen objections to reform — many of which I believe are misinformed — in op-eds, including those in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the New York Post (though these don’t all mention the same concerns). What follows is an explanation of the program and why these regulations are needed to protect taxpayers as well as the families who use charter schools.

Let’s begin with an explanation of the CSP. The program began in 2006. It is a competitive program that, among other things, gives awards to states, charter chains (known as CMOs), and sometimes directly to charter school developers to open or expand a charter school. The CSP program does not determine which charter schools can open and which cannot. The majority of charter schools that have opened over the past few decades never received a penny from the CSP. The average grant to a school is $499,818, although charter chains have received hundreds of millions of dollars.

Congress mandates that the Education Department give away a large proportion of the money appropriated to the program each year. The rush to spend the money helps explain why low-rated schools can get grants and unqualified or deceitful applicants whose schools never open can dip into those federal funds for planning. The mandate to spend the money is a problem only Congress can fix. Nevertheless, the proposed regulations would put in some solid rules of the road to better protect the tax dollars that are spent. What follows is an explanation of what the proposed regulations say and do not say.

*The proposed regulations say charter schools that for-profit operators fully or substantially control would not be eligible to get grants. They do not say that charter schools cannot use for-profit vendors.

The federal definition of a public school under the federal laws IDEA (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act] and ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act) is that it must be a nonprofit. When the department challenged for-profit charter schools in Arizona over a decade ago, the for-profits created nonprofit facades to allow the for-profit and its related organizations to run the charter school and still receive federal funds, including CSP dollars.

The present provisions in the CSP are not now strong enough to close this loophole; thus, the proposed regulations say:

Each charter school receiving CSP funding must provide an assurance that it has not and will not enter into a contract with a for-profit management organization, including a nonprofit management organization operated by or on behalf of a for-profit entity, under which the management organization exercises full or substantial administrative control over the charter school and, thereby, the CSP project.

Why is this important? Because for-profits have used CSP dollars to enrich their bottom line at the expense of students for years. I offer as examples the recent CSP expansion grant awarded to Torchlight Academy Charter School of North Carolina, which is now being shut down, as well as a grant to Capital Collegiate Preparatory Academy of Ohio, which has been passed from one for-profit operator to another.

The State Comptroller of New York specifically chided a school run by the for-profit National Heritage Academies (NHA) in New York for letting NHA take oversized fees for its services. NHA uses its schools to acquire and sell real estate and operates them with “sweeps contracts,” requiring the school to pass all or nearly all funding and operational control to NHA.

When taxpayer dollars go into the pockets of owners or corporations, fewer dollars go into the classroom for students.

Some argue that public schools do business with private vendors for books or transportation and that is true. However, the relationship between a for-profit management organization (EMO) is quite different from the relationship between a vendor who works with a district or a charter school to provide a discreet service. A school or district can sever a bus contract and still have a building, desks, curriculum, and teachers. This is not the case when a sweeps contract is in place. In cases where charter schools have attempted to fire the for-profit operator, they find it impossible to do without destroying the schools in the process. And public schools are subject to bidding laws to ensure that nepotism does not drive vendor choice. Charter schools are not.

13 ways charter schools shape their enrollment

The Network for Public Education identified more than 440 charter schools operated by a for-profit that received CSP grants totaling approximately $158 million between 2006 and 2017, including CSP grants to schools managed with for-profit sweeps contracts. It is a way to evade the law, and it must stop. It is remarkable that the IRS has not, to date, stepped in.

*The proposed regulations say an applicant must include an analysis of school enrollment in the area from which it would draw students. Regulations do not say that grants only go to charter schools in districts facing over-enrollment.

More than one in four parents who walk their kindergartners into a new charter school will have to find another school for their children by the time they reach the fifth grade. That is how alarming the charter closure rate is. Over one in four closes during the first five years; by year 10, 40% are gone. Between 1999 and 2017, nearly 1 million children were displaced due to the closure of their schools.

One of the primary reasons charters close is under-enrollment — they cannot attract enough students to their school to keep it going. Sometimes that occurs because of school quality. But often, it happens because a new, shiny charter school with great marketing opens nearby and draws students away.

New Orleans, a district where virtually all nonprivate schools are charter schools, is facing a crisis because they allowed the charter sector to grow out of control; they no longer have sufficient enrollment, and the district cannot force schools to merge because they are charter, not district-run, schools.

The proposed regulations do not preclude applicants who want to open a charter school in a district already saturated with public and charter schools from getting a CSP grant. It simply asks them to provide information on enrollment trends — specifically:

include any over-enrollment of existing public schools or other information that demonstrates demand for the charter school, such as evidence of demand for specialized instructional approaches.

In other words, it is asking the applicant to make their case for why the school is needed. That information will be used by reviewers of applications when they evaluate applications and rank them. Sounds like common sense to me.

*The proposed regulations say that applicants must provide assurances that they would not get in the way of district-mandated or voluntary desegregation efforts. They do not say that you cannot open a charter in a non-diverse or economically disadvantaged neighborhood.

Charter schools have been magnets for white flight from integrated schools in some places. Other charter schools attract high-achieving students while discouraging students with special needs from attending. In this letter submitted to the Department of Education last year, 67 public education advocacy and civil rights groups provided documentation that the North Carolina SE CSP sub-grants were awarded to charter schools that actively exacerbated segregation, serving in some cases as white flight academies.

The proposed regulations clarify that an application from “racially and socio-economically segregated or isolated communities would still be eligible for funding.” Nevertheless, it is repeated over and over in editorials that schools in non-diverse neighborhoods would not apply as well as “schools that don’t prioritize racial diversity,” a polite way to refer to white flight charters.

*The regulations do not say charter schools must engage in a cooperative activity with districts. The regulations state that they may receive some bonus points on their application if they do.

According to the op-ed in the Wall St. Journal: “The administration also plans to require applicants to ‘collaborate’ with a traditional public school or school district on an ‘activity’ such as transportation or curriculum.” It doesn’t, actually.

When deciding which schools get a grant, reviewers rate applications using a point system. Every grant cycle, the department puts forth priorities as a way for applicants to get a few bonus points on their applications. The majority of schools get CSP grants without them.

The regulations propose two priorities. One gives points if the school is commonly referred to as a “community school.” The second provides points to schools that work cooperatively with a district on a transportation plan, curriculum, or another project. Neither priority is required to apply for or to receive a grant.

The 72 pages of proposed regulations are tedious reading. Because they apply to three separate programs in the CSP, there is much repetition. But the details matter. Read the new regulations. You can see the Network for Public Education’s statement of support for them here, and submit your own comments before April 13, 2022.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Lies, U.S. Department of Education

Tennessee: Memphis Charter School Will Close After Misappropriating Nearly $800,000

By dianeravitch

April 6, 2022 //

While Tennessee Governor Bill Lee is eagerly expanding the charter school sector, a state panel decided to close a Memphis charter school because of its leaders “misappropriating” nearly $800,000.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Charter revoked. Today a state panel agreed with the Memphis Shelby County School board to pull the plug on a local charter school.

The Memphis Academy of Health Sciences (MAHS) appealed a January 12th decision by the board to revoke the charter and close the school. Today, the appeal was denied, MSCS’ ruling was upheld by the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission.

The decision follows allegations of former school administrators misspending school money, accused of misappropriating nearly $800,000 in funding.

“At least six years of mismanagement, and it’s hard to un-ring that bell,” said a member of the state charter school board.

The parents and students were disappointed but the missing money mattered.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Memphis, Tennessee

Jeff Bryant: Inside a Chaotic For-Profit Charter School

By dianeravitch

April 6, 2022 //

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. In this article, he reveals what we long suspected about for-profit charter schools. They make money by cutting corners.

He writes:

It didn’t take long for Tasha Stiles to realize there was something very wrong with the school where she had just started teaching.

First, there was her rushed orientation to the school, Toledo Preparatory Academy, an early kindergarten through eighth grade charter school in Toledo, Ohio, operated by for-profit charter chain Accel Schools. She told Our Schools that her training during orientation in August 2020 consisted mostly of one workshop on “basics,” which included how to record attendance and enter grades. There was no school handbook or written guidelines about student discipline practices or instructional protocols.

She said that the school had the appearance of a bare-bones operation, with very little decoration on the walls, empty classroom shelves with no books or instructional materials, heavily worn flooring and furniture, a rickety staircase that students and staff had to use daily, and drafty classrooms with insufficient radiator heating, which, on cold days, kept students shivering even in their coats.

Although Stiles had mostly taught social studies in her career, she told Our Schools that at Toledo Prep, she was told to teach math in grades five through eight. To help with lesson planning, she was given binders that contained the Ohio math standards and some student math workbooks, for which there was no teacher’s edition for grade eight.

She was told that students were expected to spend most of their instructional time on their Chromebooks, which the school supplied for in-school use only, and that students needed to be working on i-Ready, a digital software program for reading and mathematics, for at least 30 minutes per class period. The school didn’t seem to have any other curriculum materials available.

Administrative staff made promises of books and supplies that never arrived or, if they came, were never dispersed to classrooms. Stiles eventually resorted to using online learning tools like Khan Academy videos, which were free online, but school administrators disapproved of her using them.

“I had eighth graders who were reading at kindergarten level,” she told Our Schools. She also observed that there were students at Toledo Prep who struggled with English but had no consistent help from specialized support staff. What few support staff there were came from outside agencies that provided services, such as counseling and mental health, mostly online. A lone special education teacher with responsibility for all exceptional students in the building was “stretched very thin,” Stiles said.

The most reliable support staff in the building proved to be the tech support service from a company called Pansophic Learning, which happens to be the parent company of Accel Schools.

There was no school nurse, Stiles recalled, adding that, as COVID-19 raged across Ohio, students generally didn’t wear masks, and the school did no contact tracing when students or staff got sick with the virus. One day, a student came to her with bloodied knuckles, and Stiles went in search of the school’s first-aid kit, which turned out to be empty. The next day, Stiles came to school with Band-Aids that she’d purchased with her own money. Word about this got around, and students would come to her whenever they needed Band-Aids.

The few student clubs and after-school activities the charter school offered were all canceled after a student, following a TikTok trend, damaged a bathroom.

Students were frequently suspended by the school’s administrative staff, often for reasons that weren’t clear to her. “Rules were made up on the fly,” she said. One week she counted and realized that 20 students had been suspended by the school staff.

The school also enforced a rigid student ranking system, placing students in hierarchies based on their academic performance and discipline issues. Students at the top of the hierarchy were called “eagles,” students in the next rank below were labeled “doves,” and students called “larks” included those who were struggling with learning or behavioral issues. Students in the bottom rank, who were currently serving in-school suspensions, were called “turkeys,” until complaints by parents of students prompted the school to change the label to “phoenix.”

What substituted for a rich academic program at the charter school was its near-constant emphasis on test prep. “Everything was focused on testing,” Stiles said. “I had never taught in a school where there was so much emphasis on testing. While I was there, there were three whole days devoted to nothing but mock testing.”

Stiles quit after working only three months at the school, but the experience left her very frustrated and deeply concerned about the students. “I can’t pretend to not see what I saw there,” she said.

What Stiles didn’t know when she took the job at Toledo Prep was that she had stepped into a school that emulates what has become a growing practice in the charter school industry.

As an ongoing investigation by Our Schools has revealed, a substantial sector of charter schools, particularly those operated by for-profit operators like Accel Schools, are at the forefront of a wave of charter operations that follow an investor-driven business model borrowed from retail, health care, and manufacturing sectors.

In the charter school application of this business model, struggling schools are cycled through a series of private entities that, in turn, strip the schools of resources, run them at bare-bones costs, and reap whatever assets that remain before handing the schools off to the next private operator, or shutting them down completely.

In business and investment circles, the model is often defended as “an important economic function” to either “revive” struggling enterprises, or “reallocate” resources that have been invested in failed enterprises to more productive endeavors.

But in the case of Toledo Prep, and other charter schools practicing this business model, although the business consequences might be fine for the charter operators and their investors, the children caught up in this investor-driven enterprise often have their education significantly disrupted, or even permanently impaired, perhaps with lifelong impact.

Portfolios of Failed Charters

Stiles, who earned her master’s degree in education at the University of Kentucky, had been teaching since 1998, mostly at schools outside the United States. When she returned to the United States in 2020, she started looking for work in Ohio.

She was attracted to charter schools because she wanted the challenge of teaching academically challenged students, and Ohio state law generally guides charters to locate in urban or “challenged” districts.

Stiles, who identifies as white, had previously taught mostly in private Islamic schools—she practices the Islamic faith and wears a hijab—where students were often more affluent and better supported than most of their peers. She believed she could have a bigger impact on students who were more disadvantaged.

What Stiles only later came to learn is that Toledo Prep had a previous life, with a different name, a different operator, and a different authorizing agency that held the permit allowing the school to operate—which, in Ohio, is called a sponsor.

According to two leading business registration services, the building at the address now occupied by Toledo Preparatory Academy—824 6th St. in Toledo, Ohio 43605—had previously been occupied by Aurora Academy, a charter school sponsored by, according to state records, the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation (BCHF), an Ohio nonprofit that has long sponsored a number of charter schools in the state.

It’s not clear who operated Aurora Academy before it became Toledo Prep, but according to a 2018 report by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the school was acquired by Accel Schools around the same time Accel was buying up charter schools that had previously been operated by White Hat Management, a for-profit charter management organization (often called a CMO).

White Hat was one of a number of CMOs, according to a 2013 analysis by Policy Matters Ohio (PMO), that had a history of using a loophole in state charter school laws to open new charter schools in the same locations where a previous charter had been closed due to poor academic results. A case study that was part of the analysis by PMO showed that White Hat opened a “new” charter school, Southside Academy in Youngstown, “within days” of a school at the same street address being closed due to poor academic performance.

Both BCHF and White Hat had earned high ratings in the Ohio Department of Education’s 2015 evaluation of charter school sponsors and management firms, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. However, the article also noted that the Cleveland Transformation Alliance, an alliance of local businesses and organizations that advocate for high-quality schools in Cleveland, wasn’t “convinced” with those ratings, finding flaws with BCHF’s “school quality issues” and the “track record” of its associated management companies, which included White Hat.

Whether or not BCHF took this criticism to heart is difficult to assess, but it certainly made a turnabout in its performance evaluation of Aurora Academy.

In its 2016-2017 annual report, the foundation rated Aurora Academy as meeting or exceeding performance levels in all its evaluation categories but one—academic. However, the foundation’s performance report for 2018-2019 lists the school as falling short of the foundation’s acceptable academic and fiscal performance levels, and the report indicated the school was among five of its charter schools that would be closed at the end of the 2018-2019 school year.

As the Akron Beacon Journal reported in 2018, White Hat Management started closing its schools, beginning in 2014, as families of students opted for other schools for their children as a result of “years of low test scores and soaring high school dropout rates.” Charter schools run by White Hat Management, the report further noted, were “among the lowest performers in the state” and “were plagued from the start with allegations of padded enrollment and skirting accountability.”

Although the exact date that Accel bought Aurora Academy is unclear, a state registry of charter schools (which are called “community schools” in Ohio) in 2017 indicates Aurora Academy was being operated by Accel Schools, with BCHF continuing as the school’s sponsor…

Toledo Prep is not the only Accel school that’s been similarly rebranded to cover up its troubled past.

Open the link and learn more about how a for-profit charter operator makes a profit while running a chaotic school.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry

Tennessee Legislature Passes Hateful Laws

By dianeravitch

April 6, 2022 //

Representative Gloria Johnson posted a series of tweets describing the hateful legislation that her colleagues in the Tennessee Legislature have passed. Her Twitter handle is @VoteGloriaJ

When I got home this weekend someone asked how things are going in Nashville, I’m not sure they were ready for my answer, but it went kind of like this…

We have a “Don’t Say Gay” bill worse than Florida’s and about 4 more bills to go along with it-all equally filled with hate. GOP and B list celebrities are accusing librarians and teachers of “grooming” kids.

We have a vigilante abortion bill worse than Texas’. A bill that makes your friends and family $10k if they rat you out. Heck, if you decide to abort your rapists baby, his family and friends can sue you for $10k.

Did you ever imagine TN would give more rights to a violent rapist than a victim of a violent rapist. He can choose the mother of his child, but she can’t choose not to have her rapist’s baby. That is pure evil folks. That is today’s GOP, they don’t believe women are equal.

We have a school funding formula that’s not ready for prime time. It takes away local control, doesn’t have details and is more than 50% rule making we won’t see until AFTER the vote. And counties will love the property tax it will inevitably bring in 3-4 years😬. #whenleeisgone