Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire. His wife Priscilla Chan is a pediatrician. Ten years ago, they founded and funded a school that was designed to be different. They sought out children who were impoverished. Their school offered wrap-around services. They did all the right things.
But they are withdrawing their funding because they are disappointed by the school’s test scores. Test scores! Had they no better way of measuring success? Apparently not. Their scores were substantially higher than those of the local school district. But that wasn’t good enough. Were the children healthier? Were parents more engaged in their children’s education? In the end, the school was closed because its scores were not “good enough.”
It was supposed to be a long-term commitment, but it wasn’t. CZI surely could have made a 25-year commitment to their school but they pulled away their funding after only a decade. Do they have enough evidence to determine the value of investing in children’s well-being? No.
As I said, this is a very sad story.
Laura J. Nelson of The Wall Street Journalreported:
The school that Dr. Priscilla Chan co-founded for low-income students was designed to be different.
The vast fortunes being minted in other corners of Silicon Valley had mostly missed East Palo Alto, Calif., where the Primary School opened in 2016. Funded through Chan’s philanthropy with her husband Mark Zuckerberg, the private, tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” through wraparound services, including free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.
The school joined a long list of efforts by the country’s wealthiest, dating back to Andrew Carnegie, to put their stamp on the American classroom. Then, after a decade of operation and more than $125 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Primary School shut down in June.
Dr. Priscilla Chan SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The board voted unanimously in April 2025 to close the school after learning that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wouldn’t fund it after the 2025-26 academic year, people familiar with the situation said.
The school’s demise marks the end of one of the highest-profile education efforts funded by the couple’s philanthropic arm, which has shifted its focus from social issues toward scientific research.
By some measures, the school’s academic performance fell well short of state norms and its leaders’ expectations, complicating efforts to spread its model to public and charter schools. By others, it succeeded in helping students outside the classroom in ways that are usually not available in public schools.
Board president Jean-Claude Brizard said that before the vote to close, he shared several options with CZI about the school’s future, including “winding down.” The board wouldn’t have voted to close without alignment from their biggest funder, he said.
A CZI spokesperson said the decision to close was up to the school’s board and that the organization was focused on the school’s academic results, not the cost.
The Primary School’s closure has illustrated what philanthropic investment means for a community when it arrives, and when it leaves.
“It was a godsend school,” said Mele Fakapelea, whose daughter Telesia won a lottery spot in the founding class. Fakapelea later enrolled her four younger children. Losing the school’s support system, she said, was “crushing.”
Mele Fakapelea, in red lei, and her family at the eighth-grade graduation for her eldest daughter, Telesia, center. SAO LUTUI
Nearly 540 children were enrolled at the Primary School’s two campuses. The Ravenswood City Elementary School District is now preparing for an enrollment surge, renovating a campus to avoid packing students into portable trailers.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pledged $50 million when the closure was announced. That includes paying the balance of the school’s lease to the district and supporting local groups to carry on some services. CZI also gave $3.6 million to education savings accounts: $10,000 for elementary students, $2,500 for preschoolers and $1,000 for children in early-childhood education.
Business leaders and founders “look at K-12 education and go, ‘Man, how hard can it be to improve this thing?’” said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Well, it’s incredibly hard.”
Zuckerberg announced one of the couple’s first major charitable gifts, a $100 million grant to Newark, N.J., public schools, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2010. The Primary School was far more hands-on.
Chan said then that her work as a pediatrician, and at a Boston housing-project after-school program, had taught her that systems to help children are often siloed. The school set out to help children overcome the effects of poverty and childhood trauma.
Staff worked with community clinics to find high-needs families, including students with behavioral issues and learning disabilities. Three in four students spoke a language other than English at home.
Some things felt more startup than school. Teachers signed nondisclosure agreements as part of their employment contracts. Some toddlers wore recording devices at home to count back-and-forth conversations with their caregivers, part of a program to boost language development.
Chan was on campus often, including to read a Mo Willems book (“The Pigeon Needs a Bath!”) to kindergartners. During the launch of a curriculum with Sesame Workshop, Chan bantered with Elmo in a promotional video. Teachers attended the workshop’s 50th-anniversary gala and met Michelle Obama.
Parents were on campus regularly for coaching sessions and classes about child development.
But the school had some challenges, including high principal turnover. It also initially lacked clear plans and approaches for special education and student discipline, former employees said.
Katherine Carter, a former middle-school principal hired as a consultant in 2019, said there “really was not an understanding of the amount of time and support” and planning to launch a school. Carter, who left in 2024, said it can take five years for a new school’s approach to gel.
It took time for the new school to find the right curriculum and policies, said Lindsey Luebchow, a founding member of the Primary School. Principal turnover, she said, was one result of the structural challenge of “managing many programs in a single school.”
Chan was the Primary School’s co-founder and board chair for about eight years, until 2023; CZI was the main funder. Having one major backer in perpetuity hadn’t been the original plan, CZI said, but rather a model that “could be sustained through primarily public investment.” To that end, the Primary School said it tried to keep per-pupil spending at a reasonable level for a public school.
Jean-Claude Brizard, chairman of the board of directors for the Primary School SITTHIXAY DITTHAVONG/AP
Chan lobbied her network “to bring in other funding sources,” CZI said. But finding donors to supplement CZI was a tough sell, said Brizard, who is the former head of Chicago’s public schools. “Why would you give money to an entity being funded by one of the wealthiest people in the world?” he said.
Chan was “not shy” about her frustration with academic performance, Brizard said. Chan told The Wall Street Journal last year that outcomes weren’t where “frankly, anyone would have wanted them to be.”
Early last year, soon after Zuckerberg and Chan attended President Trump’s inauguration, CZI told staff its mission was changing. Funding for social advocacy had been “wound down” over the past several years to “align with our focus as a science philanthropy as well as the current legal and policy landscape,” staff were told. There was no evidence that the couple’s attendance influenced the board’s vote, CZI said.
That April, the Primary School’s board voted unanimously to close after the next academic year. The timing of the CZI changes and the inauguration, Brizard said, was “an unfortunate coincidence.”
Angelica Cardenas, 29, whose 3-year-old daughter was enrolled along with her siblings’ five children, said she heard about the closure from the news. “If they knew they were going to stop investing in our community, it should have been spoken about earlier on,” Cardenas said.
Some staff and parents said they thought the Primary School would last for decades, in part because it was focused on long-term outcomes.
“This was never something that was supposed to be just a philanthropic play in perpetuity,” Brizard said. “Maybe that wasn’t articulated well enough.”
A Stanford University report found that in spring 2025, 14% of local students in third grade and above exceeded literacy standards; at the Primary School, it was 26%; statewide, it was 47%.
Eighth-grade students, many of whom had attended the school for a decade, demonstrated above 50% grade-level proficiency in their final year, the school said.
Luebchow said students saw “steady and encouraging” academic progress after the pandemic, and pointed to improvements in children’s well-being and socio-emotional skills. About 85% of students had their annual well-child visit, compared with 55% of children on Medicaid in the county.
Every teacher returned for the final year. School leaders told parents: We understand if you don’t want to stay. If you do, we’ll close the year out strong.
School leaders arranged tours of other schools, set up a station for parents to complete admission applications, and called in a representative from a 529 savings plan to help parents open the accounts seeded by CZI.
Parents and teachers tried to savor the “lasts”: the last back-to-school night, with Pacific Island dancers on a tapa cloth mat. The last pep rally, where children blew red vuvuzelas.
Fakapelea’s oldest daughter, now 13, was one of two speakers when the school’s lone class of eighth-graders graduated in June. She cried afterward, as her family draped her in leis.
Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida constitution:
a) The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.
Article I, Section 3;
Religious Freedom
There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.
The Florida state constitution explicitly requires that the state provide a free public education for all children. It explicitly forbids the use of any public funds for religious schools. In 2012, then Governor Jeb Bush promoted a referendum to change the constitution and allow vouchers for religious schools. Florida voters resoundingly said NO. But the voice of the people did not dissuade Bush and his friends.
Florida now has a full/blown universal voucher system where the state funds children who attend religious schools, private schools, even home schools, regardless of family income. Most of the children who use vouchers were already in nonpublic school.
The state now spends billions of dollars every year on charter schools and vouchers. Many charter schools operate for profit. Their lobbyists work in tandem with the legislature, which seems eager to defund public schools.
Ironically, Jeb Bush used to boast that Florida was successful because of its toughs count ability. Yet this is the same governor who pushed through vouchers, even though voucher schools have NO accountability.
Go figure.
Stephanie Vanos wrote the following article for the Orlando Sentinel. She is a member of the Orange County School Board, where her children are enrolled.
She wrote:
There is an alarming misuse of public funds in Florida that isn’t just unfair and irresponsible, it undermines our state’s constitutional obligation to provide a high-quality, uniform education for every child and erodes trust in the very system meant to serve all of Florida’s children.
The taxpayer-funded voucher program has created a shadow educational system, one where billions in taxpayer funds move with little oversight, leaving families and communities in the dark about how their money is spent. This lack of accountability and transparency has created a fractured, unequal education landscape, robbing students of stability and opportunity no matter where they go to school.
Approximately $5 billion in taxpayer money is being siphoned away from our traditional public schools into voucher systems. Private schools that accept vouchers are held to a tiny fraction of the standards our public schools must meet, if any at all. Nearly a quarter of all state funding for education is now drained by voucher programs that serve only 15.3% of Florida’s students and overwhelmingly benefit families who were already paying to send their child to private school. How is this fiscally responsible?
The consequences of this system are clear in Orange County, where my kids go to school.
This year, our county was forced to close seven public schools and cut hundreds of positions despite the district earning high grades. An estimated $315 million of education money will be diverted from Orange County Public Schools to vouchers just this year. These closures and loss of funding are a direct result of a state system that puts politics and profits ahead of students.
Traditional public schools across the state are held to incredibly high standards on how and what they teach students, who they hire, how they report grades and more. However, the taxpayer-funded voucher program and charter schools are not held to the same standards and measures of accountability despite receiving public tax dollars.
Charter schools, deemed public schools by law, sometimes serve an unmet need in a community, and may operate transparently under a fully nonprofit model. In some cases, they can benefit our larger communities. However, charter schools operate with far fewer requirements and accountability measures than traditional public schools, and far too many are franchise operations, run by for-profit management companies that benefit affiliated for-profit entities with our tax dollars.
Mike Simpson posts amazing memes on Twitter and BlueSky. He calls himself “Big Education Ape.” He makes the point with his illustrations.
Here is one of his best: THE GHOST OF ELI BROAD: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF VULTURE PHILANTHROPY AND THE ONGOING DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION.
I wasn’t able to copy some tables and graphics. Please open the link to read the post in full.
Eli Broad was one of the billionaires who was eager to tear apart public education and remake it. I referred to him, the Waltons, and the Gates Foundation as “the Billionaires Boys Club,” which was chapter 10 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
Eli Broad’s distinctive contribution to the corporate reform movement was his Broad Academy, where aspiring superintendents were “trained” with his ideas. All expenses were paid, and trainees got to hobnob with others. They also had the Academy’s help in job placement; many “graduates” of the Broad Academy were placed as superintendents in big-city districts, imbued with the ideology that schooling was a business, that low-performing schools should be closed and replaced by charter schools. Eli and his wife Edythe were both graduates of the Detroit Public Schools, but they were not grateful for what they learned.
In 2009, when I was writing the book, I was not aware that the Billionaire Boys Club had many more members and that some were women. There was Alice Walton, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, John Arnold, Joel Greenberg, Daniel Loeb, Jeff Yass, and many more. I posted a far longer list of the super-rich underwriting the privatization of public money in my book Slaying Goliath.
I once was invited by Eli Broad to meet at his gorgeous apartment in New York City, overlooking Central Park. He wanted to know why I was critical of his efforts. He told me that he knew nothing about teaching or curriculum, but he knew a lot about business management and organization. His belief was that public schools could improve by better management.
Mike Simpson performs a public service here by updating the legacy of Eli Broad.
He writes:
How a billionaire’s “vision” became a scandal-soaked legacy — and why it refuses to die, now dressed in Yale’s ivy
There’s a particular kind of audacity required to spend a quarter-century systematically dismantling public education, leave a trail of federal indictments, billion-dollar procurement disasters, and devastated communities in your wake — and then get your name engraved on a building at Yale University. That, in essence, is the story of Eli Broad, the Broad Academy, and its reincarnation as The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. If you were hoping the death of Eli Broad in 2021 would finally close this chapter of American education history, well — ghosts don’t follow rules. And this one has a $100 million endowment.
Part I: Venture Philanthropy — When Billionaires Play School
Let’s start with the concept that makes all of this possible: “venture philanthropy.” It sounds benign — even noble. In practice, it means a billionaire who made his fortune in housing construction (KB Home) and insurance (SunAmerica) decided he understood public education better than educators, parents, communities, or — heaven forbid — children.
Eli Broad’s core thesis, launched formally in 2002 with the Broad Superintendents Academy (BSA), was elegantly simple and catastrophically wrong: public school systems are just badly managed corporations, and what they need is corporate managers.
Not teachers. Not child psychologists. Not community leaders. Corporate managers. Preferably ones with MBAs, military command experience, or backgrounds in supply-chain logistics. Because nothing says “I understand the developmental needs of a seven-year-old” quite like a background in restructuring defense procurement contracts.
The curriculum reflected this philosophy with almost comedic precision:
10% — Actual education: pedagogy, curriculum, child development
90% — Corporate operational reform: fiscal optimization, data-driven accountability, labor relations, and what the Academy euphemistically called “reform accelerators” — which, translated from the original MBA-speak, meant privatization strategies
The program was free to participants — tuition, travel, lodging, all covered. Because when you’re deploying an ideological army, you don’t charge the soldiers.
Part II: Yale Said “Yes” — And Charged It to Prestige
In 2019, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation committed $100 million to Yale University to transform the independent, unaccredited Los Angeles operation into The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. The transition was completed in 2020, and the unaccredited LA entity was quietly sunsetted — like a getaway car abandoned after the heist.
The rebranding was masterful. Suddenly, the same ideological pipeline that had produced federal convicts, FBI raid subjects, and a generation of “disruptors” who disrupted primarily the educational lives of low-income children of color was now operating under the imprimatur of one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
The center today operates two flagship tracks, both tuition-free:
The 2026–27 MMS cohort is already being assembled, per the center’s own Instagram, described as “leaders committed to reimagining” public education — which, given the network’s history, should be read as a threat as much as a promise.
Beyond the programs themselves, the center has launched an aggressive data aggregation initiative — a centralized repository hosted on GitHub tracking superintendents across more than 10,000 of the nation’s 13,000 public school districts, aggregating over 180,000 data points across 23 states. The stated goal is academic research. The unstated goal, critics argue, is mapping the vacancy pipeline for the next generation of Broad placements.
Part III: The Damage Ledger — Twenty-Five Years of “Disruption”
Let’s be precise about what the word “disruption” meant in practice. A landmark 2022 longitudinal study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis tracked two full decades of Broad Academy graduates and delivered findings that would be devastating — if anyone in the venture philanthropy world were capable of embarrassment:
No statistically significant positive effects on district spending, student completion rates, or test scores
Broad-trained superintendents had 18% shorter tenures than non-Broad peers in equivalent districts
The only statistically significant footprint left behind? A sustained, measurable trend toward increased charter school enrollment and sector privatization
In other words, after 25 years and hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars, the Broad Academy’s measurable legacy in public education was: more charter schools and shorter superintendent tenures. That’s it. That’s the product.
The Human Cost
The abstract numbers become concrete when you look at specific communities:
Oakland & Detroit saw aggressive charter expansion and centralized fiscal management that critics argued deepened structural deficits and fractured community trust for generations.
Chicago experienced the largest single wave of school closures in modern U.S. history — 50 neighborhood schools shuttered in 2013 under Broad-network-affiliated Barbara Byrd-Bennett — triggering federal civil rights complaints alleging the closures disproportionately harmed low-income students of color.
Seattle watched Broad graduate Maria Goodloe-Johnson (BSA Class of 2003) get fired in 2011 following a state audit revealing $1.8 million in public funds funneled into a contracting program that provided little to no actual services — with investigators concluding she exercised a “severe lack of oversight” despite early warnings.
Part IV: The Scandal Hall of Fame — From Procurement Fraud to Federal Prison
Here is where the story transitions from ideologically troubling to criminally spectacular.
John Deasy — The iPad That Broke LAUSD
Deasy (BSA Class of 2006) championed a $1.3 billion initiative to put Apple iPads loaded with Pearson software into the hands of every LAUSD student. The rollout failed within days — students bypassed security filters almost immediately — but the procurement scandal was far worse than the technical failure.
Internal records revealed that Deasy and his deputies had close personal and professional ties to Apple and Pearson executives prior to the bidding process, raising serious allegations of a rigged procurement cycle. The FBI seized boxes of district records. Deasy resigned in 2014. The district eventually abandoned the program and settled for millions in refunds.
His post-resignation career? He was immediately hired by the Broad Center as a Superintendent-in-Residence — coaching the next generation of urban leaders. Because in this ecosystem, failure is a credential.
Barbara Byrd-Bennett — The Federal Prison Graduate
Byrd-Bennett’s career arc is the Broad model in miniature: leave Cleveland in fiscal distress, leave Detroit in structural chaos, get hired as a “turnaround expert” in Chicago, execute the largest school closure wave in American history, then get indicted on 20 counts of federal mail and wire fraud.
Federal investigators proved she steered $23 million in no-bid contracts to SUPES Academy and Synesi Associates — the very consulting firms she had worked for immediately before taking the CPS helm. Internal emails laid bare her motive with a candor that would be almost admirable if it weren’t so brazen: she needed the money because she had “tuitions to pay and casinos to visit.”
In exchange, she was promised a 10% kickback disguised as future consulting fees funneled into trust funds for her twin grandsons. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison.
Robert Runcie — The Perjury Arrest
Runcie (BSA Class of 2009) took over Broward County Public Schools — the nation’s sixth-largest district — and oversaw a culture of severe administrative bid-rigging around an $800 million capital bond program, with independent investigations revealing contracts steered to pre-selected corporate entities.
Following the 2018 Parkland school shooting, which exposed deep systemic lapses in district safety infrastructure, a statewide grand jury investigation led to Runcie’s arrest by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement on felony perjury charges in April 2021 — prosecutors proving he lied under oath about communications regarding procurement contracts.
He resigned in exchange for a $743,000 separation agreement. Paid by taxpayers.
Alberto Carvalho — The AI Echo of the iPad Disaster
If the Deasy iPad scandal was the defining Broad-era procurement catastrophe of the 2010s, Alberto Carvalho’s LAUSD tenure became its 2020s technological sequel — almost as if the universe decided one billion-dollar tech procurement disaster per decade wasn’t sufficient.
Carvalho, a celebrated figure on the corporate-reform speaking circuit who regularly headlined Broad Center leadership panels, aggressively championed a contract with “AllHere,” a tech startup contracted to build a multi-million dollar AI student-chatbot tool for LAUSD. The project collapsed into total insolvency. The startup’s founder was indicted for fraud. Federal investigators traced systemic steering of contracts that bypassed traditional public bidding protections.
In early 2026, FBI agents raided Carvalho’s personal residence and district offices. He was placed on paid administrative leave and subsequently resigned — a modern, tech-era echo of the Deasy iPad scandal, separated by exactly one decade and approximately zero lessons learned.
Part V: The Carousel — How Failed Superintendents Get Recycled
One of the most structurally revealing features of the Broad model is what happens after a superintendent fails. In a normal accountability framework, catastrophic failure — federal indictment, FBI raids, mass community protests, historic labor strikes — would end careers.
In the Broad ecosystem, it typically accelerates them.
The recycling mechanism operates in three predictable stages:
Stage 1 — The Soft Landing: Departing executives are caught by the philanthropic safety net. Foundations like Broad, Walton, or Gates place them into well-funded “fellow,” “executive coach,” or “senior advisor” roles at charter management organizations or policy think tanks. The local political dust settles. The national network maintains their status.
Stage 2 — The Headhunter Buffer: National executive search firms — operating with screening frameworks that prioritize corporate operational metrics over community approval or longevity — present the executive to a new school board in another state as a “courageous, battle-tested change agent.” The fact that the “battle” was largely against the parents and teachers of the previous district is presented as a résumé enhancement.
Stage 3 — The Next Major District: Re-hired at a higher salary, with stronger contractual protections, and a golden parachute clause ensuring that the next failure will also be financially comfortable.
Mike Miles left Dallas ISD under multiple internal investigations and extreme executive turnover, founded a charter network, and was then directly appointed by the Texas Education Agency — which had dissolved Houston ISD’s elected school board — to run the entire Houston district with even fewer democratic constraints than before.
Jean-Claude Brizard left Rochester under a 95% teacher vote of no confidence, was immediately recruited to lead Chicago Public Schools (the nation’s third-largest system), triggered the historic 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike within 17 months, was pushed out with a $250,000 buyout, and transitioned smoothly into senior advisory roles at national education foundations.
The pattern is not a bug. It is the feature.
Part VI: Buying the Boardroom — How Venture Philanthropy Captured School Governance
The Broad playbook cannot function under genuine democratic oversight. A superintendent who closes 50 neighborhood schools, eliminates teacher tenure protections, and converts public schools into privately managed charter networks will be fired by an elected school board that answers to the community — unless that school board has been pre-selected to not do that.
The solution was elegant and corrosive: buy the school board elections.
Because local school board races historically required minimal campaign capital, the injection of billionaire wealth fundamentally altered the political landscape. The money flows not directly to candidates (which faces statutory limits) but through Independent Expenditure Committees and Super PACs — allowing unlimited spending on sophisticated polling, negative television ads, and targeted digital saturation.
In Los Angeles, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and allied donors regularly poured $5 million to $10 million per election cycle into LAUSD board races — specifically to achieve a “pro-reform majority” that would protect executives like John Deasy and later Austin Beutner (a former investment banker with no education background whatsoever) from community accountability.
In Oakland, independent groups funded by the California Charter Schools Association outspent local parent-teacher associations 10-to-1, successfully seating board members who routinely approved charter petitions and fiscal consolidation plans drafted by Broad Residency staff embedded in the central office.
When even this proved insufficient — when local civic resistance made winning democratic elections too expensive or unpredictable — the network pivoted to eliminating the elections entirely:
Chicago: Mayoral control legislation allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to single-handedly install Broad executives without board confirmation.
Houston: The Texas Education Agency dissolved the elected school board entirely and replaced it with a state-appointed body, allowing direct installation of Mike Miles.
Detroit: The short-lived Education Achievement Authority bypassed the traditional school board to implement a centralized, non-unionized reform experiment under Broad graduate John Covington.
The structural message is unambiguous: the corporate management model and democratic accountability are incompatible. When democracy gets in the way, the solution is to remove democracy.
Part VII: The Network Map — 1,000 Alumni and Counting
The Broad Network now comprises more than 1,000 alumni spanning major urban school districts, charter management organizations, state education agencies, and venture philanthropy foundations — with its heaviest concentrations precisely where the playbook finds the most fertile ground:
California remains the densest hub, with alumni embedded throughout LAUSD, Oakland Unified, and San Diego Unified central offices, as well as major CMOs like KIPP SoCal, Aspire Public Schools, and Green Dot.
Texas has become the fastest-growing hub, with Houston ISD under state-appointed Miles serving as the current flagship experiment, alongside significant placement within Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, the Texas Education Agency, and massive charter entities like KIPP Texas and IDEA Public Schools.
New York serves as the “soft landing” capital of the network — hundreds of alumni operating within Wall Street-adjacent education foundations, charter advocacy groups, and elite national search firms headquartered in Manhattan.
Illinois and Pennsylvania — Chicago and Philadelphia specifically — remain high-density environments where teams of Broad Residents are embedded in central operations managing financial stabilization, facilities restructuring, and school assignment data systems.
Meanwhile, the network has largely migrated out of direct superintendencies — where the political friction is high and the tenure is short — and into the broader ecosystem where influence is durable and accountability is minimal: senior director roles at the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; high-level education consultancies like Watershed Advisors and Instruction Partners; and, of course, The Broad Center at Yale SOM itself, where the current MMS cohort is being trained to carry the philosophy forward.
Part VIII: Yale — Laundering a Legacy in Ivy
Let us be direct about what the Yale partnership accomplishes that the standalone Los Angeles operation never could: institutional legitimacy laundering.
The Broad Academy, operating independently, was unaccredited, ideologically transparent, and easy to critique. Its graduates were called “Broadies” — a term used by both allies and critics — and the pipeline was visible enough that parent groups, teachers’ unions, and education researchers could track, document, and organize against it.
The Broad Center at Yale SOM is something different. It is now embedded within one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions, granting an Ivy League master’s degree, hosting fellows in New Haven, and publishing peer-reviewed research. The same corporate management philosophy that produced federal convictions and FBI raids now arrives in urban school districts wearing a Yale credential.
The center’s new data aggregation initiative — tracking superintendents across more than 10,000 districts, aggregating 180,000+ data points — is framed as academic research. Critics see it as something more operational: a comprehensive national vacancy map for the next generation of Broad placements, now with the algorithmic sophistication that the original Los Angeles operation could only dream of.
The 2025-26 Fellowship cohort of 17 fellows is already gathering in New Haven for weeklong modules at Yale SOM. The 2026-27 MMS cohort is being assembled. The pipeline flows.
The Synthesis: What Twenty-Five Years Actually Taught Us
Here is what a quarter-century of Broad-style education reform has empirically demonstrated:
The Promise: The Reality
Corporate management improves district outcomes/No measurable positive effect on test scores, graduation rates, or spending efficiency”
Disruptors” bring needed change/18% shorter tenures; accelerated community fracture
Charter expansion improves options/Statistically significant increase in privatization; no demonstrated academic gains
Data-driven accountability improves teaching/Curriculum narrowing; teaching to the test
Free consulting support helps districts/Permanent embedding of private ideology on public payroll
School board reform improves governance/Systematic dismantling of democratic accountability
The most damning verdict is not the federal indictments — though those are damning. It is not the FBI raids — though those are spectacular. It is not even the $23 million in no-bid kickback contracts or the billion-dollar iPad disasters.
It is this: after 25 years, hundreds of millions in philanthropic investment, and the placement of Broad-trained executives in over 160 school systems, there is no credible empirical evidence that any of it helped a single child learn to read better.
What it did produce — measurably, statistically, reproducibly — was more charter schools, shorter superintendent tenures, and a revolving door of well-compensated executives cycling between urban districts, consulting firms, and Ivy League fellowship programs while the communities they “disrupted” rebuilt themselves from the wreckage.
Epilogue: The Ghost That Won’t Be Exorcised
Eli Broad died in April 2021. His foundation subsequently announced it would spend down its assets and close. The Los Angeles operation was already gone, folded into Yale two years prior.
And yet — the ghost persists. It persists in the 2026-27 MMS cohort assembling in New Haven. It persists in the 180,000 data points tracking superintendent vacancies across 10,000 districts. It persists in the career of Mike Miles, currently running Houston ISD under state protection from democratic accountability. It persists in the aftermath of Alberto Carvalho’s FBI-raided departure from LAUSD — a scandal so structurally identical to the Deasy iPad disaster of 2014 that it reads less like history repeating and more like history plagiarizing itself.
The Broad Center at Yale SOM is not a reformed version of the Broad Academy. It is the Broad Academy with better branding, an Ivy League address, and a GitHub repository. The philosophy is identical. The network is intact. The pipeline flows.
The only thing that has genuinely changed is the zip code — from Los Angeles to New Haven — and the price tag of the credential being handed to the next generation of disruptors preparing to be deployed into the public schools of America.
Eli Broad may be gone. But his ghost has tenure.
And unlike the superintendents he trained, it shows no signs of an early exit.
Sources:
: The Broad Center institutional history, curriculum breakdowns, alumni scandal documentation, EEPA 2022 longitudinal study findings, and school board funding mechanics — as documented in comprehensive public education policy research and investigative reporting compiled in the source brief above.
: EdSource — “FBI raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho’s home, office may be linked to student AI chatbot” (2026) — edsource.org
: Los Angeles Times — “How probe into failed startup led to LAUSD superintendent investigation” (March 1, 2026) — latimes.com
: Yale School of Management — “The Broad Center Announces 2025-26 Cohort of the Fellowship for Public Education Leadership” — som.yale.edu
Master Source List: The Ghost of Eli Broad & The Broad Center at Yale
🏛️ The Broad Center at Yale SOM — Official Sources
$CITETitleSourceLinkThe Case of Broad Superintendents— Full EEPA Longitudinal Study (2022) Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis / Tom Dee tom-dee.github.io — EEPA-Broad.pdf New Study: Broad Supes Made No Difference, Other Than Increasing Charter Schools Diane Ravitch’s Blogdianeravitch.net
🗞️ Investigative Journalism & Policy Criticism
$CITETitleSourceLink Critics Target Growing Army of Broad Leaders Education Week edweek.org The Broad Foundation’s Impact on Public Schools Facebook — Oakland Parent Sharon Higgins Analysis facebook.com — Broad Foundation Analysis
⚖️ Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Federal Conviction (Chicago)
$CITETitleSourceLink Former Chief Executive of Chicago Public Schools Sentenced to More Than Four Years in Prison U.S. Department of Justice — Official Press Release justice.govBarbara Byrd-Bennett — Full Coverage Archive WTTW Chicago Public Media news.wttw.com Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Wikipedia Overview Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
⚖️ Robert Runcie — Broward County Perjury Arrest
$CITETitleSourceLinkFDLE Arrests Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie for Perjury Florida Department of Law Enforcement — Official Release fdle.state.fl.us Former Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie Avoids Trial — Perjury Charge Dropped CBS News Miami cbsnews.com/miami State Drops Perjury Charge Against Former Broward Schools Superintendent Miami Herald miamiherald.comPerjury Charge Dropped Against Ex-Broward Schools Superintendent NBC Miami nbcmiami.com
🤖 Alberto Carvalho — LAUSD FBI Raid & AllHere AI Scandal
$CITETitleSourceLinkFBI Raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho’s Home and Office May Be Linked to Student AI ChatbotEdSource edsource.org How Probe Into Failed Startup Led to LAUSD Superintendent Investigation Los Angeles Times latimes.com
📌 Quick Citation Reference Guide
For the article sections, citations map as follows:
Broad Center Yale programs → , , ,
EEPA 2022 empirical study → ,
General Broad criticism & history → ,
Byrd-Bennett federal conviction → , ,
Runcie perjury arrest → , , ,
Carvalho FBI raid / AllHere AI → ,
⚠️ Research Note: Several additional primary sources — including the original EEPA journal publication, the Jeffrey Hubbard California Supreme Court ruling, the Maria Goodloe-Johnson state audit, and the Jean-Claude Brizard Chicago strike documentation — are recommended for deeper verification. Additional searches can be run to surface those specific primary documents on request.
Jeff Bryant, a veteran education journalist, dissects he plan to destroy public schools. Governor Ron DeSantis and the Legislature has unleashed the for-profit vultures to pick the bonds and funds of the state’s public schools. Not because the charges are better schools, but because the rightwingers have close ties to members of the legislature. Want to open a charter school? Want the state to pay all your expenses? Come on down to the Sunshine State!
This article was produced by Our Schools.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. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky@jeffbinnc.
The letters started coming in October 2025. In the first wave, according to the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), “at least 22 school districts in Florida” got letters alerting them that charter school operators, including a for-profit charter school management company based in Miami, intended to use a state law recently enacted to open new charter schools on the campuses of existing public schools beginning August 2027.
In Broward County, a South Florida district that includes Fort Lauderdale, the Mater Academy charter school chain, operated by for-profit charter management company Academica, claimed space in 27 public schools. Mater Academy claimed space in nearly 30 schools in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa Bay, “along with more than a dozen [schools] in Pinellas [County] and six in Pasco [County],” Tampa Bay Times reported. In Sarasota County, Mater claimed space in three public school campuses.
“So far, 480 schools in 22 counties have received 690 ‘letters of intent’ from charter school organizations expressing their intent to occupy space in public school buildings,” FPI’s Norin Dollard told Our Schools in late November. When schools receive letters from multiple charter organizations, it’s first come, first served, she explained, and the timeline for schools to respond is incredibly short—just 20 days.
Once the charter occupies part of the public school, Dollard explained, it operates rent free, and the public school district becomes responsible for much of the charter’s costs, including those for services charters don’t customarily provide, such as bus transportation and food service, as well as costs for school support services like janitorial, security, library, nursing, and counseling. Even any construction costs the charters might incur have to be covered by the public school.
This new law will force some public schools to convert to charter schools, said Damaris Allen, “and that’s intentional.” Allen is the executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, a public schools advocacy organization that is rallying opposition to the law.
The letters have caught the attention of national news outlets, including the Washington Post, which reported, “The Florida law is an expansion of a state program called ‘Schools of Hope,’ which was set up to allow certain charters to operate in areas with low-performing local public schools. The new law allows ‘Schools of Hope’ operators to take over space at any public school that’s under capacity, regardless of whether it is high- or low-performing.”
“The expansion of the Schools of Hope idea has been on a slippery slope,” Dollard explained, “much like school vouchers have been in the state.” Originally, in 2017, schools identified for Schools of Hope transition from public governance to charter management were very narrowly defined as persistently underperforming schools. That changed in 2019 when the legislature altered the definition of low-performing to target more schools and added schools in so-called opportunity zones—government-designated areas selected for economic development—as open territory for charters. Now, the new law allows charter schools to take over “underused, vacant, or surplus” space in traditional public schools and operate free of charge.
As the reach of the Schools of Hope idea morphed, so did its rationale. According to a 2025 op-ed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the program was originally conceived as an “initiative that incentivizes high-quality charter operators to open schools for students trapped in failing ones.” The aim now, according to Bush, is to solve the “problem” of underutilized space in existing public schools.
With school enrollments in steep decline in nearly every district in the state, fear of a potential mass charter school industry takeover of public school spaces—along with the costs local districts will incur—looms over district leaders across the state and strikes them as a clear existential threat.
Other consequences of colocating more charters in public schools have not been well-thought-out, according to Allen. For instance, on the issue of school safety, public schools have undertaken a number of measures to protect against school shootings, such as converting buildings to single-point entry. Charter schools don’t have to do that. So what happens when a charter operation moves into a building and doesn’t comply with the single-point entry? Also, the state legislature created new rulesfor public school libraries in 2022. Charters don’t have to follow those rules. How is that going to work in a colocation?
Allen fears the daunting challenges of charter colocations will cause some school boards and communities to sell school buildings or convert them to district-operated charters rather than give in to charter schools run by outside, for-profit companies.
And while proponents of Florida’s Schools of Hope program see it as a way to expand education options for students and families, critics point to evidence that Florida charter schools, which one expert called “a shitstorm,” need stricter oversight rather than a free rein. And, regardless of the outcomes, they warn that the idea is sure to get promoted as an “education innovation” that other Republican-dominated states will likely adopt.
A warning sign, not a model
When Nancy Lawther, a retired college professor of French, got involved in public schools advocacy, she became very skeptical about the oft-told narrative about the need for more education options because “too many poor children are trapped in failing public schools.” After all, in Dade County, Miami, where she lives, the public system has an A rating by the state despite having a challenging student population that is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with many living in households earning less than the state’s median income.
Her skepticism only increased when she first heard about expanding the Schools of Hope program to more schools, especially when she saw the results from the first schools taken over.
The original “Schools of Hope” weren’t individual schools; it was a whole district. In 2017, the Jefferson County school board voted in favor of participating in a pilot project for the new Schools of Hope initiative. The board’s approval to join the pilot meant that the district was required to turn over the management of their schools to a “high-performing” charter management company, which, in this case, happened to be Somerset Academy, another charter chain managed by the for-profit Academica management company.
But the results of the pilot would be a warning sign about the abilities of charter management firms to improve the education outcomes of public schools. As a 2025 op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel recounted, “[T]axpayers saw higher costs, stagnant results, and constant staff churn. By 2022, the takeover collapsed. Local leaders called it ‘an absolute disaster.’ The state had to step in with a $5 million bailout just to get the district running again.”
A 2024 account of the pilot in the Tallahassee Democrat reported, “[F]rom 2017 to 2022,… [Jefferson County] remained troubled by students’ lagging academic performance and mounting disciplinary issues, like fighting that in one case led to the arrest of 15 students. … [And] the school district was still getting a D grade” from the state.
Nevertheless, after Florida lawmakers expanded the Schools of Hope program in 2019, which has cost more than $300 million as of 2025, “There are only about a dozen Schools of Hope in Florida. In 2024, eight of them got C or D grades,” pointed out the Bradenton Times.”
‘All about market share’
Given its track record of failure, Lawther suspects that expanding Schools of Hope has nothing to do with improving education outcomes or making better use of publicly funded school buildings.
Indeed, Sarasota County, one of the districts targeted for charter colocations, has been an A-rated system since the state created the grading system in 2004, according to the district website.
Also, in districts where there are enrollment slides, there are few signs that demand for charters will soak up excess building capacity. According to a 2025 analysis of Sarasota County by Suncoast Searchlight, “The number of charter schools has grown in recent years, but the share of students at charters has not shifted much.” And building utilization rates of the different sectors are nearly identical—82 percent for public schools and 84 percent for charters, WUSF stated. “Some of the lowest-performing charters are barely a third full.”
Mater Academy, the charter operator using the Schools of Hope law to claim space in Sarasota public schools, does not currently operate a school in the district.
“This is all about market share,” Lawther said. “It’s about getting an advantage over charter operators that are not Schools of Hope providers, and independent charters that can’t compete in a market geared to the large chains,” like those operated by Academica.
Further, while enrollments in Florida charter schools continued to grow, it has shown signs of slowing down—from 3.7 percent in 2024 to 2.6 percent in 2025—and the number of charter schools decreased, from 739 in 2023-2024 to 732 in 2024-2025.
Also, the charter industry in the state faces many more privately-operated competitors. “Expansions of voucher programs are creating a more competitive market for charter schools,” Lawther noted, “and private schools, microschools, and homeschooling are growing forms of school choice.”
Indeed, charter schools no longer appear to be the fastest-growing form of school choice in the state.
After the Republican-led Florida legislature passed a bill in 2023 that did away with income requirements for families to receive state-sponsored school vouchers, the share of state funding diverted from the public system—which, technically, includes charters—to private schools and homeschooling doubled from 12 percent in 2021 to 24 percent in 2025, WUSF reported. In the school year 2023-2024, the number of vouchers, often called “scholarships,” given out to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling increased by approximately 142,000 students, according to Next Steps, a school choice advocacy group.
Florida has also experienced a 46 percent increase in homeschooling over the past five years, WEAR statedin 2025. And the state has freed up 50,000 new community facilities to serve as microschools, according to the Center for American Progress.
It would seem that in this increasingly competitive education landscape, the Florida charter school industry could use a new competitive angle like the one offered by Schools of Hope. “Officially, charter school advocates say Schools of Hope is an amazing opportunity to expand parent choice,” Dollard said, “but unofficially, this is an incredibly lucrative business opportunity.”
An industry in decline?
The charter school industry’s desire for new business strategies that enable charter operators to seize public school classrooms—or even whole buildings—is not confined to Florida.
In Indiana, for years, public school districts have been required to notify the state, within 10 days, when one of their buildings becomes vacant and to make the building available to lease to a charter school for $1 per year or sell the building to a charter operator outright for $1.
In Ohio’s 2025 approved budget, a new provision allows the state to force school districts to close some public school buildings and sell those properties to charter or private schools “at below market value,” Ideastream Public Media reported.
One market condition that’s likely behind these increasingly aggressive charter school industry is land grab, as revealed in a 2025 analysis by the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA). According to the report, charter school closings have been accelerating nationwide, while the pace of new charter openings has slowed significantly during the same time.
“[T]he 2023-24 school year saw just 12 more open charter schools than during the previous year,” the report found. This is “a dramatic departure” from the heydays of industry growth when “[t]he number of charter schools increased by 421” between 2010 and 2011.
Charter school enrollment growth has also stalled, according to the report, increasing by 0.1 percentage point—from 7.5 percent to 7.6 percent of total charter enrollment—between 2020 and 2023.
In the most recent school years, based on official data from 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, NCCSA found, “Most states experienced declines or stagnation [in charter school market share], and preliminary indicators suggest that, once the 2024 data is finalized, the trend will likely worsen.”
North Carolina offers a clarifying example of the significant headwinds that the charter school industry now faces.
In the Tar Heel state, charter schools have enjoyed widespread support among state lawmakers and private investors. The state legislature has made dramatic changes to state laws regarding charters, including loosening regulations and fast-tracking approval of new schools. And a 2024 analysis by the Charlotte Observer found “at least $279 million in private equity investments in North Carolina charter schools since 2013.”
Despite this support, the number of charter schools in North Carolina declined in 2024-2025, from 211 to 208 in 2023-2024, according to an industry spokesperson. And many of the newest charter schools to open in the state have not fared well. “State data show that only about 26 percent of new charter schools in the past five years met or exceeded their enrollment projections,” NC Newsline reported, “and more than half of those that missed the mark are now closed or never opened.”
The report’s findings revealed that although charters tend to locate in low-income neighborhoods, they serve far fewer children from low-income families, fewer children who are English learners, and fewer children with disabilities, resulting in leaving traditional public schools with elevated needs and higher costs.
Critics of the Schools of Hope law noted that these industry shifts, as well as a historical tendency for education policies enacted in Florida to get picked up in other Republican-dominated states, will spur other states to adopt similar policies, regardless of any evidence that they might harm public schools.
“More generally,” Baker added, “Florida charter schools are a shitstorm, both underserving higher need populations and underperforming with those they do serve.”
‘A shitstorm’
Among the critics of Florida’s Schools of Hope legislation is Bruce Baker, a professor and chair of the department of teaching and learning at the University of Miami and an expert on charter schools and public school finances.
“I’m, of course, deeply concerned with granting preferential access to any charter operator, at the expense of a fiscally strapped school district,” Baker wrote in an email. “I’m more concerned when it may present a slippery slope regarding control over land and buildings that should—by the [state] constitution, which supersedes this regulatory change—be solely under the authority of the local boards of education elected by the taxpayers who financed those facilities and continue to maintain them. It becomes even more problematic if this eventually creates an avenue to transfer ownership. That would be a particularly egregious violation of local board authority and private taking of public assets. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a concern.”
Baker’s assessment of charter schools in the Sunshine State is evident in his 2025 report, which looks at the impacts of the industry on school funding adequacy, equity, and student academic outcomes across the state, and, more specifically, in the Miami-Dade district.
Also, charters, despite having an advantage of educating less challenging and less costly student populations, underperform public schools on state assessments while “serving otherwise similar student populations.” This finding holds statewide and in Miami-Dade.
The report concludes that Florida charters are “compromising equity, eroding efficiency, and producing poor educational outcomes for those it serves.”
Given these findings, the report recommends that state lawmakers “[i]mpose a moratorium on charter school expansion, including the Schools of Hope Program.” It also calls for “new regulations for evaluating existing charter operators,” stronger vetting of new charter operators, and stricter enforcement of regulations about charter school student outcomes.
Schools of nope
Several district school superintendents acrossFlorida have urged their communities to oppose the state’s Schools of Hope charter school expansion in public school buildings. When the state’s current education commissioner defended the Schools of Hope law in his address at a 2025 conference for school board members and district leaders and suggested it could be used to shut down whole districts, the audience roundly booed him.
Grassroots groups such as Families for Strong Public Schools have held events to educate the public about the negative impacts of charter colocations. A coalition that includes the United Teachers of Dade, NAACP Miami-Dade Branch, the Miami-Dade County Council of PTA/PTSA, and others has formed to protest charter colocations. And a senator in the state legislature has introduced a bill to repeal the Schools of Hope expansion.
Much of the opposition has rallied under the banner of “Schools of Nope” and is organizing call-ins and an email campaign targeting state legislators.
Opposition organizers like Damaris Allen see this as a do-or-die moment in the state. “Either we win this fight, or it’s the death of public schools in Florida,” she said.
Parents enrolled their children in a new charter school in North Carolina that offered great promise. But the charter school was deeply entangled with for-profit entities whose first priority was profit, not students. The school never opened. Parents had to scramble to find another school.
Last spring, Dulce Garcia heard about a soon-to-open school that would offer students immersion in both Spanish and Chinese. There was no other in High Point like it, and it didn’t charge tuition. It seemed like a way for Garcia, a restaurant worker, to give her children a long-term advantage.
She decided to enroll her 6-year-old daughter, Aracely, in Triad International Studies Academy (TISA). In its first year, the school would serve preschool through second grade. She planned to enroll her 9-year-old son, Joel, when the school expanded to higher grades.
Aracely flourished at TISA. Garcia marveled that her daughter was soon counting in both Spanish and Chinese, and credited her swift academic progress and close friendships to TISA’s small class sizes. Aracely’s first-grade class had only 12 students; the entire school had only 45. “I think she does better in that type of environment,” Garcia said.
While the school’s modest enrollment seemed like a benefit to Garcia, it set off alarm bells in Raleigh. Charter schools like TISA—privately run, but publicly funded—must have 80 or more students under North Carolina law.
Most state funding is awarded on a per-pupil basis, and real estate costs—not covered by a state allocation—can be hefty, making it difficult for even charter schools with more students to remain solvent.
TISA seemed at risk of buckling under the financial pressure, facing an acute version of the challenges that have begun to slow growth in the once-booming charter school sector. At the same time, its management was pushing the bounds on conflicts of interest.
After learning about TISA’s low enrollment, the state Charter School Review Board summoned school leaders to their October 6 meeting. The board has the responsibility to shut down schools that fail to meet the state minimum, but broad leeway to set terms and make exceptions.
TISA’s board chair, Chaowei Zhu, fielded the state board members’ questions. He largely blamed construction delays.
The plan to renovate a former church and install modular classrooms on the property had hit one obstacle after another, said Zhu, who is assistant dean for global initiatives at Wake Forest University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. By mid-August, school leaders were on Plan C: putting all the kids in the auditorium until the renovations were finished. Two days before the start of the school year, parents arrived at an open house and found the parking lot a muddy mess. Zhu said that while he was directing traffic that rainy evening, he overheard parents saying that the school wasn’t ready.
Zhu’s wife, Junlan Li, a veteran educator and TISA’s principal, also told the board that an incident inside the school during the open house did perhaps even more damage. A child with autism hit several other students, she said. The child’s parents had not disclosed the child’s needs, so the school was unprepared.
TISA had projected 144 students in its first year. Roughly 90 attended the open house, but only about half that showed up on the first day.
Zhu and Li tried several arguments to persuade the Charter School Review Board to let their school stay open. They pointed out that state law allows the board to grant exemptions from the minimum enrollment if there is a “compelling reason.” In this case, TISA’s leaders said, the reason was the school’s “unique student population”—almost a third of students had a disability or other need for specialized education.
Zhu described aggressive marketing plans and a commitment from the school’s landlord to defer rent, which would allow them to break even with just 50 students. He requested that the board delay closing the school until next summer even if a waiver was ruled out. “If there’s any way you think we can continue, we’d love to give it a try,” Zhu said.
Bruce Friend, the charter board’s chair, said he was skeptical that TISA could boost enrollment substantially so far into the school year. “I’m just gonna be honest with you,” said Friend, who is head of school at Pine Springs Preparatory Academy, one of North Carolina’s largest charter schools. “Your track record doesn’t suggest that that’s going to happen.”
Friend moved to revoke the school’s charter, effective at the end of December. The board, made up largely of people with experience founding or operating charter schools, voted unanimously in support.
Garcia hadn’t considered TISA’s financial viability when she was selecting a school. She chose it for its programming and schedule. Seeing Aracely so happy, she imagined the school a staple of her family’s life for years to come. She didn’t expect to have to find another one just weeks into the school year.
Charting a New Course
North Carolina was among the first states to permit privately run, publicly funded charter schools. In its 1996 authorizing law, the General Assembly laid out its aims: to provide more choice for parents, more educational opportunities for gifted and at-risk students in particular, and new professional opportunities for educators.
The proposition was more freedom to experiment in exchange for more accountability. Rules on how money could be spent and what lessons could be taught were looser. But if the schools failed to meet student performance standards, they could be shut down. Some level of instability was built into the system.
At first, no more than 100 charter schools were allowed across the state. Legislators removed the cap in 2011 after Republicans gained majorities in both chambers. The number of charter schools doubled over the next decade. Then growth began to slow down. After hitting a peak of 211 in 2023, the number of charter schools fell for the first time ever. But the climb resumed this year. There are now 221 charter schools across the state, including virtual academies.
Even during the height of the boom, schools were regularly closing. Most years, there was at least one; some years, as many as 10. Regulators forced 38 charter schools to close between 1998 and 2024 for reasons that included insufficient enrollment, untenable finances, and poor academic performance. Over the same period, 32 other schools chose to voluntarily give up their charters—three in their first operating year. Another two dozen approved charters never materialized as schools.
While established schools continue to expand, pushing overall charter school enrollment ever higher, new schools are struggling. Every one of the seven that opened in North Carolina this school year came up short of their enrollment projections. Liberty Charter Academy, also in High Point, projected 500 students, but had only 172 enrolled as of the beginning of October. Three other new schools reported October 1 enrollment under 100.
Ashley Logue has noticed new schools facing ever-greater headwinds over the eight years she has worked in the state Office of Charter Schools. In that time, three first-year schools had their charters revoked for failing to meet the state’s minimum enrollment requirement; two were in the past two years….
She also saw other signs of escalating distress: More boards with approved charters were delaying their school’s opening by a year or more or deciding to give up their charter before the school ever opened. New schools were, on average, missing their targets by higher percentages.
National trends have been following a similar trajectory, according to a report published this summer by the National Center for Charter School Accountability that asked, “Has the charter movement reached its saturation point?”
Logue, who is now the director of the Office of Charter Schools, said the pandemic shifted how many parents thought about school, and in subsequent years alternatives to traditional public schools multiplied. “Post COVID, parents are much more understanding of the options and also more willing to say, ‘OK, this option that my child had—whether it was a district school or something else—is not working. What are my other options?’”
The alternatives include abundant variants of homeschooling, magnet schools run by public school districts, and private schools ranging from tiny church-run operations to opulent college preparatory academies. Since 2023, the General Assembly has made a massive investment in subsidizing private school tuition—families of any income now qualify for Opportunity Scholarships, though not all private schools accept the vouchers.
Meanwhile, birth rates in many parts of the state are declining, and high housing prices have changed where families with children live. The combined effects have been hard for schools of all stripes to predict.
The problem is perhaps most acute for novice independent charter school operators, who are, almost by definition, optimistic. By the time their school is about to open, they have been working toward that goal for years, sometimes racking up significant debt in the process. TISA said in its application that it planned to take out a $210,000 loan with a five-year term and a 7% interest rate to fund its planning year.
Real-estate and financial constraints can have a strong influence on the enrollment projections that operators submit to Logue’s office and the Charter School Review Board. Friend, now the board’s chair, said that was his personal experience when he was preparing his application back in 2015.
He was trying to project enrollment two years out in one of the state’s fastest-growing communities, Holly Springs. “The truth of the matter is my projections were largely based on what the size of my facility was going to be, and the size of my facility was going to be largely based on how much money I could secure,” Friend said.
The board of every school that Logue has warned about low enrollment has come before the oversight board promising that they will make their numbers. “I call it unrealistic optimism,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that we’ve seen over the last couple of years that you wouldn’t want to happen to your school.”
In response, the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools has begun organizing new training for schools in the year-long, state-mandated planning period that follows a charter award. First-year schools will also be allowed to participate. “Having names on a list and people telling you they’re going to send their kid—that doesn’t mean much these days,” the association’s Executive Director Rhonda Dillingham said. “We’ve got to make sure that the new schools that are opening understand that and do everything in their power to market the school.”
Dillingham’s group also recently received a $53 million federal grant to help charter schools build out career development; science, technology, engineering, and math; artificial intelligence; and career and technical education programming. Some of that funding will go to new schools.
Logue has proposed several changes to the state’s oversight of charter schools to try to prevent closures that leave families scrambling for a new school for their child in the middle of the school year.
“TISA,” she said, “was a worst-case scenario.”
High Hopes
Pressed for first-year numbers, Zhu said they had almost 100 students registered, but it was hard to know how many would show up. He estimated no-shows at 30 to 40 percent.
TISA’s plans were exuberantly bullish from the start.
Its application for a charter describes dual-language immersion programs in four different languages by the school’s fifth year in operation.
The school would start by serving kindergarten through second grade and add one grade per year until it was a full K-8 school. More than 900 students were expected at full enrollment.
The application named three model schools—East Point Academy in Columbia, South Carolina, and East Voyager Academy and Elbert Edwin Waddell High School, which are both in Charlotte. But only the latter offers multiple languages, and it is a magnet school within the public school district, rather than an independent charter.
Above: In mid-November, a for-sale sign stood on the property that housed TISA. Right: Parent Dulce Garcia was sad to see the school close. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)
Mike Lally, the head of school at East Point, said in an interview that the prospect of running a school offering multiple languages was “scary.” “It’s difficult enough with HR and personnel to do Mandarin immersion,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine trying to manage that with multiple languages.”
The candidate pool for language-immersion teachers is small and would be smaller still if fluency in multiple languages was required, Lally said. On top of that, there is often extra administrative work related to immigration for those teachers.
Renee Mathews, the CEO and principal of East Voyager, was the founding principal of East Point and said the two schools had very different growth trajectories. The South Carolina school grew quickly, she said, because there was little competition at the time. The Charlotte charter school, facing more competition, has grown steadily, but much more slowly. It offers Spanish in addition to Mandarin, but only introductory classes that are limited to middle schoolers.
Li worked at both East Point and East Voyager, but consulted neither Matthews nor Lally as she prepared to open TISA, they said. Neither did Zhu, who was on the committee that helped to open East Voyager. One member of East Voyager’s board of directors was on TISA’s board for a time, but he declined an interview through Mathews.
In their charter application, TISA leaders cited the success of the charter school movement in the state as one reason to think their enrollment projection was sound. “While some may view this as a concern for too much competition, TISA’s case is different,” the application said. “If approved to open, TISA will be the only public school in Greensboro offering multilanguage immersion programs in Chinese, Japanese, French, German, and/or Spanish under the same roof. … TISA’s program is unique, innovative, and difficult to replicate. Therefore, competition should not be a concern in TISA’s case.” They indicated their break-even number was 138.
After school leaders couldn’t find acceptable property in Greensboro, they shifted their sights to High Point. The former church they settled on required a special use permit, which meant school leaders had to plead their case before the city council.
What city leaders most wanted to know during the March hearing was how many students TISA was expecting.
“We just want to build a very small school,” Zhu told them. “Because that’s always my dream. At a small school, teachers get to know everybody, give them individualized care, and particularly help them to learn the language.”
High Point’s planning staff recommended that the special use permit restrict the school’s enrollment to 250. TISA was arguing for up to 390 students, with a plan to have students arrive on a staggered basis each day to minimize traffic.
Minutes from a TISA board meeting three days earlier indicate the school had sent out acceptance notices to 76 families. Enrollment wasn’t meeting expectations, Li told the board. She noted that another new charter school, Liberty Charter, was also opening in High Point.
‘Came Out of Nowhere’
The families with children enrolled at TISA learned about the Charter School Review Board’s vote to revoke the school’s charter the following evening, on October 7.
“Please know that our staff and leadership team are fully committed to ensuring a smooth, supportive transition for every student and family in the coming months,” Li, the principal, wrote in the email, which said the school would close at the end of December.
Garcia was shocked. To her, the information “came out of nowhere.”
She had no idea that board members were discussing a shortfall of $58 million in September or that state charter school regulators had advised against TISA’s management structure.
A deeper look at public records tied to the school might have prompted additional questions about ethics and finances. TISA Board Chair Zhu is also a partner in LinguaVista, the for-profit company that owns the school’s property and holds its management contract. Additionally, he is president of TISA Child Care Center, a for-profit company with a contract to run the on-site preschool.
TISA said in its 2023 charter application that it “does not foresee any existing relationships that could pose actual or perceived conflicts if the application is approved.” Zhu was identified as the board chair, and Li was identified as the likely principal candidate. It made no mention of the fact that they are married.
North Carolina law allows charter schools to hire relatives of board members as long as the conflict is disclosed, and TISA’s board meeting minutes indicate that Li and Zhu left the room for certain discussions due to a conflict of interest.
But theminutes and a financial journal shared with some board members in February also show Zhu had deep involvement in managing the school’s finances—including scheduling $40,000 in payments to Jun-Chao Consulting, a company registered to his wife, for “supporting in planning year” and “writing charter.”
The board had also experienced high turnover. The only members named in the application that were still involved by late 2024 were Zhu and Hua Qin, who is described in the application as a certified public accountant. Records from the CPA oversight boards in North Carolina and South Carolina list no one by that name. (The Assembly tried to reach a Forsyth County resident by that name, but did not receive a reply.)
It’s not clear from the minutes how seriously the board considered contracting with companies unconnected to Zhu. Neither Li nor Zhu provided copies of full board packets and contracts in response to multiple requests from The Assembly. Li declined an interview; in response to detailed questions, Zhu provided a written statement that said TISA complied with all state disclosure requirements and followed the conflict-of-interest policy its board approved. Other board members either declined to speak with The Assembly or did not respond.
“Without subpoena powers, it is very difficult to figure out what is going on financially” at a charter school, particularly one with a for-profit management company, said Tom Kelley, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about charter schools and nonprofit law. While there are federal and state legal doctrines intended to prevent self-dealing, investigations are rare, he said.
The second email Garcia received about TISA’s closure really shocked her. That email, sent about 24 hours after the first, retracted many of Li’s previous assurances that school would continue as normal through the end of the year.
“Effective immediately,” there would be no more breakfast or lunch service, no transportation, and no before- or after-school care.
Garcia attended an emergency board meeting the following evening. Parents gathered in the school cafeteria to encourage the board to appeal.
Lisa Noda, an attorney who drove her children from Davidson County to attend TISA, went first. She told the board that her second-grade daughter, who has dyslexia, now loves to go to school and wants to read. Her younger daughter, who is in the preschool program and advanced academically, is also happy at TISA, Noda said. “Please consider appealing and allow students to finish.”October 15 was students’ last day at TISA. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)
Breanne Kraft said the teachers were so patient as her daughter, who has autism, processed her father leaving the family. “She does not want to leave. It hurts her and it hurts me,” Kraft said. “We both cried.”
Cailey Oates said, “To us, TISA is more than a school, it is a community.”
When it was her turn to speak, Garcia suggested things she could personally do to try to boost enrollment. She could hand out flyers and spread the word among Spanish speakers.
But Zhu told the parents that he did not see much of a chance to reverse the Charter School Review Board’s decision. “We told them everything, but it did not change their mind,” he said. “I am the saddest person. I sold my house to build the school.” (County records indicate the house listed on the school’s charter application is still owned by Zhu and Li.)
After a half-hour closed session, the board voted unanimously not to appeal.
The following week, the board held another meeting, voting unanimously to relinquish the charter. TISA would not keep operating through December as state regulators allowed; instead, October 15 would be students’ last day.
Left in the Lurch
Amanda Cook, a former public school teacher who served on the High Point City Council, immediately started to coordinate a meeting to help the families left in the lurch.
“I felt like with the number of kindergarteners that they had, there were a lot of families that had never been part of the school system before, so they hadn’t been through the process,” said Cook, who has since been appointed to the state House to replace Rep. Cecil Brockman.
On the day TISA closed, Guilford County Schools held an event at one of the district’s two Spanish-immersion schools, Kirkman Park Elementary School, to introduce parents to other local options.
Teachers and other staff were available to translate, Cook said. The district also brought people to answer questions about transportation, enrollment, exceptional children’s services, and English language support. As of mid-November, 18 former TISA students have enrolled in district schools, a spokesperson for Guilford County Schools said.
Garcia learned at the open house that she could send Aracely to Northwood Elementary School, where a weekly Chinese class was offered. There was also a spot for her son and room for both children in the afterschool program. She enrolled them the next day, but Garcia was still out of work for the better part of a week.
Aracely Lopez Garcia flourished at TISA, her mother said. She credited her swift academic progress and close friendships to TISA’s small class sizes. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)
Noda lost much more work time getting her daughters resettled. She felt that Davidson County schools did not have the resources to do right by her daughter with autism and dyslexia, so she looked into private options.
“My older child was out of school for a month where we were trying to find something, and she did trials at different schools that did not accept her because of the needs that she has,” Noda said.
She ultimately enrolled her older daughter at another school in High Point, The Piedmont School, which serves children with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, and received some state funds toward the private school’s tuition. Her younger daughter now attends a private pre-K program.
Zhu and Li received a bill from the state the same day the board voted to relinquish the charter. TISA had received state funding based on its projected enrollment; charter schools that end up enrolling fewer students have to give a proportional amount of money back. TISA now owes the state $112,789.
LinguaVista, the for-profit company that owns the school property, is facing legal action for another apparently unpaid bill. In late November, Dobbins Electric Company Inc. filed a claim of lien against the school property, asserting that it’s owed $68,351.86.
In mid-December, after repeatedly reminding Li that the school is obliged to disclose public records, The Assembly received an email from the address tisabankruptcyperiod@tisanc.org. The email, signed “TISA Board of Trustees,” said the board was “in transition and in the process of retaining bankruptcy counsel.” No public records requests would be fulfilled in the meantime.
Carli Brosseau is a K-12 education reporter for The Assembly. She previously worked at The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter and a ProPublicaLocal Reporting Network fellow.
Jan Resseger recently read Arne Duncan’s cheerful hopes for the Trump education agenda and encouraged the public to look at the bright side. Then Jan remembered Arne’s disastrous Race to the Top, which even the U.S. Department of Education rated as a waste of money, and Jan looked elsewhere for advice. She found Kevin Welner’s sage thoughts.
My view is that Trump, his budget director Russell Vought, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon ultimately hope to turn all federal funding into block grants to the states, no strings attached. No money dedicated to students with disabilities, no money for schools enrolling large numbers of low-income students. Federal regulations drafted by hard-hearted zealots of the Trump administration will be directed to vouchers, charters, cyber schooling and home schooling.
Don’t be fooled: The Trump administration wants to destroy public schools.
In a recent column in the Washington Post, Arne Duncan suggested that even Democrat-led states can opt into the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax credit school voucher program and redirect the funds into public schools or at least into programs that support achievement in public schools as a way to replace COVID American Rescue Plan funds that have run out. “This solution is a no-brainer,” he declares.
Here is Arne’s prescription: “The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special education services and learning technology. For both current governors and gubernatorial candidates, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate. By opting in, a governor unlocks these resources for students in their state. Some Democratic leaders have hesitated, however, worried that the program could be seen as undermining public schools, since private scholarships are also eligible. But that misses the point.”
Remember that Arne Duncan launched Race to the Top, which brought No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime into the Obama years by offering gigantic federal grants as a bribe for states to turn around their lowest scoring 5% of public schools with rigid improvement plans—with the schools that failed to improve being closed or charterized—and with the teachers being held accountable and punished if they couldn’t quickly raise test scores. Because none of Arne’s programs worked out, I am hesitant to take Arne Duncan’s advice.
Welner explains that the One Big Beautiful Bill requires the governors of the states to opt into the federal tax credit vouchers (or choose to opt out). As Welner lists how the money can be used, it is clear that the federal dollars can be spent on private education but that, in addition, some programs supporting public schools themselves or their students could qualify: “Under the OBBB, nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) in states opting into the program are authorized to pool the donated money and then hand out “scholarships” for students’ ‘qualified elementary or secondary education expense[s].’ This is limited to the expenses allowed for Coverdell Savings Accounts,¹ which are tied to school-related needs, such as tuition, fees, and academic tutoring; special needs services in the case of a special needs beneficiary; books, supplies and other equipment; computer technology, equipment, and Internet access for the use of the beneficiary; and, in some cases, room and board, uniforms, transportation, and extended day (after-school) programs.”
Welner continues: “This idea of ensuring that each state could implement the program in ways that allow all flexibility is consistent with the Trump administration’s vociferous embrace of “returning education quite simply back to the states where it belongs.” Welner, however, remains skeptical that the Trump administration really plans to return control of federal dollars back to the states:
“Unfortunately, the U.S. Treasury Department rulemaking is likely to deny states the promised flexibility, notwithstanding the administration’s rhetoric about ‘returning education to the states.’ While the law’s ardent supporters may want Democratic governors to participate, they don’t want to give them the flexibility permitted by the law itself… (T)he key issues for state leaders, particularly the governors who will make the opt-out or opt-in decision in most states, involve whether they can shape the program as it is implemented in their states.” Welner lists key concerns for governors and for those of us who have watched the damage done by the voucher programs now established by many state legislatures. “Governors will want to know… if they can:
“Place requirements on SGOs involving reporting, governance, transparency, access, non-discrimination, profiteering, and prioritization of students with greater need;
“Require that schools and other vendors… be accessible to students and not engage in discrimination against protected groups of students, including members of the LGBTQ+ community;
“Put quality-control policies in place to weed out the lowest-quality of these vendors;
“Limit the program to just one or two of the Coverdell categories, ideally research-based options such as high-impact tutoring and after-school programs.”
Welner warns, however, that powerful advocates at the federal level are “pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of largely unregulated voucher programs.”
He recounts many of the problems with state level private school tuition vouchers: Josh Cowen’s research documenting low academic achievement in voucher programs in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio; the failure of voucher programs to protect students’ civil rights; “free-exercise” justification for public dollars diverted to religious schools; failure to provide programs for disabled students; diversion of massive state dollars to support private school tuition for wealthy students; and states’ failure to regulate teacher qualifications, curriculum, equal access, and oversight of tax dollars.
Welner thinks governors might do well to wait to make the decision about opting in until they can review the formal guidance which will eventually be provided by the U.S. Treasury Department. “(F)or state leaders who are tempted to opt in, that decision could be publicly announced as conditional on the Treasury regulations allowing the state the flexibility to include specified access, quality, and non-discrimination protections for the state’s students. “
He concludes: “In sum, the federal scholarship tax credit may look to some state leaders like an opportunity to secure additional resources for students, but the risks are profound. The structure of the law, coupled with the likely direction of Treasury rulemaking, points toward a program designed not to empower states but to constrain them—pushing states into a rigid, federally controlled voucher system that undermines educational equity and quality and presents long-run threats to the fiscal stability of public schools.”
If you have ever wondered why I am crazy about Peter Greene, wonder no more. Just read this post that appeared on his blog. Peter is consistently smart, funny, wise, and insightful. He has a way with words. He is unerring in spotting phonies. He is fearless. Let me say it out loud: I love Peter Greene!
He wrote about the article that exposed Duncan’s true views. Until now, some of us had only inferred who he is. Now we know. Duncan”political advice” to Democrats–adopt Republican policies– is hilarious in light of Tuesday’s election results: across the nation, Democrats won school board races, and every Moms for Liberty candidate lost.
Peter Greene writes:
Mind you, on education, Duncan was always the kind of Democrat largely indistinguishable from a Republican, but with his latest print outburst (in the Washington Post, because of course it was), he further reduces the distance between himself and his successor as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.
It’s yet another example of reformsters popping up to argue that what’s really needed in education is a return to all the failed reform policies of fifteen years ago. I don’t know what has sparked this nostalgia– have they forgotten, or do they just think we have forgotten, or do they still just not understand how badly test-and-punish flopped, how useless the Common Core was, and how school choice has had to abandon claims that choice will make education better in this country.
But here come Duncan and Elorza with variations on the same old baloney.
First up– chicken littling over NAEP scores. They’re dipping! They’re low! And they’ve been dipping ever since 2010s. Whatever shall we do?
Who do Duncan and Elorza think holds the solution? Why, none other than Donald Trump.
Seriously. They are here to pimp for the federal tax credit voucher program, carefully using the language that allows them to pretend that these vouchers aren’t vouchers or tax shelters.
The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.
The encourage governors to “unlock these resources” as if these are magic dollars stored in a lockbox somewhere and not dollars that are going to be redirected from the United States treasury to land instead in some private school’s bank account.
Democratic governors are reluctant to get into a program that “could be seen as undermining public schools.” But hey– taking these vouchers “doesn’t take a single dollar from state education budgets” says Duncan, sounding exactly like DeVos when she was pushing the same damned thing. And this line of bullshit:
It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.
“At no cost to taxpayers” is absolute baloney. Every dollar is a tax dollar not paid to the government, so the only possible result must be either reduction in services, reduction in subsidies, or increase in the deficit. I guess believing in Free Federal Money is a Democrat thing.
The “support students in public and nonpublic settings” is carefully crafted baloney language as well. Federal voucher fans keep pushing the public school aspect, but then carefully shading it as money spent on tutors or uniforms or transportation and not actual schools. And they are just guessing that any of that will be acceptable because the rules for these federal vouchers aren’t written yet.
Duncan and Elorza want to claim that this money will, “in essence,” replace the disappearing money from the American Rescue Plan Act. “In essence” is doing Atlas-scale lifting here because, no, it will not. The voucher money will be spent in different ways by different people on different stuff. They are not arguing that this money will help fund public schools– just that it might fund some stuff that is sort of public education adjacent.
But how about some “analysis” from Education Reform Now, which claims that the potential scale is significant.” They claim that “the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year,” drifting ever closer to “flat out lie” territory, because the federal vouchers won’t “generate” a damned cent. Pretending these numbers are real, that’s $3.1 billion in tax dollars that will go to SGOs in the state instead of the federal government. It’s redirected tax revenue, not new money. Will the feds just eat that $3.1 billion shortfall, or cut, say, education funding to California? Next time I get a flat tire, will I generate a new tire from the trunk? I think not.
In classic Duncan, he would like you to know that not following his idea makes you a Bad Person. Saying no to the federal vouchers is a “moral failure.”
Next up: Political advice.
Over the past decade, Democrats have watched our party’s historical advantage on education vanish.
Yeah, Arne, it’s more than a decade, and it has happened because you and folks like you have decided that attacking and denigrating the public education system would be a great idea. You and your ilk launched and supported policies based on the assumption that all problems in school were the sole treatable cause of economic and social inequity in this country, and that those problems were the result of really bad teachers, so a program of tests followed by punishment would make things better in schools (and erase poverty, too).
But now the GOP states are getting higher NAEP scores, so that means… something?
This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground. To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.
Yes, Democrats– you can beat the Republicans by supporting Republican policies. And that “we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up” thing? You had a chance to do that, and you totally blew it. Defund, dismantle and privatize public schools was a lousy approach. It’s still a lousy approach.
Opting in to the federal tax credit scholarship program isn’t about abandoning Democratic values — it’s about fulfilling them.
When it comes to public education, it’s not particularly clear what Democratic values even are these days, and my tolerance for party politics is at an all time low. But I am quite sure that the interests of students, families, teachers, and public education are not served by having the GOP offer a shit sandwich and the Democrats countering with, “We will also offer a shit sandwich, but we will say nice things about it and draw a D on it with mayonnaise.”
We have always heard that Arne Duncan is a nice guy, and I have no reason to believe that’s not true. But what would really be nice would be for him to go away and never talk about education ever again. Just go have a nice food truck lunch with Betsy DeVos.
If you read only one article about what happened to the students, teachers and schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this is the one. Ashana Bigard is a parent of students in New Orleans. Elizabeth K. Jeffers taught in the NOLA district.
Turning New Orleans into an all-charter district may have raised test scores–although New Orleans is still a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states–but as you will learn by reading this article, the transformation was a disaster for students, their families, their communities, and their teachers.
This article was produced by Our Schools. Ashana Bigard is the director of Amplify Justice, an educational advocate, and author of Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20. A dedicated mother of three, she serves as an education fellow for the Progressive magazine’s Public Schools Advocate project and is a director-producer of numerous video and audio productions. Follow her on Bluesky @AshanaBigard. Elizabeth K. Jeffers, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans who began teaching in pre-Katrina New Orleans public schools. Her scholarship focuses on school choice and community-based inquiry. Her research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and other scholarly journals. Follow her on Bluesky @ekjeffersphd.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, numerous articles and opinion pieces have appeared in prominent media outlets touting the supposed improvement of the city’s public school system since the storm.
Katrina’s immediate aftermath saw the state of Louisiana disempower the democratically elected school board by taking over the management of 107 out of 128 schools. This led to the termination of 7,600—mainly Black and women—teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, clerical workers, principals, and other permanent employees, and the eventual conversion of all of the city’s public schools into privately managed charters.
A Washington Post column, “‘Never Seen Before:’ How Katrina Set off an Education Revolution,” by British journalist Ian Birrell, proclaimed the transformation a “miracle.” Another opinion piece in The 74, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools” by Ravi Gupta, the founder and former CEOof a charter school network, stated that the New Orleans school system shaped by Katrina was “a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised.”
As proof of their arguments, both authors pointed to a June 2025 report, “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons” by Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Pulling from the data presented in that study, Birrell said the case for declaring New Orleans-style education reform a “remarkable success” is “pretty definitive,” and Gupta called this supposed success an “unequivocal conclusion.” As a longtime youth advocate and community leader and an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, who was a public school teacher in the city, we invite you to consider whether this data alone proves that New Orleans public schools and the families they serve are better off after 20 years of “reform.”
Although Gupta warns against “[falling] into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms,” we’d like to tell you about Rio, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. Rio attended 12 different schools in New Orleans, many of which were shut down suddenly, before he finally graduated from a school that is now also closed. Rio’s story is not atypical of the human costs of the New Orleans school system, where closures are a defining feature and evidence that the disaster Katrina wrought on the schools is still happening.
Forced to traverse the fragmented charter system that has replaced the public system of neighborhood schools, New Orleans students are often traumatized bymultiple school closures. Decades of researchattest to the academic, emotional, and economic harms that result from severing social connections that families, faculty, and staff have had with schools and with one another.
For instance, obtaining a job reference letter from a former teacher should be simple for students to do, but that task becomes an obstacle course for many young adults from New Orleans, like Rio. Black Man Rising, a national group providing outreach and mentorship for Black youth, had to intervene to help him obtain the letter that made the difference between him being able to financially support himself and being just another addition to the statistics of Black youth who are unemployed and incarcerated.
Rio’s story illustrates a central paradox of the New Orleans system: Black families and communities continue to be severed and displaced as a result of failed leadership at the federal, local, and state levels. While the storm may be over, the disaster continues. On the other hand, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.
The near obliteration of democratic public schooling
In addition to severing families from their neighborhood schools and educators, Katrina reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation in ways that would shock most Americans.
New York University professor Domingo Morel contends in his bookTakeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy that state takeovers do not generally improve test scores or graduation rates; instead, they are about removing political power, as Black school boards have historically functioned as entryways for Black political leaders.
In a similar vein, Louisiana legislators, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, passed Act 35 in November 2005, which expanded the state-run Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction over New Orleans public schools during an emergency session when voters were dispersed across the country and many were still searching for their loved ones. The new laws removed the parent and teacher approvals required for charter conversions.
State legislation also enabled the termination of the majority Black teaching force, gutting the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers, Local 527), and further removing obstacles for top-down reform. Research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kevin L. Henry and his co-author has shown how the “charter school authorization and application process” used in post-Katrina New Orleans “reproduces white dominance.” While another study published in the journal Urban Education points to how charter schools consolidate power “in ways that limit local Black political power.”
Consider the example of Kira Orange Jones, whose case perfectly illustrates how educational democracy has been dismantled. In 2011, Jones raised $478,000for her Board of Elementary and Secondary Education campaign—much of it from out-of-state donors connected to Democrats for Education Reform and charter school advocacy groups. Her opponent raised just $19,000, creating a 25-to-1 spending disadvantage. But the campaign money was just the beginning. Jones simultaneously served as executive director of Teach For America’s (TFA) Greater New Orleans chapter while sitting on the board that approved TFA’s $1 million state contract with Louisiana. When ethics complaints were filed in 2012, the Louisiana Ethics Board overruled its own staff’s recommendation that Jones choose between her TFA position and her board seat.
While NOLA Public Schools mandates charter school governance boards to include an alumnus or a parent, legal guardian, or grandparent, who is either elected or appointed, Katrina school reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation. Parents often don’t find out when school board meetings are happening, let alone have access to board members’ email addresses or phone numbers to voice concerns. Even local reporters who tried to obtain basic contact information for charter school board members have been stonewalled. There is no state requirement that charter school boards meet at times that are convenient for working parents to attend.
The absence of neighborhood schools is an additional obstacle for parents who rely on public transportation. And although charter schools seemingly returned to an elected school board in 2018, the public has virtually no control over individual charter schools, which maintain complete autonomy over curricula, calendars, certification requirements, contracts, and daily operations.
Shadow suspensions and ‘behavior problems’
Louisiana has long been among the states with the highest rates of student suspensions and expulsions, and Black students are more than twice as likely to be suspended compared to white students and receive longer suspensions for identical infractions, according to an analysis of 2001to 2014 figures by Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. In New Orleans, suspension and expulsion rates rose sharply after the storm but then stabilized. Nevertheless, some charter schools continued to suspend and expel high percentages of students.
But that’s just the official data. More recently, several parents have reported that their children are being sent home from school without receiving official suspension papers. Elizabeth’s field notes attest to students’ reports of one charter school network sending students to “the RC room” (restorative center) where they are forced to sit in cubicles, complete detention assignments, and write apology letters in a secluded room. This shadow suspension system allows schools to push out Black students without creating the paper trail that might trigger oversight or intervention. Children lose days or weeks of education in bureaucratic limbo, with no formal process and no recourse. And large numbers of students, often labeled as “behavior problems,” remain enrolled in alternative schools, rather than mainstream degree programs, according to state data.
Community-rooted educators replaced by managers
New Orleans teachers once lived in their communities. Most were career educators who taught generations of children, creating lasting bonds that extended far beyond the classroom.
Ashana experienced this personally at a small school called New Orleans Free School. As someone who is extremely dyslexic, she felt inadequate throughout most of her educational life until she encountered teachers like Woody, Janice, Jeanette, and Jim—two of whom, Jeanette and Jim, have since passed away. Woody still leaves encouraging comments under articles she has published, telling her he is proud of her. He, along with the others, encouraged her and insisted she could be brilliant despite her spelling difficulties. They told her she could be a writer. They emphasized that we all have different skill sets that we can develop, and that none of us is perfect, but that we can practice and grow.
This encouragement didn’t end when Ashana left Free School. The advice and support continue today. That’s what it means to have authentic relationships with your teachers. That’s what it means to be rooted in your community. Unfortunately, Ashana didn’t have the opportunity to send her children to that school to be educated by those incredible educators. The school that gave her a love of learning shut down.
The structure of charter schools severs critical bonds between schools and families. For instance, in her book Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20 Ashana recounts a teacher reaching out to her for resources to help with one of her students years before the storm. The child’s mother, who worked two jobs as a housekeeper and restaurant server, struggled to care for her seven children.
Her nine-year-old son often arrived at school dirty and disheveled because their washing machine had broken, and despite the mother’s instructions, the children didn’t wash their uniforms in the tub while she worked overnight shifts. Although the mother worked tirelessly, her extremely low reading level meant she was unaware of how to apply for assistance programs that could have helped her family. Most importantly, she probably didn’t believe she qualified for help. This teacher understood the family’s circumstances and worked to connect them with resources rather than simply reporting the situation to authorities.
This kind of close relationship between educators and families has become increasingly rare in the Katrina experiment. For instance, Ashana encountered a similar situation that ended differently. A family facing tough times was reported to the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) multiple times for neglect. When OCFS attempted to provide services, the mother, terrified that her children would be taken and placed in foster care as she had been, and having suffered abuse in that system, fled Orleans Parish with her children. She moved them to a motel in St. Bernard Parish, leaving everything behind. The children weren’t enrolled in school for almost a year until someone tracked them down and helped them return to the city and reintegrate into the school.
Somehow, punitive measures for Black parents and children have been equated with success—which raises the question: What exactly is the reform proponents’ definition of success, and what was the goal from the outset?
The current system has replaced community-based educators with a top-heavy administrative structure. New Orleans charter schools spend significantly more money on administration, even as teacher shortages remain high. For instance, InspireNola Charter Schools, which only manages seven schools, paid three executives a total of $667,000 for the fiscal year 2023.
Meanwhile, the constant “churning” of schools and the absence of a collective bargaining agreement have led to a larger system that dehumanizes teachers. In fact, the RSD required certified teachers who chose to return to their pre-Katrina schools to complete a “basic skills test” (akin to a literacy test).
But that was only the beginning of the disaster for New Orleans educators. One Black veteran explained to Elizabeth: “The RSD was bouncing teachers around like balls.” That is, the state takeover district issued letters labeling numerous experienced teachers as “surplus” when their schools transformed into charters. Many of these schools recruited inexperienced teachers who were expendable, accepted lower salaries, and could be programmed to adhere to the ideology of reform. The absence of collective bargaining power, arbitrary closures, and charter takeovers eventually led many career teachers to “choose” between commuting several hours a day to schools in outlying parishes and changing careers. Twenty years after the district’s purging of its unionized teachers (the United Teachers of New Orleans), only five of the city’s 90 charter schools are unionized.
In another example, Ashana recounts in her book about how a teacher whom she advocated for brought a doctor’s note to her school’s chief financial officer to document a urinary tract infection and request restroom breaks. The administrators emailed her to offer reimbursement for adult diapers. This example of denying teachers basic respect and humanity illustrates what is seen as a continual disaster. If educators are treated this way, imagine the conditions students face.
The cruel reality of ‘choice’
The current “choice” system has created impossible decisions for families. Consider the mother in New Orleans East who must choose each morning which of her two children to accompany to their bus stop, because the system doesn’t allow siblings to attend the same school. She would have to explain to her young daughter, who is clutching a bright orange whistle for safety, “Today I’m going to stand with your brother, but tomorrow it’ll be your turn.” The little girl, frightened at the prospect of standing alone, pleads with her mother, but is told, “I’m sorry, you know this is just the way it is for right now.”
This mother, with tears in her eyes as her children clung to her legs, captured the cruel reality. With this new choice system, she doesn’t get to choose to have both of her children sent to the same school. She gets to choose which one she can stand with every morning. That’s no choice at all.
Ashana Bigard is a parent activist in New Orleans. From her perspective as a parent leader and as the parent of a child with special needs, the New Orleans experiment has been a very expensive flop.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the nation’s most radical education overhaul has produced stunning inequality alongside modest test gains
As I sit in Bricolage Academy’s office, frustrated but trying to remain pleasant, I’m having the same conversation again about my son. He’s on the autism spectrum. He is high performing, extremely quiet, and sweet. Despite his IEP, he wasn’t receiving the required services. The special education coordinator had quit in frustration, the school counselor was cut due to budget issues, and my fifth-grader was falling through the cracks.
I’m not just any parent. I’m an advocate who has worked with the CEO since the school’s creation. I have written for national magazines about our system’s problems and challenged the school’s “diversity by design” narrative. Yet here I was, fighting for basic services. If this is my experience, imagine what average parents face.
The Numbers Don’t Add Up
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina replaced New Orleans’ traditional public schools with the nation’s first all-charter system, the grand experiment presents a troubling paradox. With half the students and double the funding, the system has achieved modest academic gains while disempowering the communities it promised to serve.
“When you have half the students and twice the resources, you should see transformational results,” says Neil Ranu, a civil rights attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Instead, we see money flowing upward to administrators while classrooms struggle.”
Antonio Travis, director of Black Man Rising, mentored several affected students. “There was shame, self-blame. Many felt they wouldn’t be successful in college.” Families canceled graduation celebrations, uncertain about the future.
Right now, Louisiana U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey is currently presiding over the dissolution of the special-needs consent decree related to New Orleans schools. Because New Orleans public schools have no oversight, and no unions to fight to ensure the law is followed, we, as parents of children with special needs, have to fight to get our stories to the judge so hopefully he will keep it in place.
Walk through charter schools and notice what’s absent or insufficient. Arts programs have declined; fewer offer pre-kindergarten, and students average 35-minute bus commutes. Basic skills, such as cursive instruction—required by state law for signing legal documents—are often ignored. “The children only learn what’s tested,” observes one advocate. “Everything else gets cut.”
“When people ask if they should move out of the city for better education,” says one advocate, “my answer is: if you can afford to move, you should. This system is not built to support our children.”
The comment hangs like an indictment not just of a school system, but of a 20-year experiment that promised everything and delivered prosperity for some, displacement for others, and continued struggle for families who need excellent public education most.
Ashana Bigard is a fifth generation New Orleanian and lifelong resident of the Crescent City. A mother of three, Ashana is a tireless advocate for equity and social justice, especially in her work advocating for children and families in New Orleans and Louisiana. She leads the Education Justice Project of New Orleans, where she organizes and advocates for the rights of students and parents. Ashana is an adult ally advisor to United Students of New Orleans. She also serves as a Community Faculty member with Tulane University’s Center for Public Service.
I was born in 1967 in Chalmette, Louisiana (St. Bernard Parish), a suburb of New Orleans so close to the city that is is the actual site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
I did not know that my father moved to Chalmette in the mid-1950s as part of the “white flight” from New Orleans.
I did not know why the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line was so starkly white on the St. Bernard side and black on the Orleans side.
I did not know that the black teachers at my all-white elementary and middle schools were part of an effort for local officials to dodge federal mandates to racially integrate the schools (as in integrating the student body).
(I do remember seeing what I think was one black student in the special education, self-contained classroom of my elementary school– such an unusual, remarkable event that it puzzled my young mind to see him as a student assistant in the cafeteria, and the moment remains clearly in my memory to this day.)
I did not know that when I moved to a more rural section of St. Bernard Parish as I started high school that the African-American residents “down the road” knew full well of the dangers of trying to reside in certain sections of the parish (namely, Chalmette and Arabi).
I did not know that the school-superintendent uncle of one of my favorite teachers tried circa 1961 to create an “annex school” near the Arabi-New Orleans city line in order to enable white parents in the city to avoid racial integration by using school vouchers from New Orleans to enroll their children in an all-white public school just across the parish line.
I did not know that the proliferation of parochial schools in New Orleans was fueled by white flight from the New Orleans public schools.
I did not know that the reason I attended an all-girls public middle- and high school was for local officials to try to sham-integrate the St. Bernard public schools but to keep “those black boys away from our white girls.”
There’s a lot that I did not know and did not begin to learn until I was in my twenties and started asking questions.
But there were a lot of lessons that many white adults in my life tried to instill in me, lessons that indeed needed some serious questioning:
“You know property values will drop if the blacks start moving into a neighborhood.”
“It is better for a white woman to have a physically-abusive white boyfriend or husband than a black one, even if he does treat her well.”
“Interracial marriage is cause for a family disowning a child.”
“The city is a wreck because blacks are lazy and destroy everything.”
As I began reading about New Orleans officials’ cross-generational efforts to obliterate the black middle class in New Orleans (by, for example, by destroying multiple black owned businesses in order to build both the Desire housing project in 1956 and construct Interstate 10 in 1966), I felt like I had been lied to for decades– and my views as a white child and young adult repeatedly manipulated in order to purposely cement in me a sense of white superiority that no amount of personal maturity would ever shake.
Nevertheless, I am happy to say that such twisted, misplaced superiority is indeed and forever shaken in me and shown to be the mammoth lie that it is– the very lie that happens to fuel the white saviors who would impose themselves on black communities– including the center of the community:
The community school.
The community should be the final word on its schools, and when it is, those schools are successful, even in the face of racially-imposed hardship and intentional, multi-generational deprivation of basic resources, including physical space, current textbooks, and even ready supplies of toilet paper.
Such is the story of George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans– a school created as part of a school complex and housing project and build in New Orleans, Louisiana, to intentionally be a segregated school despite its opening post-Brown vs. Board of Education.
In her book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press), Dr. Kristen Buras offers to readers a detailed history and daily life of G. W. Carver High School in New Orleans, from its inception to its white-savior closure in 2005, post-Katrina, when the state of Louisiana refused to grant the returning Carver community a charter to operate their own school. Buras details what no pro-charter, education reformer discussed at any length as regards traditionally-black New Orleans public schools: the repeated, intentional, multi-generational, systematic fiscal neglect of both the schools and the black community in New Orleans.
In contrast, Buras not only discusses these issues; she brings them to life through her numerous interviews with Carver faculty and staff, a life that begins even before Carver High School opened its doors in the 1958-59 school year.
Right out of the gate, the community served by Carver High School– families residing in the Desire Housing Project– had to face the reality that the project homes were poorly constructed and were starting to fall apart due to a lack of concrete foundations on swampland, no less.
Indeed, the location of what was known as the “Carver Complex” was originally a Maroon colony for escaped African slaves in a backswamp area that 1973 Carver graduate describes as “really not made for residential living.”
Separate was not equal, but to the Carver community, it was theirs, and in the midst of profound racism, the faculty and staff at Carver High devoted themselves to their students and the students’ families, who also happened to be their neighbors.
What speaks loudly to the teacher commitment to Carver High students, as Buras notes, is their multi-decade commitment. Despite being chronically underfunded and under-maintained across its almost-fifty years pre-Katrina, Carver High School had a very low teacher turnover.
In What We Stand to Lose, readers are introduced to the precise and disciplined teachings of music teacher Yvonne Busch, who was known for offering free music lessons during summer break. Former student Leonard Smith produced a documentary about Busch, who retired in 1983 after a 32-years at Carver. We learn of the 38-year career of social studies teacher, Lenora Condoll, who wanted so much for her students to experience the larger world that she organized fundraisers to take her students on Close-Up trips to Washington, DC, and who, on a practical note, showed students that they could make a dressy wardrobe out of a few basic items, including her “black, cashmere skirt.” We meet Enos Hicks, head coach of track and football and athletic director once Carver High opened. By that time, Hicks had been teaching for twenty years already. When Hicks’ students saw “his bag of medals” for track and field, they believed that they, too, could excel and receive their own medals.
These are real teachers whose legacy is undeniable among Carver alumni. They inspired their students to hold their heads high in self-respect despite the cultural pressures and dangers to be pressed into a Whites Only mold of “forever less-than.”
Carver High School was at most 30 minutes from my own high school. I had no idea such quality against the odds was so nearby.
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