Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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SHOCKER! Massive Charter Scandal Stretches from Ohio to Florida

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2017 //
17

The Akron Beacon-Joirnal reports on a multi-state charter scandal.

“The founder of an Akron-area charter school company is accused of using thousands of dollars parents paid for student lunches and uniforms and millions more from Ohio and Florida taxpayers to fund home mortgages, plastic surgery, extensive world travel, credit card debt and more.

“Criminal charges filed last week in Florida against Marcus May also allege he improperly used private and public funds earmarked for students’ education to expand his charter school empire in Columbus, Akron, Cleveland and Dayton.

“Florida State Attorney William “Bill” Eddins brought the charges of racketeering and organized fraud against May, the founder of Newpoint Education Partners and Cambridge Education, a Fairlawn company that manages about 20 charter schools in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Akron, Youngstown, Canton and Cleveland.

“In a prepared statement provided to the Beacon Journal on Friday, Cambridge Executive Director John Stack said: “My co-owners and I asked for and today accepted Mr. May’s resignation as managing member of Cambridge. We are now in discussions to remove him completely from ownership in the company because we feel it’s in the best interest of our schools.

“Despite this distraction, my colleagues at Cambridge and I will continue to focus on our core mission and the students we serve as we have always done.”

“Cincinnati businessman Steven Kunkemoeller also was charged in the First Judiciary Circuit, a regional court in Florida. Kunkemoeller is a longtime business partner of May, according to a Beacon Journal/Ohio.com report from December and a multi-state investigation that included help from the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office.

“Kunkemoeller was arrested Wednesday in Florida. May’s attorney has reportedly talked with authorities there. Neither man could be reached for comment.

“The Florida prosecutor alleges that the men fabricated invoices, embellished enrollment, misappropriated public funds and created an elaborate network of limited liability companies in order to bilk the federal and state governments, as well as parents and students.

“In Akron, where Cambridge manages Towpath Trail High School, Middlebury Academy and Colonial Prep Academy, school board members are taking caution but not jumping to conclusions.

“We are keeping a close eye on it and discussing alternatives if they are needed,” said Ron McDaniel, president of Towpath Trail High School. “But we need to be responsible and not make snap decisions. Our schools are running well and run responsibly. We verify things better than the Florida schools did from what I understand.”

“The mark up

“School and business records obtained by the Beacon Journal and detailed by a forensic accountant working on the case show that May and Kunkemoeller marked up the price of services and supplies provided to the charter schools they managed in Ohio and Florida, sometimes more than doubling the cost of school uniforms, desks, computers, chairs and website design.

“Florida investigators questioned the vendors who sold the goods and could find “no apparent business reason” for the mark ups. May and Stack, Cambridge’s executive director, have said that the schools pay more upfront for more flexible financing terms.

“Fabricated invoices

“Items listed on invoices, from iPads to furniture, could not be found when Florida investigators swept schools for evidence of how public dollar were spent…

“Property and bank records reviewed by investigators showed May and his wife, Mary May, purchased a Florida home soon after “rebate” payments began. In 2014, two payments of $175,000 were applied to Kunkemoeller’s mortgage and the May’s home equity line of credit. Investigators traced the money to a laundry list of other non-public expenses, including $381,631 for credit cards, $207,415 for Marcus May and his family, $52,388 for a homeowner’s association fees (including swimming pool services), $4,735 taken as cash, personal loans to other people, a $10,000 jet ski from Barney’s Motorcycle Sales in St. Petersburg, $5,000 to the Fairlawn Country Club, $11,000 for plastic surgery and additional money for trips to Amsterdam, the British Virgin Islands, Brussels, Cancun, China, France, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Japan, Los Cabos, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Italy.”

Florida officials are investigating; Ohio officials don’t seem to care.

The story goes on to detail massive fraud, double-billing, and other misappropriation of public money.

When will the mainstream media report this story? We know that Betsy DeVos won’t care. As long as parents are choosing these schools, why worry about the money?

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

Jeff Bryant Wins “Project Censored” Award for His Article on the Walmart Takeover of Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2017 //
24

Jeff Bryant has won one of the annual Project Censored awards for his brilliant article about the malign intrusion of Walmart into public education.

We may differ about which person is “the worst in the World,” but if there were a competition for the “Worst Corporation in the World,” Walmart would definitely be at or near the top. They treat their workers horribly. They fight unions. They fought paying a living wage or even a minimum wage. I have heard that Walmart workers are given advice about how to apply for food stamps and welfare.

But that’s not all. Walmart destroys Main Street. It undercuts all the Mom-and-Pop stores by offering shoddy foreign-made shlock and drives them out of business. Mom and Pop, who once lived in dignity, are lucky if they can get a job as a greeter at Walmart. The small towns of America are being hollowed out by Walmart’s cut-throat competition. If zwalmart doesn’t get the profit it expected, it closes, leaving behind the devastated small towns where the closed shops are for rent.

The Waltons, the richest family in America, have placed their bets and their billions squarely behind charter schools. They would support vouchers too, but charters are easier as their preferred method of cutting down public education, which the Waltons despise. They not only fund new charters and existing charters, they give millions to TFA and to mainstream media outlets with the hope that they can buy good coverage.

If I found a magic lantern and were granted three wishes, one of them would be that all our billionaires lost their billions. That would be the best hope for our democracy.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Carol Burris: The Broken Promises and Scams of the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2017 //
15

Carol Burris notes in this article that the NAACP passed a resolution last year demanding a moratorium on new charters until charters cleaned up their actioms and policies.

Instead of doing some self-examination and trying to right what was wrong, the charter apologists attacked the NAACP.

Burris reviews some of the notable charter scams and corruption in the past year or so.

Back in the 1990s, when I was a Charter fan, I believed that charters would cost less money (no bureaucracy), but now they demand the same funding as public schools. The slogan of the day was that charters would get autonomy in exchange for accountability.

Now we know, 25 years later, that charters want autonomy with no accountability.

That’s a bad deal for students, teachers, and taxpayers. It does not produce better education. It robs public schools of resources. We are re-creating a dual school system. This is not Reform. It is a massive scam.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Segregation

Newly Elected LAUSD Member Says He is not Going to Promote Charter Expansion

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
27

Surely to the surprise of the California Charter School Association, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings and the other billionaires who funded his election campaign, Nick Melvoin told EdSource in California that his election was not about expanding the number of charter schools.

No, what he is about is seeing public schools replicate the successes of charter schools. Melvoin was a TFA teacher for two years, so he knows what a successful school should be doing. For some reason, charter schools have discovered the secrets of success but public schools have not.

I don’t think districts like LAUSD have learned lessons from the charter movement the way that it was initially intended. I’ll ask charter principals, “Has the district come and asked what’s working and how to replicate it?” They laugh, as if that’s a crazy question, given the political climate. I’d like to see an increase in schools that are serving kids. I’m much less interested in whether that is a district school or a charter or a magnet school. I’d like to see us cross-pollinate, elevate the work of educators and have LAUSD lead the nation in terms of how to navigate this new public school ecosystem.

At no point in the interview does he suggest that charters can learn from successful public schools.

Nor does he acknowledge the number of charter operators who have been caught and prosecuted for theft, or the common practice of pushing out or excluding students with disabilities.

Maybe that’s the lesson the public schools can learn. Don’t accept kids who might cause your school scores to drop.

But what will Melvoin propose to do for the kids that no one wants?

He has hired Sarah Angel to be his chief of staff. Angel currently works for the California Charter Schools Association. But don’t interpret this as a signal that he is the puppet of the charter industry. We will judge him by deeds, not words.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

Florida: Charter Operator Charged with Theft, Fraud

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
13

When will the citizens of Florida say “Enough is enough”?

When will taxpayers stop subsidizing frauds who open charter schools?

The founder of a charter chain in Florida was charged with racketeering and fraud

The founder of a charter school company that managed two schools in Jacksonville was charged Monday, along with a business partner, with racketeering and organized fraud allegedly involving 15 charter schools in Florida.

“Prosecutors say Marcus May, owner of Newpoint Education Partners, is accused of misusing and co-mingling charter school money, as well as taking excessive payments and “kickback” fees, and spending the proceeds on such things as cruises, numerous trips to foreign countries, plastic surgery, home mortgages and a personal watercraft.

“May obtained more than $1 million of public funds from a pattern of thefts from the state department of education, six school districts and 15 Newpoint-managed charter schools,” said District 1 State Attorney Bill Eddins, in a prepared statement.

“In total, Newpoint’s charter schools in Florida received $57 million from the state and from six school districts, including Duval, between 2007 and 2016, the affidavit attached to the charges states.

“In Jacksonville, Newpoint ran the San Jose Academy and San Jose Preparatory High schools on Sunbeam Road. Both are now managed by a different company and serve 310 middle and high school students.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, Fraud, Privatization

Maurice Cunningham: Dark Money Combines to Privatize Public Schools: PLEASE READ THIS!

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
20

This may be the most important post you read today.

Maurice Cunningham, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, began investigating the millions of dollars pouring into the state during the referendum on charter schools last fall. He wondered why so many billionaires from other states wanted to expand the number of charter schools in Massachusetts. He continued his investigation after the election and has lifted the curtain on groups like Families for Excellent Schools, Stand for Children, and Educators4Excellence, and Leadership for Educational Excellence (a group connected to TFA).

He began researching the intersection between philanthropy and dark money.

My descent into darkness led me to decipher the hidden funding of Families for Excellent Schools, a New York based organization that poured over $17 million in dark money into the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot committee for 2016’s Question 2 on charter schools. That brought me to the initial funding to get FES up and running in Massachusetts, which came from a Boston based Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) charity called Strategic Grant Partners. The investments from SGP are consistent with the practice of wealthy individuals using charitable entities to influence the direction of public policy, a topic I explored in Unmasking the Philanthrocapitalists Who Almost Bought Massachusetts Schools. One way for wealthy individuals to grease the path to their public policy goals is to fund organizations that undermine teachers unions, a topic I took up in Philanthrocapitalists Brandish BEANball at BTU.

In the course of this research I have created a database of all Strategic Grant Partners’ publicly available grants since its inception, from its Form 990PF tax returns. The non-profit has dispensed many grants for family support and educational purposes over that time to about seventy grantees, only five of which I would characterize as engaging in political activities: advocacy/organizing/mobilizing for three of them, adding lobbying activities for two, Stand for Children and Families for Excellent Schools. There were no grants to political activities organizations until Stand for Children in 2009, and then no other such organization received a grant until 2013 when Education Reform Now and Families for Excellent Schools received funding.

He concludes:

The Stand for Children and Families for Excellent Schools initiatives both led toward the ballot box and thus we could look at OCFP reports; but these days the reports only tell us which dark money front is laundering for which elegantly named shell. That’s the tip of the iceberg. But there is much more.

Professor Cunningham, keep up the research. Check out Donors Trust, another group that bundles dark money for school privatization. Add ALEC and its donors.

Dark Money wants to destroy our public schools and our democracy.

The people behind these activities use “civil rights” rhetoric to advance anti-democratic goals. They are thieves of democracy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization, Stand for Children

Nancy Flanagan: The War on the Teaching Profession Is No Longer Covert

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
66

In 2010, the corporate reform movement emerged as a national phenomenon. “Waiting for Superman” was the rage that fall, aided by a massive Gates-funded PR program, asserting that bad schools were caused by lazy, greedy teachers. Suddenly, the push for privately managed charter schools and attacks on teachers merged as a coherent “reform movement,” helped along by $5 billion in Race to the Top federal funding and Arne Duncan’s persistent snide comments about “bad” teachers, low standards, the promise of charter schools, and the necessity to judge teachers by the test scores of their students.

Conservative Stanford economist Eric Hanushek was at the center of the fray, pointing out in 2010 that conservatives and liberals now agreed that teachers were the biggest problem in schools. Hanushek had a featured role in “Superman,” where he reinforced the importance of choice and data as levers of change to raise test scores. In the fall of 2010, he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal asserting that “There is No War on Teachers.” The article was sufficiently popular that Hanushek rewrote it and published it a few more times, first in the Hoover Institution publication in 2011 as “The ‘War on Teachers’ is a Myth,” and again in defense of the Vergara lawsuit in California, which sought to throw out teacher tenure (he said that the teachers’ unions would surely trot out “tired rhetoric” about “the war on teachers” to defend tenure.) No, no, he insisted there was no war on teachers, just a bipartisan effort to hold teachers accountable for student test scores.

But now, Nancy Flanagan writes on her blog at Education Week that the war against teachers and the teaching profession has gone into high gear. The mask is off. Betsy DeVos is leading the charge.

She writes:

“Several years ago, when the concept of a “war on teachers” was first entering the national conversation, I used the phrase in a blog. I got a solicitous message from a casual ed-friend, a man with more degrees (and from more prestigious universities) than I have. He politely told me that using “purple prose” weakened any carefully supported argument I could make.

“Besides, he didn’t believe there was, or ever had been, a concerted, organized effort to demean public school teachers–only disconnected bits of evidence that not everyone thought teachers were universally beneficent and professional. Nothing new. Nothing substantive. Just the same old grumbling about bossy, arrogant teachers, the bottom tier of the academic barrel.

“I was probably more worried about what people thought of my writing back then, because I haven’t used “war on teachers” language since. Until I read this: Parent Unions inviting stakeholders in multiple California districts to weigh on survey questions.

“Sample question: Over the last 10 classes you have taken. How many teachers would you characterize as idle, incompetent, rude, or lacks teaching ability?

“Another question: Unfortunately, the educational system has some bad apples who’s [sic] actions not only affect other teachers, but also the lives of students. Help us identify some of those infected [sic] in order to preserve your educational experience, as well as the experience of the next generation.

“Are there any teachers that are abusing their authority in or outside of the classroom?

“The teacher (#1) I have listed below should be fired:___________________________________

“Sample question: Over the last 10 classes you have taken. How many teachers would you characterize as idle, incompetent, rude, or lacks teaching ability?

“Another question: Unfortunately, the educational system has some bad apples who’s [sic] actions not only affect other teachers, but also the lives of students. Help us identify some of those infected [sic] in order to preserve your educational experience, as well as the experience of the next generation.

“Are there any teachers that are abusing their authority in or outside of the classroom?

“The teacher (#1) I have listed below should be fired:___________________________________

“You get to choose three teachers to be fired. And–to be fair and balanced–you get to choose three who should get a raise. The “survey,” offered to parents and students (and social media trolls, of course) goes on in a similar vein, with small editorial bits about horrible teachers and their horrible unions, urging survey-takers to name names and get those incompetent offenders out of our classrooms, so that children can be better prepared for their future.

“Is this a war on teachers? Organized by corporate-funded “parent unions?”

“Or is it just same-old griping about teachers by resentful adults, including those who were never properly instructed on the difference between “who’s” and “whose”?

“I would argue that we have genuinely reached a tipping point, one where we’re struggling to get young people to go into teaching as professional career (as opposed to two-year adventure before law school). Our state legislators are openly declaring that teaching is now a short-term technical job, not a career, and thus public school educators don’t really need a stable state pension.

“That’s not only a war on individual teachers, but a war on teaching itself.

“In the spring of 2011, the planning team for the Save Our Schools March of July 2011 struggled to clarify our aims. We knew it was important to have a set of lucid, defensible goals. We couldn’t speak to media or explain the purpose of rallying in Washington, D.C., without simple, easily understood objectives…

“It seemed to me then–and still does–that what we were fighting for, in the end, was more basic: the preservation of public education. There were people on the planning team (who had more degrees than I, and from more prestigious universities) arguing that the existence of public education was not endangered. We wanted better support for public education, certainly, and improvements in public schools, changes in policy and practice. We were fending off threats, for sure. But public education itself would survive….

“Last night, I went to my local Indivisible group meeting. I gave a two-minute report on education in my county. I said: There’s a war on teachers and we are facing the end of public education. It’s time to do something. And people applauded. What are you doing, in your county or district, to make these statements out loud?”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Detroit: The Broken Promise of School Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2017 //
7

Nancy Kaffer, writing for the Detroit Free Press, assesses the failure of School Choice in Detroit.

http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2017/06/07/detroit-schools-charters/375076001/

Charters, like public schools, underfunded. Large classes. Teacher shortage.

Well, the good news for billionaires is that their taxes stay low instead of funding good schools for all students.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Denver: Student Calls Out Elected School Board for Taking Money from Koch Brothers and DFER

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2017 //
13

At a public comment session of the Denver school board, Kate Burnite, a student who had just graduated from DPS, scolded the entire Denver school board for taking dark money from the Koch brothers, DFER, and other outside groups who love charters. All seven board members were funded by corporate outsiders.

Kate called upon the board to represent the people of Denver, not the big money that funded their campaigns.

She is well-informed and fearless. Watch the proceedings. Find Kate’s 2 minute speech at two hours into the proceedings.

Or you can see it on Facebook here:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1241723209270889&id=100002996656209&refsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2Fkate.burnite%2Fvideos%2Fvb.100002996656209%2F1241723209270889%2F&_rdr

Also be sure to watch the mother at one hour and 40 minutes into the livestream, who asks why the board closed Gilpin, which she described as the best integrated school in Denver, where test scores were on the rise.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Denver, Students

California: Two Scandal-Ridden Charters Closed, Then Reopen with New Names

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2017 //
17

The Los Angeles Unified School District closed down two charter schools that are part of the Celerity charter chain, because of financial abuses and mismanagement. The charters appealed to the charter-friendly State Board of Education, which rejected their appeal.

With amazing speed, the two charters changed their names and will reopen in the same buildings with the same principals and most of the same students and staff.

Celerity is the chain whose leader used School credit cards for designer clothes, shoes, expensive meals, and a limousine, while re eiving a salary of nearly half a million dollars a year.

This is what is known as “accountability” in California, where the California Charter Schools Association buys politicians and blocks any effort to hold charters accountable.

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