Denis Smith writes here about a Presidential election in 1968 where the GOP candidate colluded with a foreign power to win the election.
Tonight at 9:00 pm, MSNBC will air a special about these events.
Archives for category: Corruption
Marcus May, charter operator, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and a fine of $5 million for fraud.
PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — The founder of a company that operated charter schools in several Florida counties has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The Pensacola News Journal reports Marcus May also was sentenced Tuesday to pay a $5 million fine for using those schools to steer millions of dollars into his personal accounts. He was convicted last month of two counts of racketeering and one count of organized fraud.
May’s company, Newpoint Education Partners, operated charter schools in Escambia, Bay, Broward, Duval, Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties.
Prosecutors say May misappropriated millions in public money to buy furniture, computers and other materials at inflated prices from fraudulent companies headed by his close associates.
A co-defendant, Steven Kunkemoeller, has been sentenced to 4 1/2 years for racketeering and organized fraud.
Denis Smith worked for many years for the Ohio Department of Education. When he retired, he was employed in the office that oversees charter schools. He has written many articles about the scams and frauds that charter operators get away with in Ohio, as well as some that they don’t get away with.
He wrote me recently to say that the five most common words in charterdom are:
“The defendant will please rise.”
Isn’t it interesting that the pro-charter candidates, no matter which school district or city or state they live in, do not admit they are pro-charter.
Apparently the public is catching on, and it is not a good thing to admit that you want more charters.
Suddenly, everyone—even the execrable governor’s Scott Walker and Doug Ducey of AZ—call them selves “the Education Governor” and boast about (lie about) have they have helped public schools. Don’t believe them.
Any candidate funded by the Koch brothers, The Walton Family, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, or Michael Bloomberg is a Pro-Charter Candidate. They are coming to privatize your public school and replace it with a national corporate chain school.
This is a handy website that will inform you how much money was diverted from your school district to fund the fraudulent ECOT virtual charter school.
Typing your address and learn how much money you lost, as ECOT man was protected by John Kasich, Mike DeWine (the Republican Candidate for Governor), and other Republican politicians.
https://www.kidsnotcorruption.com/
Betsy DeVos is a big fan of virtual charter schools like ECOT. She wants more of them.
You must always remember that Betsy DeVos is working every day to promote vouchers and charters, no matter what story is in the headlines.
While the nation was obsessed with the crucial battle for control of the Supreme Court for the next generation, DeVos was busy promoting her privatization agenda.
Jeff Bryant has the story here.
We know, for example, that she handed out $399 million to the overfunded charter industry, which is riddled with fraud, conflicts of interest, nepotism, and profiteering. These are matters of no concern to DeVos, who supports the expansion of online charters, which have proven to be frauds, and for-profit schools, which have enabled widespread fraud in Michigan.
Bryant writes:
USDoE recently awarded $399 million in federal grants to expand and support charter schools across the country.
The grants, made through the Charter Schools Program, which has enjoyed a $40 million boost under the Trump administration, went to individual charter school operators and various state education agencies and nonprofit groups that either help secure funding for charters, push for their expansions, or advocate for the charter cause.
Even a cursory scan of some of the recipients warrants deeper scrutiny.
For instance, among three Alabama charter schools that received $1 million each in grant money, two have already been the subjects of multiple lawsuits.
Birmingham charter Legacy Prep – which recently changed its name, postponed its opening date, and has yet to find a building – just settled a messy court case with its founder – a Baptist church pastor – over who had authority over the school’s operations and whether the school’s governing board was properly constituted.
The court settlement follows closely after the Alabama Public Charter School Commission won its effort to overturn the Birmingham district school board’s original denial of the charter’s application. The district board had ruled last year that the school’s application did not meet the requirements of the district’s request for charter proposals.
So now, thanks to DeVos and her department, federal funds are going to a charter school under suspect leadership, with no building, that the district doesn’t want.
Similarly, another Alabama charter with a million dollar grant, University Charter School in Livingston, had to hurdle a lawsuit to open its doors.
In May, the county board that oversees the district filed suit to prohibit the charter’s authorizer from operating the school in a former high school that the district sold to the authorizer with the specific condition not to open a charter school in the building.
Here again, federal dollars are funding a charter startup in a local community that does not want it. So much for DeVos’s promises to curb the “overreach” of the federal government in education.
Supporting Rightwing Cronies
Another charter school grant winner on the list that deserves a closer look is the American Heritage Academy in Idaho.
The school’s founder Frank Vandersloot is a conservative billionaire, with a net worth of $1.9 billion, who was a finance co-chair of Mitt Romney’s 2012 failed presidential campaign and has given money to Florida Republican US Senator Marco Rubio, former Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina, the Republican National Committee, and state Republican parties across the US, according to a report in Forbes.
Vandersloot made national headlines in 2015 when he sued Mother Jones magazine for defamation after the news outlet published an article detailing his efforts to oppose gay rights.
Vandersloot has hosted a closed door meeting with President Trump at the headquarters of his company, Melaleuca. The company – which sells diet, personal care, home cleaning, and cosmetic products – has been compared to Amway, the mega-company DeVos is heiress to, in that it employs a multi-level marketing strategy.
Vandersloot and DeVos are, in fact, connected through their participation in a multi-level marketing trade group that has been active in promoting legislation that attempts to limit the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to investigate and prosecute multi-level marketing scam operations.
All the Things We Don’t Know
None of this is to consider whether Vandersloot’s charter school, or any of the other charter school grantees, may or may not be worthy institutions, but shouldn’t taxpayers know more about why the school deserves our money?
Should we know, for instance, why grant money will go to a North Carolina charter, the Charlotte Lab School, that touts racial diversity in its mission, yet has a student population that is two-thirds white in a district where only 30 percent of the students are white?
Should we know more about why a federal grant is going to a Kansas City charter school, Scuola Vita Nuova Charter School, that is located at an Italian Cultural Center and had to pay $30,000 to former principal who filed lawsuit claiming the school’s founder made her fire her same-sex partner who also worked at the school?
Because of DeVos’s general lack of transparency, what we’re left with, instead of answers, are more questions and a well-founded suspicion that her purpose in office is to purloin as much public money as she can into the hands of private interests while justifying it as a much-needed reform.
Perhaps if there’s a Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives after the upcoming midterm elections, there will be inquiries to reveal the inner machinations of DeVos’s department. But in the meantime, she and her associates toil away behind a shroud of scary headlines, and that’s just the way they want it.
Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel writes here about a voucher school that is a sham, but the state doesn’t care. Does anyone in Florida care about accountability for taxpayers’ money, or about the quality of education?
I urge you to subscribe to the Orlando Sentinel to follow its fearless coverage. I did.
And remember, when you read this story, that this is what Betsy DeVos describes as the “best” state because she wants everyone to follow Florida’s example of charters, vouchers, and no accountability for public dollars.
Maxwell writes:
Two years ago, the Beta Preparatory school in Orlando was being run — with your tax dollars — inside a commercial complex on South Orange Blossom Trail, alongside eight bail-bonds businesses and a drug-testing company.
With no outdoor space for recess — and fellow tenants such as “Drug Tests R Us” — it wasn’t most parents’ vision of an ideal learning environment.
Apparently Beta wasn’t an ideal tenant either. The private school that takes state vouchers was evicted for not paying its rent.
Yes, the entire taxpayer-subsidized school. (Class, the words of the day are: “Final notice.”)
So last year, Beta moved to a new locale — a church campus in Orlando, where it continued to take more of your tax dollars … until things went south there, too.
Teachers filed formal complaints about a “lack of basic school supplies,” academic “irregularities,” student safety, inadequate staffing and a “lack of professionalism.” Multiple teachers said the school stiffed them on salary. The church said the school stiffed it on rent.
Ultimately, the school shut down for good.
You might think that would be the final chapter in this sorry story.
But not in Florida.
As Sentinel reporter Annie Martin reported last weekend, the owner of the Beta school simply opened another school a few weeks ago with a new name; this time in Volusia County … once again with your tax dollars.
Court records show the school’s owner filed the application for the new school the same week a court ordered him to pay $18,793 for not paying a teacher at his last school.
Florida education officials and politicians didn’t seem to care. They seem content to send your money — and children’s futures — down a black hole.
They scream about “accountability” for public schools, but have few checks and balances on the private schools that take public money to supposedly better serve low-income and special-needs students.
In its “Schools Without Rules” series, Sentinel reporters found voucher (or “scholarship”) schools faking safety reports, hiring felons, hiring high-school dropouts as teachers and operating in second-rate strip malls. They discovered curricula full of falsehoods and subpar lesson plans.
If you confront defenders of this system, be they legislators or school operators, many start mumbling about the virtue of “choice”— as if funding a hot mess of a school is a swell thing, as long parents choose that mess.
Horse hockey. I choose accountability. And transparency. And standards.
And the estimable Mr. Maxwell goes on to write:
Florida legislators — such as House Speaker Richard Corcoran — claim to support all those things as well.
If a tourism bureau makes headlines about questionable activities, Corcoran issues subpoenas and screams that taxpayers have a right to know how “every penny” and “every dollar” is spent. (He’s right.)
When a university is accused of improperly spending $38 million on a construction project, he demands an “immediate investigation.” (He’s right there, too.)
But as nearly a billion dollars — a mix of tax dollars and corporate tax credits — are siphoned away to voucher schools, many with proven problems, Corcoran and his buddies look the other way, meekly mumbling: Um … choice.
Mr. Speaker, you should choose to do your job.
Instead, the Sentinel’s been doing it for you. Last year, our journalists personally inspected more voucher schools in six months than every state education official combined visited in a year. And we found problems galore.
Some voucher schools whine: You’re focusing on the bad apples.
You’re damn right we are. That’s what news organizations do. We focus on problems — whether it’s dangerous airlines, corrupt toll-road agencies or, yes, shoddy schools — so we can fix them.
We’ve done it for decades at public schools — exposing safety violations, unfit teachers, absentee school board members and failing schools. And in every case, elected leaders demanded fixes.
But when problems are found at voucher schools, defenders simply whine about being picked on.
Grow up. You sound like an airline exec asking news teams not to cover a crash.
Lawmakers should require all voucher schools to hire certified teachers, or at least college grads. Schools should be inspected every year. Curriculum plans should be filed with the state. Graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores should be publicly reported. And school operators who fail shouldn’t be allowed to re open.
If you want those standards — all basic, yet none of which are in place for voucher schools — demand them from your legislator. (Contact info at http://www.leg.state.fl.us)
No decent school should be afraid of standards. If you don’t want accountability, don’t take public money.
And if you’re an elected official who doesn’t care about accountability — for all schools — find a new line of work.
Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona has been a stalwart champion of unregulated charters and vouchers. He has looked the other way when members of the legislature pass laws to enrich themselves while running charter chains and voucher programs. He has ignored conflicts of interest, nepotism, and self-dealing because, hey, that’s how unbridled capitalism works!
But the state is now knee-deep in scandals committed by privatizers, and guess what? Governor Ducey says it is time to reign in the corruption!
In a debate with his Democratic opponent, David Garcia, Ducey claims he wants to reform charter law. Is it because of the latest scandal, where a legislator (Eddie Farnsworth) sold his for-profit charter chain to a nonprofit and cleared at least $11.8 million in profit plus a contract to manage the nonprofit chain?
Laurie Roberts of the Arizona Republic is outraged that the government is indifferent to charter fraud.
She writes:
Farnsworth says he’s just a businessman who took a risk, followed the law and is now reaping the reward.
“Charter schools have been lucrative to me because I’ve done what every other business has done to make money: I had an idea,” he told Harris. “I put the business plan into place. I followed every law and every contract. I provided a product that is a good product that people wanted.”
“It doesn’t hurt that for most of the last two decades, Farnsworth, along with other legislators who own charter schools, has helped write some of those laws. In his 16 years as a legislator, for example, Farnsworth has voted 12 times to boost “additional assistance” to charter schools (read: himself).
“But there is no conflict, we are told.“
Garcia is an education professor. He has pledged to eliminate the profiteering from the charter se tor. His own children have attended an arts-focused charter school, so he is not opposed to charters on principle, just to the rampant fraud that makes Arizona a national laughing stock.
Despite his support for charters, the Network for Public Education Action Fund Endorses Garcia because Ducey is an ALEC stooge and a voucher proponent. Garcia opposes vouchers and has pledged new dedicated funding for public schools.
If you live in District 19 in Ohio, I urge you to vote for Louise Valentine.
She is running against Andrew Brenner, chair of the Senate Education Committee, who despises public schools. Under Brenner’s malign leadership, Ohio has supported corrupted charter operators and ineffective vouchers, which drain money from public schools that belong to the community. With Brennan in charge, Ohio’s taxpayers have been bilked of billions of dollars that should have gone to public schools but ended up in the pockets of profiteers.
Louise Valentine has pledged to support high-quality public schools and to insist on charter school accountability.
Charter operators don’t get rich on tuition, although many have a business model that relies on cost-cutting, low-wage teachers, TFA, and replacing human teachers with technology. Those wonderful computers don’t expect health or pensions. When they break, you can repair them or discard them.
The big bucks are in real estate!
ESJ properties
https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/08/04/aventura-firm-makes-45m-addition-to-its-portfolio-of-school-properties/
It is traded as EPR properties (Entertainment properties in the graph you show
And they also own the BASIS schools.
https://insightcenter.eprkc.com/basis-schools/
In Arizona, if the school goes under, they get to keep the property, even though the taxpayers have paid for it.
And look at this
https://insightcenter.eprkc.com/education/
This is what is known as “legal graft.”
It is a theft of public assets.
In plain sight.
The bond industry issued warnings against charter schools, because they endanger the financial ratings of school districts and cities.
Mercedes Schneider: Municipal Analysts Call for Charter Financial Transparency
Municipal Analysts Ask Whether Charter Schools Make the Grade
Arizona has a Charter Law that ignores nepotism, conflict of interest, Profiteering, frauds, scams, etc.
Now Governor Doug Ducey is in a tight race with educator David Garcia, and Ducey wants to “reform” the charter law! And I have a bridge to sell you if you are that gullible.
Laurie Roberts of the Arizona Republic says that this is hilarious. PS: I love Laurie Roberts and Craig HARRIS of the Arizona Republic, who regularly expose charter corruption (he exposes it, she ridicules it).
She writes, to begin:
“A month ago, Gov. Doug Ducey said he wasn’t concerned that the head of Primavera charter school – which puts just 11 percent of its state funding into instruction — scored an $8.8 million “shareholder distribution” from the for-profit company that runs the online operation.
“I’m not concerned about the CEO,” Ducey told The Republic’s Craig Harris. “That is of very little interest. I’m concerned about the child and the parent and what the child is equipped to do after 12 years of education.”
“Today, Ducey and other Republicans have seen the light and the light is a freight train of public outrage racing right at them as they seek re-election.
“As a result, Ducey is now backing a set of charter school reforms proposed by state Sen. Kate Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, who like Ducey is facing a fight to get back to the state Capitol next year.
“While I’m certainly happy to see that Ducey and his Republican colleagues at long last might be willing to plug gaping loopholes that have allowed some charter operators to plunder public money, I have to ask the same question I asked when they suddenly saw the need to prioritize public schools as teachers took to the streets this spring:
“Where’ve you been?”…
“Virtually every year, we hear an outrageous story about a charter school operator who has fundamentally failed the smell test, either by shorting kids or lining their pockets – or both.
“Virtually every year, Democrats in the Legislature propose reforms to fix laughable state laws that require hardly any oversight or public accountability.
“And virtually, every year Republicans ignore all evidence of a problem while joining hands and chanting “school choice, school choice, school choice.” This, to the delight of their dark money pals who shovel campaign money their way.
“Indeed, it is a choice to focus only on charter school successes — and there certainly are some — while ignoring problems rampant in the charter school industry.
“Just last fall, the centrist Grand Canyon Institute released the results of a three-year study that found up to up to 77 percent of charter school holders are using public funds on “potentially questionable financial transactions” — often paying themselves or their various relatives to provide goods and services to their charter schools under a price they get to set, courtesy of no-bid contracts.
“The study found that charter school executives earn on average 50 percent more than their school district counterparts while teachers earn 20 percent less. That classroom spending and academic performance are both lower in charters than in district schools.
“Rather than taking a serious look at those findings, our leaders and the charter school industry labeled the Grand Canyon Institute as “anti charter” and did … nothing.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 