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Florida: League of Women Voters Reports Fraud, Conflicts of Interest in Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2017 //
70

This story was originally posted in May 2014. In light of the Trump-Pence privatization agenda, it bears reading again.

 

The Florida League of Women Voters released a bombshell study of charters across the state. The study shows that charter schools do not perform better than public schools; that charters are more segregated than public schools; that many charters funnel money to religious organizations; that a significant number of charters operate for profit; and that the charter industry has captured control of key seats in the legislature.

 

Here is the press release. Open the links and read the study. At the end of the press release is a list of state legislators identified by the LWV with “Conflict of Interest Concerns.”

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 27, 2014

 

Contact:
Deirdre Macnab
LWVF President
Email: floridaleague@earthlink.net
Phone: (407) 415-4559

 

League of Women Voters Releases

State-Wide Study on School Choice

 

Tallahassee, Fla — Twenty percent of the state’s charter schools close because of financial mismanagement or poor academic standards, according to the League of Women Voters of Florida after a year-long study of charter schools in 28 Florida counties.

“Charter schools could fill a niche in Florida’s educational spectrum, but for many, their biggest contribution may be to corporate bottom lines,” said Deirdre Macnab, President of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

With over 576 charter schools in the state, the League of Women Voters of Florida conducted a study in order to better understand the oversight, management, accountability and transparency of charter and private schools in Florida.

The study found that:

Approximately one-third of charters are run by for-profit management companies. Many screen students, then drop those who are not successful, which public schools are prohibited from doing. Charters also serve particular socio-economic groups, increasing segregation in schools.

Although charters tend to be smaller than traditional schools, there is no consistent difference in achievement for charter school and public school students.

Many charters blur the distinction between religious and non-secular schools. Some churches receive as much as a million dollars in lease payments annually for their facilities from charter schools.

In areas with declining enrollments, neither the charters nor regular public schools are large enough to adequately provide support for staff like nurses or counselors. Retaining teachers is also a problem; most charters offer lower salaries and benefits than public schools.

The League’s study produced several recommendations:

Charters should be limited to those that fill unmet needs in identified local school districts.

Stronger local management oversight and disclosure policies are needed.

Financial mismanagement issues must be addressed, as too often the privatization of schools leads to financial abuse.

For more information, including further findings and recommendations, please see the state-wide study, along with the individual studies conducted by eighteen local Leagues across Florida.

###

The League of Women Voters of Florida, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy. For more information, please visit the League’s website at: http://www.TheFloridaVoter.org.

FLORIDA LEGISLATORS WITH A DIRECT INTEREST IN CHARTER SCHOOLS:

Conflict of Interest Concerns

 Senator John Legg Chair of Senate Education Committee is co-founder and business administrator of Daysprings Academy in Port Richey.

 Senator Kelli Stargel from Orange County is on board of McKeel Academies. She is on the Education Committee and sponsored the Parent Trigger Bill.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20130429/EDIT02/130429282

 House Budget Chairman Seth McKeel is on the board of McKeel Academy Schools in Polk
County.

 Anne Corcoran, wife of future House Speaker Richard Corcoran has a charter school in
Pasco County. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/pascos-classical-prep- charter-school-delays-opening-for-a-year/1276912. Richard Corcoran is Chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

 Senator Anitere Flores of Miami is president of an Academica managed charter school in Doral.

 Florida Representative Erik Fresen is Chair of the House Education subcommittee on appropriations. Representative Fresen’s sister is the Vice President of Academica and is married to the president. http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida- politics/content/ethics-commission-clears-miami-rep-erik-fresen-alleged-voting-conflict.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/14/2545708_p2/company-cultivates-links-to-
lawmakers.html

 George Levesque, Florida House lawyer cleared Erik Fresen of conflict of interest
concerns over charter schools. He is the husband of Patricia Levesque, former Jeb Bush Deputy Chief of Staff and currently Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education which promotes school choice. http://www.truthabouteducation.org/1/archives/01-2010/1.html.

 Representative Manny Diaz is Dean of Doral Academy, an Academica managed school. He is the leader for the new statewide contract bill in the Florida House. Doral College was cited by the Florida Auditor General for a $400,000 loan from Doral Charter High School. Conflict of Interest and procurement for Charters with federal grants: http://floridacharterschools.org/schools/taps/conflictinterest_att.pdf

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

Florida League of Women Voters Documents Charter Scams

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2017 //
14

I originally posted this story in October 2016. In light of the Trump-Pence privatization agenda, it is worth reading again.

Pat Hall and Sue Legg of the Florida League of Women Voters have performed a public service by detailing how for-profit charter companies rip off taxpayers and cheat children.

You can be sure Jeb Bush will not assign this report when he lectures at Harvard this fall about the Florida “miracle” that no one can see other than himself and his hirelings.

Here is the beginning. Please note that 40% of taxpayer funds goes to the management company, not to educating students. What a racket!

Hall and Legg write:

“ANALYSIS OF CHARTER SCHOOL USA REAL ESTATE BUSINESS PRACTICES

“Florida now educates more than 230,000 students at more than 650 publicly funded charter schools. While many of these schools are providing good educational opportunities, we have found that the fundamental structure of the for-profit management companies, specifically Charter Schools USA, must be questioned. The following outline summarizes a very detailed report given the LWVF Board this past summer.

“1. CSUSA has six non-profit school boards that operate 49 schools in 12 urban counties in Florida. Additionally, CSUSA operates 17 schools in 6 other states.

“2. The six governing school boards cover the 49 charters and are run by CSUSA; they are not independent of the management companies.

“3. Inter related affiliated businesses include Red Apple Development, Ryan Construction Company, the Florida Charter Education Foundation and Connex (curriculum software). Furthermore, we found over 300 limited liability companies (LLCs) initiated by CSUSA.

“4. Facilities financing incorporates all aspects of land acquisition, site clearing, construction, bond financing and multimillion dollar lease fees. CSUSA charges the Hillsborough County School district at one of their four schools more than $30/square foot, significantly higher than downtown Tampa skyscrapers!

“5. Tracking expenditures of taxpayer monies is impossible due to for-profit business practices which are not transparent.

“6. Long term lease agreements, after flipping (changing deeds from one related company to the next) from Ryan Construction to Red Apple Development, are charged out 40 years, and charge rent and interest amounts on top of the lease payments. Most CSUSA lease fees in Hillsborough County take 25% of all taxpayer dollars designated for educating children. Some are even higher.

“7. Another 13% to 15% is charged by CSUSA for management fees, hence 40% of public money is not spent instructing children. State auditors have questioned how these costs are reported.

“8. Evidence exists of real estate “flipping” by CSUSA in Hillsborough County. This results in new real estate appraisals to increase value. Lease and rent costs use these values to justify cost charged to charter budgets.

“INTERIM REPORT: ANALYSIS OF CSUSA REAL ESTATE BUSINESS PRACTICES

“By Pat Hall and Sue Legg, LWVF Education Team, June 2016

“Introduction. District school boards grant charter school contracts to private entities and monitor their financial balance sheets, but by legislative intent, they do not have responsibility for their management and operation. Charters have little regulation, and the result has been a continuing saga of scandals. This report goes beyond the mismanagement and corruption issues to the fundamental structure of for-profit management companies, and it questions the accountability of these companies for their use of public funds. Charters may be self-managed or operated by non-profit or for-profit companies. We focus on one for-profit charter management company, Charter Schools, USA (CSUSA). Florida has several others including, Academica which was the focus of a federal investigation, and Newpoint charters which face indictments. A detailed example of the complex facility transactions for CSUSA’s Woodmont K-8 school raises the issue of excessive profiteering. We have data that indicate these business practices are not specific to one school or one company. CSUSA organizational structure: CSUSA is owned and operated by the CEO, Jonathan Hage. It has multiple interrelated entities whose operations are difficult to track. CSUSA has created six non-profit charter school boards to operate 49 publically funded, privately managed charter schools in 12 Florida counties. Additionally CSUSA operates 17 schools in 6 other states. These non-profit boards subcontract to the CSUSA for profit educational management firm which founded them.”

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

My Interview on NPR “The Takeaway” re Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
73

 

 

In case you want to listen for 10 minutes about why Betsy DeVos should not be confirmed, here is the link. 

 

Also, I will be on the Chris Hayes show tonight on MSNBC. Same topic.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice

Kenneth Zeichner: Why Betsy DeVos is Unfit to be Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
7

Kenneth Zeichner is Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. He writes here why Betsy DeVos should not be approved for Secretary of Education.

 

 

Betsy DeVos is thoroughly unqualified for the job of Secretary of Education. She has never attended a public school, sent her children to public schools, taught or worked in a public school district or a state education agency, overseen public education as a governor or governor’s aide, or studied the field of education. There has never been a more unqualified nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education in the history of the Department of Education.

 

The DeVos family’s has donated millions of dollars over the years to education causes through groups like the American Federation for Children and contributions to pro-“choice” political candidates to privatize public schools and turn their management over to corporations or religious groups. In Michigan, where DeVos has focused most of her efforts, about 80 % of charter schools are run by for-profit corporations as opposed to about 13% of charter schools nationally.

 

Ms. DeVos and her husband Dick who became billionaires mainly through earnings from their company, Amway, a Pyramid scheme[1] in which many people have lost a lot of money, have been very active in their home state of Michigan and elsewhere in promoting the spread of both unregulated charter schools and voucher schools.

 

Voucher schools involve the transfer of money from public schools to private and religious schools.

 

They began in the South during the civil rights era of the 1960s as a way for whites to maintain segregated schools after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools. The first modern day voucher program was started in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1989 and has transferred millions of dollars from the Milwaukee Public schools (MPS) to private groups and have made it more difficult for MPS to educate the children who remain in the public schools. Today there are voucher programs in about 30 states supporting some children living in poverty to attend private or religious schools.

 

The success of voucher schools in Milwaukee and elsewhere has been meager. Many voucher schools in Milwaukee have closed (about 40%) and they have not shown any consistent improvement over the performance of public schools even though 3% of their students have a disability in comparison with the public schools where 20 % of students have a disability.

 

In the 25th anniversary report evaluating the performance of Milwaukee’s voucher schools Patrick Wolf a Professor of School Choice at the University of Arkansas concluded “ This whole philosophy and theory of parental school choice kind of falls apart.” Instead of giving families more voice in the education of their children as is promised, voucher schools erode the power of families to influence their children’s education because they are unaccountable to the public even though they use public tax money.

 

There are both good and bad charter schools in the U.S. The unregulated form of charters that Betsy DeVos and her husband have promoted has been widely criticized by education experts and the public. For example, one of the leading advocates for charter schools in the U.S. and most respected education researchers, Professor Doug Harris of Tulane University, has argued in a recent N.Y. Times op-ed “As one of the architects of Detroit’s charter school system, she is party responsible for what even charter advocates acknowledge is one of the biggest school reform disasters in the country… She is widely seen as the main driver of the entire state’s school overhaul… It is hardly a surprise that the system, which has almost no oversight, has failed.”

 

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education rejected Michigan’s application for a grant to expand its mostly privately run charter schools citing the lack of adequate oversight. Professor Harris concludes his op-ed by stating: “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”

 

A strong public school system is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Public schools do not affect just the individuals who use them, but as a public good, they also influence the quality of life in the society as a whole.

 

There is not a single example of a successful education system in the world that has relied primarily on deregulation, privatization and market competition, the kind of reform that Betsy DeVos wants to promote in the U.S. Chile and Sweden are examples of countries where performance declined substantially after the growth of privatization in education…..

 

 

Ken Zeichner is Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Segregation

Sara Stevenson: Why School Choice is the Wrong Choice

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
13

Sara Stevenson is the librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin, Texas. She is a prolific writer and is published in the letters column of the Wall Street Journal more than anyone in the world, always refuting their free-market claims about schools. In this post, she attempts to debunk the case for choice, specifically, vouchers.

 

Stevenson writes:

 

One must ask about the motive for the school choice movement. Public education in this nation is an operation costing about $600 billion annually. Do these private, charter, cyber and home schools want to open their arms to public school students in a gesture of inclusion, or are they after the money? The amount allotted for private vouchers is almost always less than the private school tuition, so which families will be able to make up the difference? Will private schools relax admission requirements that make their schools exclusive, or will they drop them to be accessible for all? Furthermore, home schools currently run under zero accountability. What is to prevent a home-schooling parent from taking the voucher money and using it to buy a new computer for the family?

 

And then there are the repercussions. Every dollar taken from public schools and given to a charter, private, home or cyber school burdens the operational costs for public schools. In addition, with government money comes government accountability. Do all these private and religious schools, hoping for vouchers, want to submit their students to the battery of STAAR tests as well as the A-F grading scores that public schools must undergo? When the state is still spending $339 less per pupil than before the draconian budget cuts in 2011, won’t public schools suffer further from siphoned funds?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos Explains that “Government Sucks” and “More Teachers Need to Be Fired”

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
29

 

 

Mercedes Schneider here does a close reading of one of Betsy DeVos’ greatest hits, the speech where she says that government sucks and the way to improve education is to let everyone get public money to go to school wherever they want without any oversight. Also, fire more teachers.

 

Betsy DeVos: “Government Sucks” and “We Don’t Fire Teachers Enough”

 

That pretty much sums up her deep philosophy.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice

Betsy DeVos: A Radical Destroying The Cornerstone of America

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
20

Today, the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will consider the nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education. DeVos and her family have devoted many millions of dollars to destroying public schools and turning the clock back by more than a century. She wants the government to pay tuition at religious schools, voucher schools, for-profit schools, any alternative to public schools is her goal.

 

American public education is one of the essential institutions of our democratic society. The guarantee to everyone in this country that they could attend a free public school was a hard-fought victory. First, it required persuading the public to tax themselves to pay for schools for the children of the community. Second, it required separating the schools from religious institutions, which had long been the source of education. Third, it meant expanding access to all: to boys and girls, to children of all races and cultures, to children whose first language was not English, and to children with disabilities.

 

None of of these changes came easily.

 

And the struggle to provide good schools is ongoing, since so many states base school funding on property taxes, which privileges those who are already advantaged.

 

DeVos is ignorant of the history of public education in America and the role of public schools in our society. Her hostility to public schools should disqualify her from consideration for this position.

 

 

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Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nina Rees Celebrates DeVos and “Choice”

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2017 //
30

 

 

Nina Rees thinks Betsy DeVos is a great choice for US Secretary of Education. She would. She is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for “Public” Charter Schools and like DeVos, is devoted to privatization of community public schools.

 

I first met Nina when she worked for Vice President Dick Cheney as his education advisor. Before that, she worked for the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation. She subsequently worked for ex-felon Michael Milken, when he was entering the education industry.

 

What you will learn from her article:

 

The U.S. Department of Education has spent $3 billion on privately managed charter schools, through the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

 

What you will will NOT learn from this article:

 

That charter schools and vouchers have NOT improved education.

 

That education in Michigan has suffered because of DeVos’ zeal for the unregulated free market.

 

That the destruction of democratic public education is a crime against children, families, and our society.

 

That NO high-performing nation in the world has turned public funding for schools over to the free market.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Florida: Former Charter School Employee Accused of Stealing $100,000

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2017 //
16

A former employee of a charter school in Lakeland, Florida, has been accused of stealing more than $100,000 from the school. Don’t expect this to dim the enthusiasm of Jeb Bush or Betsy DeVos for unregulated charters.

 

“45-year-old Ginger Collins was a former Assistant Director of Academics for the school until her resignation on September 16, 2016. She is accused of stealing more than $100,000 from the organization and creating fake companies and website to make her purchases appear legitimate.

 

“Collins was charged is facing seven felony charges including Grand Theft, Obtain Property by Fraud, Fraudulent Use of Credit Card, Money Launder Transaction, and three counts of Criminal Use of Personal Identification.

 

“She took trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cancun, Rhode Island, Atlanta, and mark these trips down as marketing expenses, and advertising,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.

 

“According to investigators her spending didn’t end there. The stolen money was used to buy items such as a fat blaster, a portable urine funnel, and an $85 “Nit Wit” brand beanie. A fitting purchase, according to Sheriff Grady Judd. “Well the nit wit hat goes on a nit wit,” he said.

 

“Despite all of that, it was the purchase of a prom dress and fake eyelashes on a school credit card that finally tipped someone off. “She went on a shopping spree of almost a year,” Judd said.”

 

Which public school employee has the opportunity to steal $100,000? The motive may be there but there are too many checks to provide the opportunity.

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

Gary Rubinstein: 25% of KIPP Schools in Texas Get an F Grade

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2017 //
24

Gary Rubinstein writes that Texas has started the process of awarding single letter grades to schools, based mainly on standardized test scores. This is an exceptionally asinine way of evaluating schools, invented by Jeb Bush.

 

He reviewed the Texas scores and discovered that 25% of KIPP schools were rated F. Nearly 50% were either D or F. 

 

Whenever “reformers” talk about expanding high-quality charters, they use KIPP as their example. It turns out that the failure rate for KIPP is higher than for public schools.

 

“I thought that maybe this was one of those things where a lot of schools got an F in this domain so I looked at the 280 Houston Independent School District schools and found that only 34, or about 12.5%, got an F in ‘Student Progress.’ So the percent of ‘failing’ KIPP schools is double the number of ‘failing’ schools in the biggest district in Texas.”

 

Since charters are are supposed to be the remedy for “failing public schools,” what is the remedy for failing charter schools?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization, Texas
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