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Did you know that the United States Treasury is the single biggest founder of charter schools? In 1994, when there were only a small number of charter schools, the Clinton Administration started the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) to help new startups get off the ground. The program offered only a few million dollars. At the time, no one gave much thought to the prospect of large corporate chains or charters displacing public schools. Today, the CSP hands out $440 million each year. Most of the money goes to big chains like KIPP and IDEA. Some states get $40-50 million for charter schools even though the states didn’t ask for the money.

Jan Resseger writes here that it’s time to end the CSP. The original idea was that a small amount of federal money would stimulate innovation and accountability. Nearly three decades later, we have learned that public financing of private contractors has not produced innovation, that the contractors fight accountability, and that the charter sector is marred by scandals and corruption. As the Network forPublic Education showed in its reports—Asleep at the Wheel and Still Asleep at the Wheel—nearly 40% of the federally funded charters either never opened or closed soon after opening. This waste, fraud, and abuse are the result of not only a lack of public oversight, but the result of private contractors financing state legislators.

Resseger writes:

Charter schools originated in the early 1990s, and now, nearly three decades later as the charter school sector has matured, we discover what might have been predicted in an education sector paid for with public tax dollars but at the same time operated privately with little oversight. The Network for Public Education has set up a web page to track the hundreds of scandals reported year after year across the United States in local newspapers.

She goes on to describe recent scandals, which barely scratch the surface of the systemic waste and misuse of public funds that should have been paid for instructional purposes but were deposited in private bank accounts. She doesn’t mention the most historic scandal in the charter sector: the theft of at least $200 million by entrepreneurs in California who ran a virtual charter school with phantom students and who pleaded guilty only a few months ago.

Considering that the charter industry is already richly endowed by billionaires like Betsy DeVos, the Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch, Reed Hastings, and Bill Gates, and substantial corporate support, no federal subsidy is needed.

Someone recently asked me for a definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah. Here it is. Two smart entrepreneurs create a virtual charter school in Oklahoma. Their public funding enables them to become millionaires. When the state auditor requests their financial records, they refuse to turn them over. The state auditor sues them and wins. The two entrepreneurs exhibited chutzpah.

A reader in Oklahoma sent this note:

Epic Charter Schools’ founders last week not only lost their hold on the school system that made them millionaires, but they also apparently lost their fight in court to block the Oklahoma state auditor and inspector from reviewing their bank and credit card statements.

According to public records filed in Oklahoma County District Court on Friday, a judge has directed Epic Youth Services, the for-profit school management company owned by Epic co-founders David Chaney and Ben Harris, to turn over all records of purchases and bank statements related to Epic’s Learning Fund for student needs.

https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/state-auditor-wins-access-to-epic-charter-schools-long-shielded-spending-records/article_a3cb2cec-be9e-11eb-b677-7fbbe3bcfbf6.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1

Neil MacFarquar wrote this story in the New York Times. It is a chilling warning.

Many Americans fought and died to protect our democracy and preserve our rights. Sadly, there extremists within the country who threaten the ideas and values we hold dear. They are haters and white supremacists who betray the national idea of e pluribus unem.

They robbed an armored car outside a sprawling Seattle shopping mall.

They bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho, and within weeks assassinated a Jewish talk radio host in Denver.

Then a month later, they plundered another armored car on a California highway in a spectacular daylight heist that netted more than $3.6 million.

What initially seemed to F.B.I. agents like distant, disparate crimes turned out to be the opening salvos in a war against the federal government by members of a violent extremist group called the Order, who sought to establish a whites-only homeland out West.

Their crime spree played out in 1984. Fast forward to 2021. Federal agents and prosecutors who dismantled the Order see troubling echoes of its threat to democracy in the Capitol riot and the growing extremist activity across the country…

Those who tracked the group say the legacy of the Order can be seen in the prominent role that far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers played in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Many of the participants of these groups today come from the same sources as the Order,” said Gene Wilson, the lead prosecutor, who went on to become a U.S. magistrate judge in Seattle before switching to private practice. “I think they might be just as committed to totally changing democracy as we know it.”

The men who played central roles in disbanding the Order still consider it the most important case of their lives. Given the Order’s “potential for violence and destruction,” said Mr. Manis, no other domestic group posed a similar threat to the United States.

The Order collapsed after its charismatic leader, Robert Jay Mathews, died in a fiery shootout with scores of F.B.I. agents on Whidbey Island, Wash., in December 1984. His followers were rounded up in a nationwide manhunt and 23 of them faced trial on racketeering charges involving two murders, robberies that netted more than $4 million, counterfeiting, weapons violations and arson. Sentenced to lengthy terms ranging up to 252 years, most of the core members died in jail.

Far-right groups often express antigovernment ideology or espouse ideas about returning the United States to some imagined, idyllic form of constitutional rule. What made the Order so dangerous was that it set about achieving that goal, killing, robbing and planning spectacular terrorist acts in hopes of toppling the government.

Just before federal agents closed in, its members had been figuring out how to sabotage the power grid in Los Angeles, hoping to incite riots and looting. Men affiliated with the Order had also surveyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as a target, which helped to inspire Timothy J. McVeigh to blow it up in April 1995, killing 168 people in the worst homegrown terrorist attack in American history.

The First Amendment means that people cannot be prosecuted on the basis of ideology alone, so the hurdle is figuring out which secretive individual or group, whether far right or far left, might be turning to violence. The dangerous core bent on violence is usually only 5 to 10 percent of an extremist organization, agents said.

Mr. Mathews, raised among white supremacists, organized a heavily armed, clandestine guerrilla force designed to spark a civil war. Adherents sought to restore America to its imagined origins and considered preserving the “green graves” of their white forefathers a sacred duty. To join, members stepped into a wide candlelit circle formed around a white infant and pledged to fight, in secret and without fear of death, to make the United States an Aryan nation…

With the robberies that were the initial focus of the group’s efforts, Mathews worked toward a general uprising, dispensing the money to extremist groups nationwide to buy weapons and other matériel. He hoped his war chest would serve to bind them together, with a wave of violence forcing the U.S. government to cede Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado as an initial white homeland…

The men who disbanded the Order believe that any contemporary group with similarly dangerous aspirations would also likely be hidden. Members of the Order shunned publicity to concentrate on crime. “Everything that they did was covert,” said Tom McDaniel, a former FBI agent who moved to Montana in 1984 to pursue the case and never left.

It was only when the FBI agents were closing in on Mathews in November 1984 that he issued a declaration of war. Part of the declaration threatened to kill politicians in Congress: “When the day comes, we will not ask whether you swung to the right or swung to the left; we will simply swing you by your neck.”

The wording came from a tract published by the National Alliance, a far-right organization run by William Luther Pierce, author of “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian novel that imagines a white supremacist underground that takes over the United States and eventually the world.

Although the motivations are related, there is plenty that separates groups active now from those that operated in the past. Far-right organizations once needed to engage with possible recruits in person; now much of that radicalization occurs online. They can connect, scheme and even act through the internet. It was also unthinkable that any high-profile politician would voice opinions that such groups considered encouragement. Now those words have come from a former president.

Former agents viewed the Capitol riot and last year’s protests over social justice issues as possible seeds for radicalization.

“I feel that if there is an organization today from the extreme right that is following in the footsteps of the Order,” Manis said, “you will not know anything about it until it is too late and they have already done something dastardly.”

The Washington Post published contemporary photographs and videos of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As many as 300 black people were killed.

On May 30, 1921, Greenwood was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, home to doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs.

It boasted restaurants, grocery stores, churches, a hospital, a savings and loan, a post office, three hotels, jewelry and clothing stores, two movie theaters, a library, pool halls, a bus and cab service, a highly regarded school system, six private airplanes and two Black newspapers, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center.

Two days later, it was all gone.

Inflamed by rumors that a young black man had assaulted a young white woman, a white mob in Tulsa set out to avenge the alleged event. Fighting broke out between whites and blacks, and a large section of black-owned businesses and homes was reduced to ashes. Hundreds of blacks were killed, and a 35-block area of residences, restaurants, professional offices, and theatre was leveled. Subsequently the black man in the incident was absolved.

Alan Singer of Hofstra University writes here about the day that whites in Tulsa burned down a thriving black community.

Singer writes:

That night, white rioters looted and burned over 1,200 buildings in the Greenwood District, which at the time was a prosperous Black business and residential neighborhood known as Black Wall Street. White mobs bombed, looted, and set fire to buildings and opened fire on Black residents who tried to defend their homes and businesses. A report in the Tulsa Tribune described that “machine guns were set up and for 20 minutes poured a stream of lead on the negroes who sought refuge behind buildings, telephone poles, and in ditches.”