Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, speaks out against the lawsuit that eight New York City charter schools filed against the U.S. Department of Education, seeking more money.

She writes:

Eight New York State charter schools filed a frivolous lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education. The lawsuit claims that in 2019, the U.S. Department of Education unfairly pulled promised funds from the schools when it called back unspent funding from a 2011 Charter Schools Program grant. 

Despite the claim, the 2019 clawback of funds was not only justified but also long overdue. And if there is fault, that fault lies with the schools and/or the New York State Education Department, which treated the CSP grant like a piggy bank with few, if any, rules. 

Here are the details.

In 2011, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) was given more than $13 million from the federal Charter School Program (CSP) to disperse as subgrants to charter schools as start-up or expansion funds. At the same time, New York’s big charter chains like Success Academy, KIPP, and Democracy Prep were also getting federal dollars from the CSP CMO grants.  There was so much CSP funding with limited demand that NYSED could not give it all away.

CSP grants to the states have a timeline of five years. That means that by 2016, NYSED should not have continued to make sub-grants. But apparently, it did not stop awarding grants and return the excess funds. It continued to give the federal dollars out.

From a dataset published in 2019, which you can find here, we know that NYSED committed $760,410 to two prospective Zeta Charter Schools and over $676,000 to Persistence Prep in Buffalo. It began dispersing funds to those schools in 2017, giving them some but not all funding. That is because these schools were not even planned to open until the fall of 2018. Other schools named in the lawsuit are not listed in the 2019 published database, which likely means that NYS continued making awards from the expired grant beyond 2018. 

Incredibly, even though it had not entirely spent its prior grant, the NYSED applied for yet another CSP grant and was approved for a whopping $78,888,888 in 2018. Why the state thought it needed those funds is beyond understanding. Grants are to be used primarily to open new charter schools, and the state was bumping up against its charter cap.

The award also appears to be a violation of the federal law called ESSA (Every Students Succeeds Act), which states:

LIMITATIONS.—

‘‘(1) GRANTS.—No State entity may receive a  grant under this section for use in a State in which a  State entity is currently using a grant received under this section.

Even though reviewers noted that the smaller 2011 grant had not been completely spent and the state had little room for charter expansion under the cap, then Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos awarded nearly $79 million to the New York State Education Department from CSP.

Zeta charter schools, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, received an additional $636,531 from that new 2018 grant, even though it had not wholly spent its prior grant before the clawback. In 2020 ,I filed a FOIA for the 2011 and 2018 grants with NYSED. I have not received the requested information. At the same time, however, I filed a FOIA with the U.S. Department of Education, which promptly provided information on CSP grants, including the 2018 grant to New York. 

Once again, NYSED had trouble giving the CSP money away and therefore asked for and received a waiver to disperse 2018 CSP funds to existing charter schools as Covid relief, even as the states’ charters were getting PPP funding, not available to public schools. 

Here is the bottom line. The NYSED grabbed as many federal dollars for charter schools as possible, regardless of actual need. When the U.S. DOE clawed the money back in 2019, it did exactly what it was supposed to do under the law—take back unspent funds from an expired grant. This lawsuit which claims that charter schools are still entitled to money to open schools that have been open for several years, is, in my opinion, unserious. Rather, it is one more attempt by charter schools to bully the Biden Education Department.  

With all of its political muscle power, the charter industry is furious that the Biden Administration is turning a program that has been a piggy bank for frivolous spending into a responsible program that functions with sensible rules of the road. Unfortunately, the New York Post reporter who wrote about the lawsuit made little or no attempt to dig deeper and uncover relevant facts. 

This is also another example that demonstrates why the federal Charter School Program needs strong oversight and reform. Since the Charter Schools Program was first launched in 1995, it has operated with minimal or no accountability. And that reform must include better supervision of states that think it is fine to apply for money they do not need and then push our federal tax dollars out the door without care. In the end, all taxpayers, including those of New York State, foot the bill. 

This is an optimistic story. This is a story about the young people graduating from our public schools. They have the knowledge, insight, and skill to see the games that unscrupulous adults are playing on them and on society. They speak out. They give all of us hope.

In California, a high school senior ripped into Los Angeles Unified School Board members for abandoning public schools and favoring privately managed public schools.

Axel Brito was the valedictorian of Hollywood High School, the student with the highest grade point average. He might have spoken in platitudes, like so many graduation speakers, but instead he criticized the school board members who had danced on the strings of billionaire supporters. School officials tried to interfere as he spoke, but the audience insisted that he be allowed to finish. The audience chanted “Let him speak, let him speak.” The article quotes the graduation speech in full (with a few errors). Watch it!

Before I commence, let us have a moment of silence for the 19 Uvalde students who will never have the opportunity to graduate as we do today.

“Achieve the honorable.” This motto has been driven through us repeatedly at every stage of our high school career, and during this time I have come to meet dedicated teachers who embody this to a tee. Teachers of this and other schools dedicate their lives laboring for us, the students, because they want and need our generation to succeed and change the future for the better.

Yet, at times the soundness of it falters. After all, does achieving the honorable mean lying about your volunteer hours and having this deed actively encouraged by the administration? Does it mean to have your grades, including my own, artificially inflated through the lowering of standards and driving our overworked teachers up a wall because of it? Does it mean to leave students unpunished for their transgressions to save face? Does it mean to lie and keep parents out of the loop during events that put us in danger, and more so to have a security system that is in no way keeping us safe? Does it mean to blame students due to the school’s own incompetence? I’d like to think not.

Despite this, I don’t blame this school for its wrongdoings, after all this is something that is learned through example.

Nick Melvoin for one abused his position and diverted district resources for his re-election campaign. A campaign which itself is funded not by us, the parents who have children in LAUSD schools, but by external multimillion and multibillion-dollar charter-based super PACs. He is not the man of the people; he is merely a puppet for those who put him into power. Look no further than in 2019 when he provided confidential information to the California Charter School Association, one of his many donors, while the district was being sued to prevent funds from being spent to make schools more accommodating for the disabled. So much for “putting kids first.”

Further so, we have Mónica García as another instance of this charter-centric rhetoric as she too is funded heavily by charter-based organizations. Under the guise of choice and neoliberal ideals, she has ravaged this district with a heavy expansion of charter schools without taking its students into account. Rather she refers to special education students as not “our own kids” and says that “our biggest problem is that most of our kids, all of our kids, can’t read.”

Tanya Ortiz-Franklin and Kelly Gonez don’t escape scrutiny either as they too are a result of charter super PACs and as such are willing to turn a blind eye to charters which allows these pro-charter board members to outvote those that hold the interests of our students.

Therefore, it is no surprise when these board members set out to close and convert Pio Pico Middle School and Orville Wright Middle School into charter schools. Schools they deem as failing due to low enrollment rates as the charters around them owe over 13 million dollars to the district. They don’t have our interests at heart, they have those of the multimillion-dollar charter school industry instead.

Astonishingly our previous superintendents, John Deasy and Austin Beutner, were magnitudes worse as they were put into power by the late billionaire Eli Broad and his heavily charter-centered foundation. Both of these men were put there with no experience in education and left amid controversy and successfully paved the way to privatizing LAUSD. Broad disrupted our education to achieve a district half composed of charters. He, alongside The Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, wormed their way through this district to privatize our human right of an education.

Our district may claim higher graduation rates, and this year’s class can attest to that. But, does moving a goalpost closer and closer each year truly mean a growth in students? No, it doesn’t, it just guarantees that we graduate and are pushed into a world we are not ready for. Our students don’t know what failure is because the district and schools themselves will not allow it as they pass extensions and recovery classes time after time.

I have heard administration at different schools, like that of NOW Academy, tell teachers to teach APs like non-APs to ensure higher pass rates. Students at Hollywood entered stunted by the pandemic and can hardly manage basic arithmetic. I can only imagine how much worse it must be at other schools.

This is not about an education. This is not about college. This is not about a career. This is about a system that profits off us and because of this perpetuates the failure of its students in exchange for a gilded view of success that ensures those in power stay in power. So don’t you dare conflate my success to that of this school’s administration and much less so the district. I’m not a product of the district even if I, alongside my class are treated as such. I’m a product of my passion and the passion of my teachers.

Class of 2022, this is not yet over. This is only the beginning of a rough uphill battle that our district has left us unprepared for. Take a stance, start now, and fight back against the system that has left us to rot and fester. Vote these people out of office and keep people like them from further ruining what our teachers worked so hard to foster. Destabilize the status quo.

Meanwhile, on the other coast, in Florida, the valedictorian of his high school class had a dilemma. He had been elected class president of his class every year; he was respected and liked. He has been accepted as a freshman at Harvard University. But he had a problem. He is gay. His principal reviewed his speech and advised him not to mention the fact that he is gay. So he talked about his curly hair and how it made him different from everyone who did not have curly hair.

Valerie Strauss wrote in “The Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post:

Senior Class President Zander Moricz was tapped with giving a commencement speech at Pine View School in Osprey, Fla., but was given a restriction not normally attached to such an event.

An openly gay activist who is the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit against a new state law that restricts what teachers can say in classes about gender and sexual orientation, the teenager said publicly that he had been warned by his principal not to mention his activism or say the word “gay.” If he did, Moricz said on social media, his microphone would be cut off.

So on Sunday, Moricz gave the speech without saying the word — but still managed to speak directly about who he is and why he advocates for the LGBTQ community. He used his curly hair as a metaphor.

“I used to hate my curls,” he said, after removing his graduation cap and running his hands through his hair.

“I spent morning and night embarrassed of them trying to straighten this part of who I am, but the daily damage of trying to fix myself became too much to endure,” he said. “So while having curly hair in Florida is difficulty due to the humidity, I decided to be proud of who I was and started coming to school as my authentic self.”

Pine View Principal Steve Covert did not respond to The Washington Post’s efforts to contact him. Kelsey Whealy, a spokeswoman for Sarasota County Schools, said in a May 10 email that Pine View’s principal “did meet with Zander Moricz to remind him of the ceremony expectations” but did not say he had been told not to say “gay.”

Google his name and watch his speech.

This is the third in the series of investigative articles about Washington State’s largest charter chain, written by Ann Dornfeld for Station KUOW in Seattle.

As we have seen over the dozen years, Bill Gates is an accountability hawk. He wants everything measured. He wants teachers and principals to be held accountable, usually by the test scores of their students. He has invested heavily in charter schools. But as Dornfeld shows, the charter schools that Bill Gates created in Washington are accountable to no one.

Will anyone hold Bill Gates accountable? Of course not. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley (the billionaire who famously said that “only the little people pay taxes”), accountability is only for working stiffs, not for billionaires.

She writes:

Over seven months, KUOW interviewed 50 current and former Impact staff and parents, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents from Impact and state agencies, including enrollment records, staff resignation letters, court records, charter contracts, nondisclosure agreements, and internal emails.

KUOW’s investigation revealed a charter school chain that state officials have allowed to grow rapidly even as, staff allege, it failed to identify and serve students with disabilities, offered little to English language learners, and where crowded classrooms are largely led by inexperienced teachers without the usual credentials. Many students were recommended to repeat a grade based on test scores.

Records show that staff members and parents have, for years, taken their complaints about how Impact serves students to the many agencies assigned to oversee charter schools. They emailed the Impact board of directors, testified to the Washington State Charter School Commission, and reported concerns to the State Auditor’s Office. Little, if anything, came of their efforts, they said.

After Impact’s first school, in Tukwila, opened in 2018, the state approved new branches in Seattle, Tacoma, and a Renton location set to open next year.

As the state’s charter school law requires, Impact promised to focus its mission on marginalized students, and its demographics reflect the communities around its schools.

The charter chain’s students are mostly children of color from low-income families. Black students make up the largest percentage, including many from East African immigrant and refugee families. Twenty-one percent of students are learning English, state records show.

Jen Davis Wickens, Impact Public Schools co-founder and CEO, declined multiple interview requests for this story and agreed only to respond to emailed questions via a spokesperson.

Impact spokesperson Rowena Yow said by e-mail that the state’s primary K-12 education agency, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, “conducts a thorough annual audit of our [special education] program and services, and we have received approval since our inception in 2018.”

“Our special education program meets the highest standards,” Yow said, adding that the same is true for its English language learner program for the schools’ large number of students from immigrant and refugee families. Twenty percent of its students are learning English, state records show.

Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of public instruction, said his agency has relied entirely on what Impact claimed that it provides to special education and English language students.

“Most of what we do is ask districts to make attestations about their use of funds,” Reykdal said.

“Periodically, the state auditor will do a deep dive on a performance audit. But that’s very, very rare, especially for a new school.”

Reykdal said his agency oversees so many school districts that it often takes a complaint from the community to trigger the agency to take a closer look at school practices. As of March, when Reykdal was interviewed for this story, he said his agency had not received complaints about Impact’s special education and English language services.

Reykdal said that if Impact is not meeting its obligations, as parents and staff allege, “that’s alarming.”

The State Auditor’s Office has a significant lag time in completing school district audits — often two or more years — which means issues are often caught only in hindsight.

To date, the agency has issued one audit report for an Impact school, the Tukwila location: it reviewed the 2018-19 school year, its first in operation. That accountability audit looked at a handful of standard items, including whether the school had accurately classified students as needing special state-funded services, like English language lessons. The audit did not look into whether those services were actually provided.

With so many layers of oversight, the roles and responsibilities for each of the many agencies tasked with overseeing charters can be murky — both to the public, and to the agencies themselves.

Few of the 29 Impact parents KUOW interviewed pursued formal complaints regarding their concerns about how Impact schools run. More often, after raising issues at the school level, they gave up — or withdrew their children and enrolled them in their neighborhood schools.

Several Impact parents told KUOW there was no clear way to file a complaint about their concerns with the school — the website gave no clear path. Two said their emails to Impact’s public records address bounced back.

An extra layer of state oversight

The eight appointed members of the Washington State Charter School Commission authorize new charter schools, renew or revoke schools’ charter contracts, and are meant to ensure schools follow the law and their contracts.

The agency has a staff of six and a $1.8 million annual budget — money that comes almost entirely from fees paid by the charter schools it oversees. Because each school pays 3% of its state funding to the commission, the agency’s budget is directly tied to charter school enrollment.

Each additional school the commission approves — and each student who enrolls at that school — grows the commission budget. Conversely, if the commission limits a school’s growth, or revokes a school’s charter contract, the commission’s budget takes a hit.

Impact Public Schools paid the commission approximately $485,000 in fees this year, more than any other charter school or network, and about one-quarter of the agency’s budget.

The commission is supposed to produce annual reports on each charter school, as voters were promised: their academic success compared to traditional public schools, as well as the schools’ financial and organizational stability. The commission has not completed a charter school performance report since the 2018-19 school year, three school years ago...

In May 2020, former Impact teacher Claire Leong wrote to the Charter School Commission, imploring the agency to deny Impact’s efforts to add another two schools to its network.

Leong said the disciplinary system at Impact’s Tukwila school had been “abhorrent,” and that teachers were required to send students to another classroom after several minor infractions.

“This could be not looking at the speaker, not sitting up straight, not walking silently,” Leong wrote. “My students often missed learning time because of these marks, and were instead in a buddy class or with the admin team,” Leong said, adding that Black boys missed the most instruction.

“Impact Public Schools should not be allowed to open any more schools, and should have their current school audited to highlight the discrepancies between the values that they tout and the malpractice that is occurring when no one is there from a foundation or commission to see everyone on their best behavior,” Leong told the commission.

Several Impact staff and parents also testified in support of the school expansion.

Several weeks later, the Charter School Commission gave Impact the green light to open new schools in Tacoma and Renton.

When asked why the commission allowed Impact to open more schools despite serious concerns voiced by parents and staff, Commissioner Christine Varela, who serves as the agency spokesperson, said that the commission is required by state law to base its decisions for new schools “on documented evidence collected through the application review process…”

Impact parents said when they have complained to the commission, the commission often directed them to instead raise their issues with Impact’s board of directors.

A different kind of school board

Unlike traditional public school boards, which are elected by local voters, Impact’s board members are appointed.

When parents wrote to the board, they said board members often told them to complain instead to Impact co-founder and CEO Jen Davis Wickens, to voice their concerns during public comment at a board meeting, or to file a formal complaint with Impact.

Speaking during public comment at a board meeting can be difficult, because the meetings occur during work hours. It can also be intimidating for parents at Impact schools, said Jimmy, a parent at its Tukwila school — especially for its many immigrant and refugee families. He asked to use only his first name to protect his child’s privacy.

“Our voice is small,” Jimmy said. “English is our second language. If we want to say something, it’s hard, you know?”

At six Impact board meetings KUOW attended over the past seven months, unanimous approval of all agenda items was the norm, with little, if any, discussion. Meetings are typically over in 30 minutes.

Impact board members declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story, or to address any of the issues raised by parents and staff that KUOW shared with the board.

Although few people know more about the charter network than its staff, many former Impact educators told KUOW they were afraid to speak up with their serious concerns about the schools because they had signed non-disclosure agreements.

Impact has most departing staff sign an agreement barring them from sharing any information that “may cause harm to the employer.”

Some staff sign more stringent agreements that ban them from making “disparaging” remarks about Impact or divulging the reason for their resignation.

“Employee will simply state ‘I decided to pursue other opportunities,’ or something similar, and will make no further comment,” an Impact severance agreement reads.

Asmeret Habte, whose children, nieces, and nephews attended Impact’s Tukwila location this year, contacted the school, the board, and the state Charter School Commission about concerns about overcrowded classrooms at the school last fall.

As many as 38 students per class were eating at shared desks in one of the most Covid-affected areas in the region, and Habte and other parents worried the school was not doing enough to mitigate risk.

Krystal Starwich, then the commission’s interim executive director, told Habte that while the commission would ask Impact some questions, parents should go through their school’s established complaint and appeal processes.

Habte eventually gave up, and unenrolled her children from Impact. “Where is the accountability?” she asked. “There is no accountability, even though it’s public dollars” that fund Impact Public Schools, she said...

Reach Ann Dornfeld at adornfeld@kuow.org or 206-486-6505.

Bill Gates is singularly responsible for introducing charter schools into Washington State. He proposed the idea four times, and three times the voters said no. In 2012, he swamped the election with millions of dollars and glorious promises, and the measure passed. How are things working out for Bill and his friends? Not so well. Station KUOW in Seattle launched an investigation of the state’s largest charter chain and what the writer Ann Dornfeld found was broken promises.

In this post, she describes the charter chain’s cruel method of holding kids back in order to raise the chain’s test scores. Made the school look better at the expense of the students who were held back.

Dornfeld writes:

Art Wheeler’s daughter and son were thriving in the fall of their second year at Impact Puget Sound Elementary, a charter school in Tukwila, Washington. Their grades were high, Wheeler said, and they got glowing reports from their teachers.

“Your kids are standouts,” he recalled teachers saying. “They’re a pleasure to have in class.”

But two months into the school year, in November 2019, Wheeler said letters arrived from Impact saying his children were failing, and may have to repeat the year — the year that had just begun. Wheeler was confused. “They messed up,” he thought. “This is for somebody else’s kids.”

The holdback letters were, in fact, for Wheeler’s children. Others in their first- and second-grade classes had gotten them, too, teachers told him the next day, based on a single test, rather than students’ overall abilities. The teachers looked stricken, he said. One cried.

Three teachers told KUOW that they’ve had up to one-third of their students on the “promotion in doubt” list.

Impact said that its grade-retention practice is meant to ensure students master the material. Parents make the ultimate decision about whether to hold a child back, they said, and ultimately, only nine returning students — fewer than 3% — “chose to repeat a grade” in 2021.

But Baionne Coleman, a former Impact administrator, said its policy of sending grade-holdback letters was connected to funding.

Coleman said that Jen Davis Wickens, the co-founder and CEO of Impact, had been adamant that low-scoring students repeat the year.

“This is going to affect our third-grade scores,” Wickens said, according to Coleman.

Third grade is when students first take the state standardized reading and math tests. The state — and funders — use those test scores to determine whether a charter school has met its performance goals.

The tests are high-stakes: In 2021, Impact received a $10.1 million property loan from Equitable Facilities Fund, an organization focused on lending to charter schools. Loan documents include a covenant that students at Impact’s Tukwila school must outperform students in the surrounding school districts on the state math and reading tests.

Wickens declined multiple interview requests for this story and agreed to answer questions only via email through a spokesperson.

Hey, Bill Gates, this is a form of cheating. Are you proud of what you created?

For years, Bill Gates pushed charter schools in his state of Washington. The voters said no three times. Parent organizations, civil rights groups, labor organizations, and others who objected to privatization at Gates’ whim opposed his offer. But in 2012, Gates poured millions once again into his personal crusade for charter schools, and the measure squeaked through. At first, his charter schools were denied public funding because the state’s highest court said that charter schools are not public schools, because they do not have an elected school board. Gates and his buddies ran a campaign to defeat some of the justices at the next election, and when the charter funding issue came back again, they allowed the charters to draw from lottery money, not from the state public school fund.

A decade has passed, and what hath Bill wrought?

Ann Dornfeld of Station KUOW in Seattle investigated the state’s largest charter chain and found a string of broken promises.

In the first of the series, the story focused on the chain’s failure to provide appropriate services to English language learners.

A charter school chain promised a world-class education. Instead they billed the state and let kids ‘sit there quietly’

It began:

For Senait Ogubamichael, an Eritrean refugee, it was the American dream: Her daughter would get a stellar education and grow up to pursue any kind of career.

“Whatever she like,” Ogubamichael said. “If she like music, if she like being a doctor.”

Ogubamichael was drawn to Puget Sound Elementary, a charter school in Tukwila, because of its promise of instruction tailored to each student. Puget Sound is part of Impact Public Schools, the largest charter school chain in Washington state.

Ogubamichael’s family speaks Tigrinya at home, and her daughter, who is in second grade, is learning English. Five months into the 2021-22 school year, Ogubamichael realized that her daughter was barely making progress in English — and that she wasn’t getting services for English language learners, as had been promised, and which is a federal requirement.

Meanwhile, records from the state schools office show Impact Public Schools has billed the state more than $857,000 in the last four years for funding for English language programming. But teachers told KUOW that English language instruction is essentially nonexistent.

KUOW spoke with 50 parents and staff who voiced concerns about Impact’s treatment of its most vulnerable students — a pattern, they said, that has persisted since the first school opened in 2018.

Of those interviewed, 13 teachers said that Impact’s three schools also failed to provide specialized instruction for many students with disabilities, or those who are highly capable — even though that, too, is legally required.

Impact called the allegations regarding lack of English language services “completely false,” and said it follows the law on that and special education.

“We have been in full compliance with special education requirements this year and every year,” said Rowena Yow, spokesperson for Impact Public Schools. “We offer a full inclusion [English language learner] program that meets all state requirements.”

Jen Davis Wickens, co-founder and CEO of Impact schools, declined numerous interview requests, and agreed to answer questions only over email, via a spokesperson...

The charter chain’s students are mostly children of color from low-income families. Black students make up the largest percentage, including many from East African immigrant and refugee families. Twenty-one percent of students are English language learners, state records show.

Students learning English are entitled by federal law to special lessons from teachers certificated or well-trained to work with them.

At most schools with sizable immigrant populations, English language specialists work one-on-one or in groups with students who are still learning the language.

At Impact, however, there are no dedicated English language teachers, state records show. Six of about 100 classroom teachers have professional endorsements to teach English learners, but it is not their focus.

Open the link and read the story. It is indeed a story of broken promises.

You flunk, Bill.