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Trump Is Selling Access to Him for $1 Million as Part of Nation’s 250th Celebration

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
5

The New York Times reported that Trump is peddling access to him for $1 million and more as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary. I have posted a link to a gift article so you can read it in full.

President Trump’s allies are offering access to him and other perks to donors who give at least $1 million to a new group supporting flashy initiatives he is planning around the nation’s 250th birthday, according to documents and interviews.

The group, Freedom 250, is threatening to overshadow years of plans meant to reach the broadest cross section of Americans for semiquincentennial celebrations. They are now taking on a Trumpian flare, replete with marble and machismo.

But Freedom 250 has also emerged as another vehicle, akin to the White House ballroom project, through which people and companies with interests before the Trump administration can make tax-deductible donations to gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fund-raising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters..

Several of Freedom 250’s planned events and monuments lack obvious connections to the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or other seminal moments in the nation’s founding. Rather, they are tailored to Mr. Trump’s political agenda and his penchant for spectacle, personal branding and legacy. They include the construction of an arch overlooking Washington, an IndyCar racethrough the nation’s capital, a national prayer event and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn to coincide with the president’s 80th birthday.

Meredith O’Rourke, the president’s top fund-raiser, is amassing private donations for Freedom 250. Her team is circulating a solicitation, obtained by The New York Times, offering “bespoke packages” for donors.

While there are inconsistencies in the solicitation language, the detailed breakdowns of packages for donors indicate that those who give $1 million or more will get invitations to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by Mr. Trump, with a “historic photo opportunity.” Those who give $2.5 million or more also are being offered speaking roles at an event in Washington on July 4.

There is no end to the possibilities for selling access to Trump.

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Categories For-Profit, Trump

King Donald the First!

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2026 //
5

Gene Nichol, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, wrote a rousing article in an effort to awaken the citizens of his once-progressive state to the dictatorship that Trump has built in the past year. He refers to him as King Donald the First.

Personally, I think that Trump operates not as a king but as a Mafia boss. He extracts protection money from universities and law firms. He threatens our allies (but strangely not our enemies). He takes campaign contributions in exchange for pardons. His sons invest in lucrative real estate deals with nations that want an entree to the President. He tears down the East Wing of the White House to build a gaudy ballroom, without going through any of the steps required to make changes in a historic building. He slathers the austere and beautiful Oval Office with tawdry gold ornaments befitting the Godfather’s crass taste.

Actually, Professor Nichols agrees with me. In the article, he compares Trump to Al Capone.

Professor Nichol wrote in the Raleigh News & Observer:

We have launched a war against Venezuela — apparently because we can. We have provided no justification, no rationale, no candor. Their oil, we claim, is now ours. We’ll sell it and, Donald Trump explains, the “money will be controlled” by him. If the Venezuelans don’t bend quickly enough to our command, we’ll kill more of them. It’s like a video game to us. You know, like blowing up the boats. The U.S. military has proven its mastery — in an illegal and blatantly unconstitutional and brutal cause.

Next, Trump explains, “we’re going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.” If we “don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” Cuba and Mexico are, perhaps, after that. As Stephen Miller oozes — who is going to stop us? It’s a real world out there. “You can talk about international niceties, but we live in a world governed by strength, by force, by power,” Miller says. The strong, apparently, take what they want and the weak, in turn, bear what they must. (I think the ancient Greeks said that.)

The Western Hemisphere is reportedly ours. So is any other nation that has anything we want. The only limit is Trump’s moral compass. Imagine, if you can.

ICE continues to terrorize Democratic cities — killing a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, because, in this new era, that’s how you look manly, lethal. We advertise for agents on TV. Give ‘em signing bonuses. Le mercenaire.

The president of the United States extorts like Al Capone. Universities, law firms, corporations, media folks, researchers, artists, nonprofits, cities (Democratic ones), states (blue ones) and countries (weak ones). If you don’t do what he wants, he’ll bring bombers and gunships to your shore to see if that changes your mind. Maybe he’ll take the money, or maybe he’ll give it to his family. The corruption is so outlandish, we’ve quit keeping track. A surpassingly gutless House and Senate bless the effort. Their only apparent actual oath is to Donald J. Trump. A supine Supreme Court utters immunity. There is, literally, nothing beyond his power. And if there was, he could hire goons to do it and then pardon them.

We have fretted, as a nation, over whether Trump would become a dictator. He has. Donald The First. Anyone who thinks he and his crew will surrender power is three shades past delusional. At least the mystery is gone. The only question is whether he will be cabined, suppressed, rejected — legally — by the constitutional democracy he seeks to undo. That will require an actual Congress, resolute state governments, faithful and independent federal courts, but, most of all, a massively engaged, courageous and patriotic citizenry. It’s not yet clear whether we can manage to deliver these undoubted and foundational requisites. I wish I knew the answer. I do know it’s the most important question we face. Maybe that we’ll ever face.https://a13dfb665532302bfc5f824632f0e1ca.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0

Surveying my home — a state that I love and that counts for the nation — the North Carolina Republican Party must now denounce President Trump. If they don’t, all Tar Heels, citizens and officeholders, must abandon the party. This day. There could be no stronger proof that an institution is unfit to govern than the continued embrace of Donald Trump — the gravest single threat to constitutional democracy in American history. No patriot can support dictatorship. And no honest human can any longer pretend that’s not what is happening here.

Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Rachel Maddow Investigates the “Real Reason” that Trump Invaded Venezuela

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2026 //
4

I saw the show where Rachel Maddow tried to understand why Trump sent troops to invade Venezuela, kidnap its President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and bring them to the U.S. to stand trial.

She reviews the usual reasons and determines that each of them is insufficient.

What’s the real reason? Open the link and see.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom, Trump

Carol Burris: Time to Fix Charter School Laws

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2026 //
6

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, is an expert on charter schools and charter legislation. For the past decade, she has studied the charter school movement, state charter laws, and federal funding for charters and the consequences of those laws and funding more closely than anyone I know.

She wrote the following article, which was published in the current issue of The Progressive:

More than thirty years have passed since nineteen states first embraced charter schools as laboratories of innovation, and the evidence is clear: The model has broken down. Public trust has sharply eroded. School closures are routine, leaving students stranded and families frustrated. And nearly every day brings yet another charter school scandal.

The second installment of “Charter School Reckoning: Disillusionment,” a three-part report by the National Center for Charter School Accountability, reveals that the very structure of this sector—rather than merely isolated bad actors—is what enables mismanagement, profiteering, and instability at high cost to students and taxpayers. The need to rewrite charter laws is no longer a matter of debate; it is a matter of protecting students, taxpayers, and the public trust.

Roughly half of all charter schools by the 2018-19 school year were operated by management corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit. In Michigan, for-profit operators run 70 percent of the state’s charter schools. In Ohio and Florida, for-profits run half. Nevada’s, North Carolina’s, and South Carolina’s for-profit-run school sectors are quickly increasing. Charter schooling is now an industry, not a public school reform.

This growth in corporate chartering has been accompanied by the expansion of complex real estate and contracting structures. These arrangements are not incidental; they are built into the fabric of many charter school laws. In nearly every state, management companies can own school buildings, set their own lease terms, and collect “management fees” that reach 10 percent to 25 percent of a school’s total revenue. Through these related-party transactions, companies maximize profits, siphoning off funding that should be benefitting students.

In every state, authorizing entities that issue charters for schools are responsible for ensuring that the school is fiscally sound, well-managed, and that students are achieving. According to the new report, authorizers “decide who can start a new charter school, set academic and operational expectations, and oversee school performance. They also decide whether a charter should remain open or closed at the end of its contract.” Unfortunately, fee incentives, multiple authorizers, and political appointees to state authorizing boards often make the authorization process vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement. 

In 25 percent of states with charter school laws, four or more types of organizations—including universities, nonprofits, struggling colleges, junior colleges, school districts, and state agencies—are permitted to authorize charters to collect at least 3 percent of a school’s funding. In some states, small and cash-strapped nonprofits and colleges have created charter portfolios that generate millions of dollars. The “Charter School Reckoning” report also documents examples of failing schools that “authorizer shopped” to avoid being shut down, as well as one case of an authorizer who took charter customers on junkets to London and Stockholm.

Charter school board governance also generally remains slap-dash and unaccountable. Only five states require charter school governance to be based on elections. Nearly all other appointments are created by charter school boards’ bylaws, with only a handful of states having any requirements around term limits or membership.

Too often, board members have been sought out by the school’s operator and serve without term limits or approval beyond the board. The Epic Charter Schools case in Oklahoma shows how boards stacked with associates of the school’s founders failed to oversee tens of millions of dollars in questionable spending, with one board member admitting that he was a childhood friend of co-founder David Chaney.

Drawing from news stories published between September 2023 and September 2025, the “Charter School Reckoning” report documented a staggering $858 million in taxpayer funds lost to fraud, theft, profiteering, or incompetence. In story after story, board members were asleep at the wheel, claiming ignorance of the theft, fraud, and incompetence occurring on their watch. Only three states—California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts—“expressly prohibit contracts between a charter school board member and a company with whom the school is doing business.”

The consequences of these system design flaws fall heavily on students and families, with more than one in four charter schools closing by their fifth year and nearly 40 percent shuttering by year ten. And the funds taken from the public school system and taxpayer pockets are irretrievably lost.

These documented patterns point to a clear conclusion: Charter laws in many states create predictable opportunities for profiteering, opacity, and instability. Reform must therefore address the systemic issues that enable these outcomes. The report concludes with ten concrete legislative changes that, if correctly implemented, will reduce fraud and abuse and bring charter schools back to their original mission to serve as laboratories of educational innovation, deserving of the word “public.” Among the specific changes supported by the evidence in this report are stronger financial transparency rules, clear prohibitions on related-party transactions, limits on authorizer fees, democratic governance requirements for charter school boards, and renewal terms capped at five years.

The report concludes, “We can still incubate good ideas, but we should do so where they belong: inside the public system, with the sunlight, stewardship, and community voice that public money requires. Recommitment to that principle—public dollars for public schools under public rules—is the surest way to move from reckoning to repair.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud

ProPublica: The Zealots Who Hate Public Schools Now Work in the U.S. Department of Education

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2026 //
2

ProPublica published this article by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards in October, but I somehow missed it. It’s still relevant because it nails the personnel that Trump and wrestling entrepreneur Linda MacMahon installed at the U.S. Department of Education. The common thread among them: they want to privatize public schools, and they want to emphasize the Christian mission of schools.

It starts:

The department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.

Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students….

To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years.

Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.

In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.

Although more than 80% of American students attend public schools, Burke predicted that within five years, a majority would be enrolled in private choice options. The impact of their policies, she believes, will lead to the closure of many public schools.

Accountability, once a watchword for conservatives, won’t be needed in the future that McMahon and Burke are building.

As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation….

Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution.

Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students.

Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.”

McMahon has welcomedeaders of extremist rightwing groups into the Department, like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.

Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row [at McMahon’s confirmation hearings] from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration.

Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department.

AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.”

The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity…”

AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.

Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.

Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools.

Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals.

The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.

These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views.

Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, is optimistic about the plans of MacMahon:

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero….”

McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office.

Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools.

Open the link to read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: The Death of Public Schools in Florida?

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2026 //
1

Jeff Bryant, a veteran education journalist, dissects he plan to destroy public schools. Governor Ron DeSantis and the Legislature has unleashed the for-profit vultures to pick the bonds and funds of the state’s public schools. Not because the charges are better schools, but because the rightwingers have close ties to members of the legislature. Want to open a charter school? Want the state to pay all your expenses? Come on down to the Sunshine State!

This article was produced by Our Schools. Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky@jeffbinnc.

The letters started coming in October 2025. In the first wave, according to the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), “at least 22 school districts in Florida” got letters alerting them that charter school operators, including a for-profit charter school management company based in Miami, intended to use a state law recently enacted to open new charter schools on the campuses of existing public schools beginning August 2027.

In Broward County, a South Florida district that includes Fort Lauderdale, the Mater Academy charter school chain, operated by for-profit charter management company Academica, claimed space in 27 public schools. Mater Academy claimed space in nearly 30 schools in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa Bay, “along with more than a dozen [schools] in Pinellas [County] and six in Pasco [County],” Tampa Bay Times reported. In Sarasota County, Mater claimed space in three public school campuses.

At least two more charter chains—New York-based Success Academy and New Jersey-based KIPP NJ—have joined in the campaign.

“So far, 480 schools in 22 counties have received 690 ‘letters of intent’ from charter school organizations expressing their intent to occupy space in public school buildings,” FPI’s Norin Dollard told Our Schools in late November. When schools receive letters from multiple charter organizations, it’s first come, first served, she explained, and the timeline for schools to respond is incredibly short—just 20 days.

Once the charter occupies part of the public school, Dollard explained, it operates rent free, and the public school district becomes responsible for much of the charter’s costs, including those for services charters don’t customarily provide, such as bus transportation and food service, as well as costs for school support services like janitorial, security, library, nursing, and counseling. Even any construction costs the charters might incur have to be covered by the public school.

This new law will force some public schools to convert to charter schools, said Damaris Allen, “and that’s intentional.” Allen is the executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, a public schools advocacy organization that is rallying opposition to the law.

The letters have caught the attention of national news outlets, including the Washington Post, which reported, “The Florida law is an expansion of a state program called ‘Schools of Hope,’ which was set up to allow certain charters to operate in areas with low-performing local public schools. The new law allows ‘Schools of Hope’ operators to take over space at any public school that’s under capacity, regardless of whether it is high- or low-performing.”

“The expansion of the Schools of Hope idea has been on a slippery slope,” Dollard explained, “much like school vouchers have been in the state.” Originally, in 2017, schools identified for Schools of Hope transition from public governance to charter management were very narrowly defined as persistently underperforming schools. That changed in 2019 when the legislature altered the definition of low-performing to target more schools and added schools in so-called opportunity zones—government-designated areas selected for economic development—as open territory for charters. Now, the new law allows charter schools to take over “underused, vacant, or surplus” space in traditional public schools and operate free of charge.

As the reach of the Schools of Hope idea morphed, so did its rationale. According to a 2025 op-ed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the program was originally conceived as an “initiative that incentivizes high-quality charter operators to open schools for students trapped in failing ones.” The aim now, according to Bush, is to solve the “problem” of underutilized space in existing public schools.

With school enrollments in steep decline in nearly every district in the state, fear of a potential mass charter school industry takeover of public school spaces—along with the costs local districts will incur—looms over district leaders across the state and strikes them as a clear existential threat.

Other consequences of colocating more charters in public schools have not been well-thought-out, according to Allen. For instance, on the issue of school safety, public schools have undertaken a number of measures to protect against school shootings, such as converting buildings to single-point entry. Charter schools don’t have to do that. So what happens when a charter operation moves into a building and doesn’t comply with the single-point entry? Also, the state legislature created new rulesfor public school libraries in 2022. Charters don’t have to follow those rules. How is that going to work in a colocation?

Allen fears the daunting challenges of charter colocations will cause some school boards and communities to sell school buildings or convert them to district-operated charters rather than give in to charter schools run by outside, for-profit companies.

And while proponents of Florida’s Schools of Hope program see it as a way to expand education options for students and families, critics point to evidence that Florida charter schools, which one expert called “a shitstorm,” need stricter oversight rather than a free rein. And, regardless of the outcomes, they warn that the idea is sure to get promoted as an “education innovation” that other Republican-dominated states will likely adopt.

A warning sign, not a model

When Nancy Lawther, a retired college professor of French, got involved in public schools advocacy, she became very skeptical about the oft-told narrative about the need for more education options because “too many poor children are trapped in failing public schools.” After all, in Dade County, Miami, where she lives, the public system has an A rating by the state despite having a challenging student population that is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with many living in households earning less than the state’s median income.

Her skepticism only increased when she first heard about expanding the Schools of Hope program to more schools, especially when she saw the results from the first schools taken over.

The original “Schools of Hope” weren’t individual schools; it was a whole district. In 2017, the Jefferson County school board voted in favor of participating in a pilot project for the new Schools of Hope initiative. The board’s approval to join the pilot meant that the district was required to turn over the management of their schools to a “high-performing” charter management company, which, in this case, happened to be Somerset Academy, another charter chain managed by the for-profit Academica management company.

But the results of the pilot would be a warning sign about the abilities of charter management firms to improve the education outcomes of public schools. As a 2025 op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel recounted, “[T]axpayers saw higher costs, stagnant results, and constant staff churn. By 2022, the takeover collapsed. Local leaders called it ‘an absolute disaster.’ The state had to step in with a $5 million bailout just to get the district running again.”

A 2024 account of the pilot in the Tallahassee Democrat reported, “[F]rom 2017 to 2022,… [Jefferson County] remained troubled by students’ lagging academic performance and mounting disciplinary issues, like fighting that in one case led to the arrest of 15 students. … [And] the school district was still getting a D grade” from the state.

Nevertheless, after Florida lawmakers expanded the Schools of Hope program in 2019, which has cost more than $300 million as of 2025, “There are only about a dozen Schools of Hope in Florida. In 2024, eight of them got C or D grades,” pointed out the Bradenton Times.”

‘All about market share’

Given its track record of failure, Lawther suspects that expanding Schools of Hope has nothing to do with improving education outcomes or making better use of publicly funded school buildings.

Indeed, Sarasota County, one of the districts targeted for charter colocations, has been an A-rated system since the state created the grading system in 2004, according to the district website.

Also, in districts where there are enrollment slides, there are few signs that demand for charters will soak up excess building capacity. According to a 2025 analysis of Sarasota County by Suncoast Searchlight, “The number of charter schools has grown in recent years, but the share of students at charters has not shifted much.” And building utilization rates of the different sectors are nearly identical—82 percent for public schools and 84 percent for charters, WUSF stated. “Some of the lowest-performing charters are barely a third full.”

Mater Academy, the charter operator using the Schools of Hope law to claim space in Sarasota public schools, does not currently operate a school in the district.

“This is all about market share,” Lawther said. “It’s about getting an advantage over charter operators that are not Schools of Hope providers, and independent charters that can’t compete in a market geared to the large chains,” like those operated by Academica.

Further, while enrollments in Florida charter schools continued to grow, it has shown signs of slowing down—from 3.7 percent in 2024 to 2.6 percent in 2025—and the number of charter schools decreased, from 739 in 2023-2024 to 732 in 2024-2025.

Also, the charter industry in the state faces many more privately-operated competitors. “Expansions of voucher programs are creating a more competitive market for charter schools,” Lawther noted, “and private schools, microschools, and homeschooling are growing forms of school choice.”

Indeed, charter schools no longer appear to be the fastest-growing form of school choice in the state.

After the Republican-led Florida legislature passed a bill in 2023 that did away with income requirements for families to receive state-sponsored school vouchers, the share of state funding diverted from the public system—which, technically, includes charters—to private schools and homeschooling doubled from 12 percent in 2021 to 24 percent in 2025, WUSF reported. In the school year 2023-2024, the number of vouchers, often called “scholarships,” given out to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling increased by approximately 142,000 students, according to Next Steps, a school choice advocacy group.

Florida has also experienced a 46 percent increase in homeschooling over the past five years, WEAR statedin 2025. And the state has freed up 50,000 new community facilities to serve as microschools, according to the Center for American Progress.

It would seem that in this increasingly competitive education landscape, the Florida charter school industry could use a new competitive angle like the one offered by Schools of Hope. “Officially, charter school advocates say Schools of Hope is an amazing opportunity to expand parent choice,” Dollard said, “but unofficially, this is an incredibly lucrative business opportunity.”

An industry in decline?

The charter school industry’s desire for new business strategies that enable charter operators to seize public school classrooms—or even whole buildings—is not confined to Florida.

In Indiana, for years, public school districts have been required to notify the state, within 10 days, when one of their buildings becomes vacant and to make the building available to lease to a charter school for $1 per year or sell the building to a charter operator outright for $1.

In Ohio’s 2025 approved budget, a new provision allows the state to force school districts to close some public school buildings and sell those properties to charter or private schools “at below market value,” Ideastream Public Media reported.

Arkansas is also likely to adopt a Schools of Hope-like measure, Allen speculated, because its state secretary of education Jacob Oliva served in Florida. Oliva was Florida’s state education chancellor during the failed Schools of Hope pilot in Jefferson County.

One market condition that’s likely behind these increasingly aggressive charter school industry is land grab, as revealed in a 2025 analysis by the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA). According to the report, charter school closings have been accelerating nationwide, while the pace of new charter openings has slowed significantly during the same time.

“[T]he 2023-24 school year saw just 12 more open charter schools than during the previous year,” the report found. This is “a dramatic departure” from the heydays of industry growth when “[t]he number of charter schools increased by 421” between 2010 and 2011.

Charter school enrollment growth has also stalled, according to the report, increasing by 0.1 percentage point—from 7.5 percent to 7.6 percent of total charter enrollment—between 2020 and 2023.

In the most recent school years, based on official data from 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, NCCSA found, “Most states experienced declines or stagnation [in charter school market share], and preliminary indicators suggest that, once the 2024 data is finalized, the trend will likely worsen.”

North Carolina offers a clarifying example of the significant headwinds that the charter school industry now faces.

In the Tar Heel state, charter schools have enjoyed widespread support among state lawmakers and private investors. The state legislature has made dramatic changes to state laws regarding charters, including loosening regulations and fast-tracking approval of new schools. And a 2024 analysis by the Charlotte Observer found “at least $279 million in private equity investments in North Carolina charter schools since 2013.”

Despite this support, the number of charter schools in North Carolina declined in 2024-2025, from 211 to 208 in 2023-2024, according to an industry spokesperson. And many of the newest charter schools to open in the state have not fared well. “State data show that only about 26 percent of new charter schools in the past five years met or exceeded their enrollment projections,” NC Newsline reported, “and more than half of those that missed the mark are now closed or never opened.”

The report’s findings revealed that although charters tend to locate in low-income neighborhoods, they serve far fewer children from low-income families, fewer children who are English learners, and fewer children with disabilities, resulting in leaving traditional public schools with elevated needs and higher costs.

Critics of the Schools of Hope law noted that these industry shifts, as well as a historical tendency for education policies enacted in Florida to get picked up in other Republican-dominated states, will spur other states to adopt similar policies, regardless of any evidence that they might harm public schools.

“More generally,” Baker added, “Florida charter schools are a shitstorm, both underserving higher need populations and underperforming with those they do serve.”

‘A shitstorm’

Among the critics of Florida’s Schools of Hope legislation is Bruce Baker, a professor and chair of the department of teaching and learning at the University of Miami and an expert on charter schools and public school finances.

“I’m, of course, deeply concerned with granting preferential access to any charter operator, at the expense of a fiscally strapped school district,” Baker wrote in an email. “I’m more concerned when it may present a slippery slope regarding control over land and buildings that should—by the [state] constitution, which supersedes this regulatory change—be solely under the authority of the local boards of education elected by the taxpayers who financed those facilities and continue to maintain them. It becomes even more problematic if this eventually creates an avenue to transfer ownership. That would be a particularly egregious violation of local board authority and private taking of public assets. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a concern.”

Baker’s assessment of charter schools in the Sunshine State is evident in his 2025 report, which looks at the impacts of the industry on school funding adequacy, equity, and student academic outcomes across the state, and, more specifically, in the Miami-Dade district.

Also, charters, despite having an advantage of educating less challenging and less costly student populations, underperform public schools on state assessments while “serving otherwise similar student populations.” This finding holds statewide and in Miami-Dade.

The report concludes that Florida charters are “compromising equity, eroding efficiency, and producing poor educational outcomes for those it serves.”

Given these findings, the report recommends that state lawmakers “[i]mpose a moratorium on charter school expansion, including the Schools of Hope Program.” It also calls for “new regulations for evaluating existing charter operators,” stronger vetting of new charter operators, and stricter enforcement of regulations about charter school student outcomes.

Schools of nope

Several district school superintendents across Florida have urged their communities to oppose the state’s Schools of Hope charter school expansion in public school buildings. When the state’s current education commissioner defended the Schools of Hope law in his address at a 2025 conference for school board members and district leaders and suggested it could be used to shut down whole districts, the audience roundly booed him.

Grassroots groups such as Families for Strong Public Schools have held events to educate the public about the negative impacts of charter colocations. A coalition that includes the United Teachers of Dade, NAACP Miami-Dade Branch, the Miami-Dade County Council of PTA/PTSA, and others has formed to protest charter colocations. And a senator in the state legislature has introduced a bill to repeal the Schools of Hope expansion.

Much of the opposition has rallied under the banner of “Schools of Nope” and is organizing call-ins and an email campaign targeting state legislators.

Opposition organizers like Damaris Allen see this as a do-or-die moment in the state. “Either we win this fight, or it’s the death of public schools in Florida,” she said.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice

The 74: More Religious Charter Schools Apply for Public $$

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
4

You knew that when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from Oklahoma to approve a religious charter school, there would be more requests in the pipeline. Oklahoma was rejected by a 4-4 vote only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, because of her friendship with one of the lawyers for the online Catholic school.

Recently, as I reported, Oklahoma returned with a proposal for an online Jewish charter school, a Ben Gamla charter. The entire state of Oklahoma has a population of only 9,000 Jews. They are not requesting a Jewish school, but an entrepreneur connected to a Florida for-profit charter chain is.

Religious charter schools are a big problem for the national charter lobby. They say that charter schools are “public” schools. The advocates for religious charter schools say they are not public schools. They are specifically religious schools.

The 74 reported the latest proposal:

When the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked this year in a case over whether charter schools can be religious, experts said it wouldn’t take long for the question to re-emerge in another lawsuit.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued an opinion last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands. 

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation runs a network of Hebrew language charter schools in Florida. Now it wants to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma. (Ben Gamla)

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially promoted the school as Christian. But it was approved in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. Related‘A Day to Exhale’: Supreme Court Deadlocks on Religious Charter Schools — For Now

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide…

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release….

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has an estimated Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Please open the link to continue reading the article.

Categories Charter Schools, Ethics, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Virtual Charter Schools

Florida: School Board Leaders Boo State Commissioner of Education

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2025 //
2

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/12/04/florida-education-commissioner-booed-at-tampa-school-board-conference/

Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas told school board members and superintendents from around the state on Thursday to get over their complaints about Schools of Hope seeking to co-locate in underused district buildings.

Then he suggested the state could look at shutting down “failing” school districts.

That’s when the boos started flying.

Kamoutsas’ lunchtime remarks riled attendees of the Florida School Boards Association’s winter conference in Tampa, the latest escalation of tension between the state’s top education official and local district leaders.

Kamoutsas — who had been invited to the conference but not confirmed as a speaker until Thursday — touted the strong student results of New York-based Success Academy, Florida’s latest Schools of Hope-approved charter school operator, and argued that local districts should want the same kind of outcome.

“That proven success is why Florida has committed to expanding the Schools of Hope model,” Kamoutsas said. “Let’s not forget Schools of Hope are subject to the same assessment program and grading system as the traditional public school. But these schools operate under a performance-based agreement with their sponsor, so if they fail to meet standards, they will be closed.”

Then came the boo line: “There’s not a school district in this state that could be shut down for failing to meet performance standards, though maybe we can talk about that with the Legislature this session.”

The crowd — who had previously heard the commissioner say some of them lacked leadership and conviction — erupted in anger, leaving the commissioner to repeatedly ask them to let him finish. A couple of attendees walked out of the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay ballroom where the meal was taking place.

After about 20 seconds, the group quieted down. Then Kamoutsas doubled down, telling them that he was not asking, but rather expecting them to innovate in any way possible to make the model succeed. Florida’s students don’t deserve failing public schools, he said.

“This is not the moment to protect the way things work,” Kamoutsas said. “This is the moment to put students first. We have a responsibility, a moral obligation to ensure that every child in Florida has access to a world-class education, not someday, not when it’s convenient, not after the funding gets negotiated. Now.”

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

Florida: Wife of GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Builds a For-Profit Charter School Empire

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2025 //
6

The mainstream media typically ignores charter school scandals, but CBS picked up on this one. Erika Donalds is building a for-profit charter school chain. She is the wife of Byron Donalds, who is running for Governor of Florida with Donald Trump’s blessing.

Byron Donalds has been a staunch supporter of Trump. Donalds is African American. Frankly, I don’t understand how he can be part of a political movement that seeks to eliminate Black history, dismantle studies of race and gender, and disparage any efforts to rectify historic racial injustices. I hope reporters ask him about these questions on the campaign trail.

Peter Greene saw the segment on CBS and posted the video. In his piece, he refers to Erika Donalds as “Florida’s leading school choice grifter.”

CBS reporters wrote:

Kathleen Cetola believed she had found the perfect fit for her 9-year-old grandson Landon when Optima Classical Academy broke ground in 2023 near her home in Fort Myers, Florida. As the primary caregiver for Landon, Cetola was drawn to the smaller class sizes and more traditional curriculum, which she felt would be “less woke” than the public school he was currently attending.

“Regarding gender and race, I want him to be able to make up his own mind,” Cetola told CBS News. “They were selling the fact that they were focused on the education and the classical type of teaching. I thought that was going to be a great opportunity for Landon.”

The Optima school in Fort Myers was founded by Erika Donalds, a leading voice in the school choice movement and the wife of Congressman Byron Donalds, the Republican frontrunner in next year’s Florida governor’s race. It was poised to be Erika Donalds’ fifth classical charter school and part of a flourishing trend.

Photo of Erika Donalds.
Erika Donalds speaks on stage during day one of the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit on Friday, July 11, 2025, in Tampa. Luis Santana / Tampa Bay Times via AP

Classical charter schools offer a curriculum with a Eurocentric focus that stresses traditional values and introduces primary source documents like the U.S. Constitution at an early age. In the last five years, more than 250 classical schools have opened across the country. Many conservative politicians argue these schools are needed to reject what they see as a pervasive woke agenda in American public education.

Donalds has been a face of the classical charter movement, touring the country to tout their value. In an October speech to a group of conservative college women, she spoke about her decision to start her own schools. She said it was born out of her own experience trying to educate her children.

“I knew there were so many families out there that were desperate for this option,” she said.

Yet, after enrolling hundreds of students and hiring teachers, the Fort Myers school failed to open, leaving parents scrambling to find a school for their children.

“I feel cheated,” said Cetola, who was one of a half dozen parents who told CBS News they had signed up their kids to attend. “These kids were cheated, and it’s heartbreaking….”

The confusion the parents faced, according to experts, is not unique within a charter school industry that often operates with less transparency than traditional public schools.

Donalds declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement, her spokesperson said she is “an accomplished businesswoman with a strong record of starting successful charter schools and providing thousands of students with an excellent education.”

Taxpayer-funded charter schools paid outside firms

Classical schools are one slice of a charter industry that GOP leaders have tapped to remake America’s public education system. Recent moves by both the federal government and local officials in Florida have freed up hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding. In September, the Trump administration announced it was investing half a billion dollars in grant programs that support charter schools.

The announcement came as Florida passed a law — at the urging of hedge fund manager and Republican megadonor Ken Griffin — to allow charter schools to operate inside traditional public school buildings.

CBS News reviewed state education data, financial documents, independent audits and faculty comments at four schools Donalds had helped launch. State data shows when it came to academic performance, one of the schools quickly excelled. But the records also raise questions about how public money was being spent by the schools.

Tax filings reviewed by CBS News show, between 2020 and 2023, the schools spent roughly 30% of the government funding they received — totaling about $35 million — on outside firms with ties to Erika Donalds. A source familiar with these arrangements said they landed the schools a good price on payroll expenses, IT and other back-office services.

In August, Byron Donalds filed an amended House financial disclosure for 2023, reporting that Erika Donalds held a stake in two of those firms each worth between $1 million and $5 million. His most recent disclosure, for 2024, again listed her stakes in those companies.

The amended disclosure was first reported by the Florida Bulldog…

Of course, parents in Fort Meyers who signed up for Donalds’ school were disappointed when it didn’t open as promised.

They had been promised that the school would open in the fall of 2024. Erika Donalds told them that financial challenges and the lingering effects of Hurricane Ian required her to delay the opening. Parents eagerly anticipated the opening in the fall of 2025, but it was again announced that the opening would be delayed, this time to 2026.

Prior to the school in Fort Myers, Donalds helped launch four other classical charter schools operated by Optima across Florida: two in Jacksonville, one in Stuart and one in Naples.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/y9D5j/

Baker, the charter school expert at the University of Miami, said the practice reflected in Optima’s tax filings — of non-profit schools paying money to for-profit companies with overlapping stakeholders — occurs across the charter school industry. He said in the absence of meaningful governmental regulation, accountability comes from “how well they do for students.”

On that measure, students at those four Optima schools performed below average, according to Baker, who looked at math and reading test scores.

“Florida’s charter sector is not strong, and Optima schools, at least the four schools that seem to be in that affiliated mix, perform even less well,” Baker said.

The learning curve when it comes to implementing the classical curriculum can be steep, according to Janine Swearingin, who served as Treasure Coast Classical’s first principal from 2019 to 2022 and would later go on to work directly with Donalds at Optima. She praised Donalds and the company’s role in launching the school, which she said consistently earned top marks from the state when it came to academic performance when she was there.

In January 2023, after Swearingin left the school, the board of Treasure Coast Classical Academy commissioned an independent “performance audit” which was intended to draw attention to areas of concern. The resulting report said that while there were “commendable” aspects of the school’s performance, it also raised questions. Class sizes were so large, it said, that they appeared to violate state law and it noted a lack of structure in the classroom, all findings that Optima disputed.

The auditor praised Treasure Coast Classical’s “outstanding” financial health. But, some faculty complained Optima operated more like a “franchising corporation” and was “dedicated to profit sometimes to the detriment of the school itself.”

“It’s quite an undertaking since teachers don’t generally receive an education in teaching a classical curriculum,” said Swearingin, who noted that in a classical curriculum, first graders are studying the American Revolution at a time when their public school counterparts are learning about community helpers and basic geography. “The training is vastly different.”

As part of its response, Optima said it was working with the auditor “to build trust, address remaining concerns, and correct misinformation or misunderstandings.” A month later, the school’s board moved to terminate its contract with Optima. Treasure Coast Classical later sued Optima, alleging numerous instances of breach of its contract with the school. A county judge dismissed the lawsuit ruling because it had been filed in the wrong venue, and Treasure Coast Classical has appealed.

According to meeting minutes of the schools’ boards as well as county officials and school administrators contacted by CBS News, all four schools that had opened have since cut ties with Optima. The schools still offer a classical curriculum, but under different management. A source close to Donalds told CBS News that Optima’s plan all along was to assist with the start-up and then move on, once the schools reached “full stability.”

Donalds’ spokesperson noted that the schools’ academic performance eventually improved. “These schools show how a supportive environment, committed teachers, and high expectations can help children thrive,” she said.

The school in Fort Myers that had planned to open as Optima Academy is no longer associated with Donalds or her company. According to county records obtained by CBS News, Donalds in August sought to transfer ownership of the building to another charter operator. In October, the county school board approved the transfer and the new operator plans to open the school next fall.

“They just dropped the ball and ran,” Cetola said. “How can you do something like this and sell this to parents who really want to stay involved with their children and then just walk away?”

This story has been updated.

Credits

Reporting by Michael Kaplan, Mark Strassman and Emma Nicholson. Production by Michael Kaplan, Emma Nicholson and Alyssa Spady. Photos and videography by Ryan Jackson. Video editing by Greg Hotsenpiller. Graphics, design and development by Taylor Johnston. Editing by Ellen Uchimiya and Matthew Mosk.

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

Carol Burris: Another Religious Charter School Applies for Public Funding in Oklahoma, Backed by For-Profit Corporation

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2025 //
13

In this post, Carol Burris reviews the latest challenge to separation of church and state. A religious school has applied for public funding as an online charter school. But that’s not all: the religious school is a tentacle in the vast for-profit empire of the Florida-based Academia charter chain.

Carol Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education (NPE). She was a teacher and principal in New York State and was designated as Principal of the Year. She is an expert on the charter school sector. She follows the money, studying federal records, state records, and financial reports. She has posted numerous reports, which can be found on the website of NPE.

Burris writes:

After the first bid for an online religious charter failed in Oklahoma, we were told it would not be the last. True to that promise, the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation has informed Oklahoma’s statewide charter board that it plans to seek public funding for an online high school serving roughly 40 students to start. According to Peter Deutch, who filed the letter of intent, a complete application is expected to be submitted before the end of the year. While owning a residence in Florida, Deutsch has lived in Israel for more than a decade.  

Ben Gamla Charter Schools were founded in 2007 by Deutsch under the nonprofit umbrella of the National Ben Gamla Charterschool Foundation Inc. Students receive instruction in Hebrew language and learn about Israeli culture and Jewish history during school hours. Religious teachings (such as prayers or Torah study) are offered as optional programs after school hours. According to this 2013 article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA),

About 150 students mill around for a few minutes before heading back to the classrooms. They are followed by Orthodox rabbis with dangling tzitzit fringes and black-velvet yarmulkes pushing carts laden with prayer books and snacks.

Within a few minutes, the kids are chanting morning prayers — even though it’s afternoon and until a few minutes earlier, the classrooms had belonged to a taxpayer-funded public school.

That’s because Ben Gamla’s lease on the building lapses at about 2:15 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. For the next two hours, the classrooms are taken over by a religious Jewish after-school program.

From the beginning, it was widely understood that Peter Deutsch’s goal in launching Ben Gamla was to create a publicly funded alternative to Jewish day schools, which charge tuition and are often financially out of reach for many families. Deutch is not shy about using his charters to promote Jewish communal purposes. He made it clear to the Times of Israel that, “He wants to give Jewish kids who otherwise would attend public school an opportunity to be in a Jewish environment and develop a Jewish identity — at taxpayer expense. The Hebrew curriculum includes Israel education and Jewish history, and most of the schools are located on Jewish community campuses. Some 85 percent of the students are Jewish. Supplementary after-school religious programs take place onsite or nearby.”

Now, Deutsch appears to be abandoning even the pretense of maintaining a secular framework, creating a new nonprofit that includes “Jewish” in the foundation name. His new vision would effectively erase the boundary between public education and religious instruction, pushing the model well beyond the constitutional line that Ben Gamla once claimed to walk carefully around.

But Ben Gamla’s story is even more complicated than above. Since its beginning, Ben Gamla charter schools have been run by a for-profit corporation—the largest for-profit charter management corporation in the United States—Academica.

Ben Gamla and the For-Profit Academica

To understand how deeply Academica’s involvement with Ben Gamla reaches, one need only examine the network’s earliest tax filings. The first available IRS Form 990—filed in 2009 for the 2008 school year, when the original Hollywood, Florida campus was the only Ben Gamla school open—lists the organization’s address as 6361 Sunset Drive in Miami, the location of Academica’s offices at the time. By the 2011 submission, Academica had moved to 6340 Sunset Drive, Miami. That address then appears as the Ben Gamla address on the Foundation’s subsequent 990s.

The overlap goes beyond shared office space. Those early tax forms were signed and submitted by Academica’s longtime Chief Financial Officer, underscoring that from the very beginning, Academica was not merely a vendor or service provider—it functioned as the operational and administrative engine behind the Ben Gamla charter school network.

The Ben Gamla Foundation’s address at 6340 Sunset Drive is still listed on the latest public 990.According to the latest Foundation audit, Academica provides both “academic and administrative services, including, but not limited to, facility design, staffing recommendations, human resource coordination, regulatory compliance, legal and corporate upkeep, maintenance of the books and records, bookkeeping, budgeting, financial reporting, and virtual education services.” Personnel in the school work for another for-profit ADP, which appears as the personnel vendor for many Academica-run schools. 

But that is not all. The audit lists the following Academica-related corporations as having received finance lease agreements and lease liability payments for its Hollywood and North campuses in 2023: North Miami Lakes Campus, LLC, Van Buren Facility, LLC, and Hollywood Educational Annex, LLC. These corporations, located at the same address as Ben Gamla and Academica companies and affiliated charter chains, are three of scores of real estate arms of the for-profit. 

During the 2023-24 school year alone, the Ben Gamla Charterschool Foundation, Inc. paid Academica and what the audit terms as “its affiliates” $3,413,317.00.

The relationship between the for-profit Academica and charter schools is repeated across the nation: Academica’s “brands” are nonprofits that hold charters and get taxpayer funds, including federal CSP grants, while Academica, for all intents and purposes, runs the schools. 

Other Academica-affiliated charter brands beyond Ben Gamla include:

• Somerset Academy, Inc. – A large charter school network (founded 1997) that partners with Academica. It encompasses roughly 80 schools across Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona, with a small international presence inSpain.

• Mater Academy, Inc. – A Florida-based chain (founded 1998) supported by Academica, and started by Academica’s owner, Francisco Zulueta. Mater Academy has grown to 44 charter schools in 3 states (primarily Florida and Nevada, with recent expansion to Texas). 

• Doral Academy, Inc. – A charter school network (founded 1999) affiliated with Academica and originating in Doral, FL. It operates 16 schools across six states – Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, North Carolina, and Texas. 

• Pinecrest Academy, Inc. – A charter network under Academica’s umbrella, founded in 2000. Pinecrest Academy operates 26 schools in Florida, Nevada, and Idaho.

• Sports Leadership & Management (SLAM) – A specialized charter school network focusing on sports-themed academics, co-founded by artist Pitbull in partnership with Academica. Since the first SLAM opened in Miami (2013), the network has expanded to multiple campuses. SLAM schools are located in Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas. 

• CIVICA – A newer Academica-affiliated charter network focused on career and civic leadership academies. It began with the City of Hialeah Educational Academy (COHEA) in Florida and has grown into the CIVICA Network operating schools in Florida, Nevada, and Colorado.

• International Studies Charter Schools, Inc. – A boutique network of multilingual college-prep charters in South Florida supported by Academica in Florida. 

• Independence Classical Academy: Academica’s latest brand of classical virtuous charter schools, with schools opening in Colorado and Nevada.

Nearly all of these chains have an Academica-supported online school. In addition, Academica provides both national and international for-profit virtual education. And it operates colleges associated with its charter chains in Florida. All of this is tied together neatly by the for-profit here.

Implications for Religious Charter Schools

To believe that Peter Deutsch—who resides in Israel—and the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation, which he created, are seeking approval to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma without the quiet support and coordination of Academica is simply naïve. Fewer than 0.1% of Oklahomans identify as Jewish. No one launches a niche virtual religious charter in that context unless a far more powerful operator is standing behind it. 

And Academica is nothing if not opportunistic. When CTE schools became trendy, Academica created the Civica chain. When “classical education” surged in conservative states, it launched the Independence charter network. Whenever a new market emerges—no matter how small, remote, or ideologically charged—Academica is there to plant a flag.

Academica likely brings in billions each year through its vast ecosystem of charter schools, real-estate deals, management fees, and related-party businesses. But for Academica, enough is never enough. The possibility of religious charter schools—publicly funded, lightly regulated, and ideologically branded—is not just appealing. It’s a gold mine. 

Some will insist this new online religious charter will be “independent.” It will not be. The pattern is already documented. As far back as 2013, the Fordham Institute—itself a charter school authorizer—admitted as much. When a Ben Gamla governing board attempted to fulfill its legal duty to operate independently from the Foundation and Academica, it was swiftly shut down. The Institute’s candor in its commentary confirmed what insiders already knew: independence is tolerated only until it interferes with the chain and its operator’s control. From that report:

“But it seems this local board took its job too seriously. Peter Deutsch, the founder of the Ben Gamla network and a former Congressman from South Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times that the local board ended up making all the decisions about the school. The foundation, he said, wanted more control.”

If the Oklahoma Virtual Charter Board approves this application when filed and the case ultimately reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the challengers won’t just be arguing before a bench that includes Amy Coney Barrett. They will also confront the power behind an established charter chain whose own governance and for-profit entanglements make the point more clearly than any brief could: charter schools—despite what their advocates claim—are not truly public schools in most states at all.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state
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