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Archives for category: For-Profit
We learned recently that Oklahoma officials have charged the EPIC online charter with fraud, alleging that its leaders siphoned off $10 million for themselves while inflating enrollments of ghost students.
Schneider does her specialty investigation of EPIC’s tax returns and discovered that the corporation was created in 2009 for a variety of purposes, but not education. It eventually amended its filing to add education. In other words, the founders were entrepreneurs in search of a mark.
In 2010, it had revenue of $60,000.
After it went into the charter business, EPIC hit pay dirt. In 2016, it’s revenues exceeded $29 million.
Is this a great country or what?
Salt Lake City station KUTV noticed that the charter industry has a good friend in the Legislature. He has made millions from charter schools.
Journalists Chris Jones and Nadia Phlaum report:
State Sen. Lincoln Fillmore (Dist. 10) is one of the foremost experts on charter schools in the state legislature. That makes sense given that he runs Charter Solutions, a company that from 2015 to 2018 has collected $5.7 million in fees from charter schools.
That is taxpayer money given to those charter schools. As many as 23 different charter schools have hired Fillmore’s company to help them administer their curriculum and take care of back office activities like payroll and human resources.
Fillmore says although he does field questions from lawmakers regarding charter schools, he never sponsors legislation that affects them.
Fillmore says he has no conflict of interest. Just business as usual.
The report includes a long list of state legislators who are directly involved in the charter industry and vote to enrich their enterprise.
This charter industry is not about education. It is about profits and self-enrichment.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation says that the EPIC virtual charter school has stolen millions of dollars.
Investigators say the co-founders of the school embezzled $10 million, based on “ghost students” who never enrolled.
Just days ago, a state legislator asked where the money was going but was rebuffed by the state Department of Education.
Oklahoma’s largest charter school is a “blended learning school” that has received so much money that a legislator asked where the money was going. The state Department of Education said it wouldn’t tell him unless he paid a fee of $850 to find out. The school claims a 99% attendance rate, which in itself is bizarre.
Oklahoma state Sen. Ron Sharp is questioning funding the state’s largest charter school has received in the past two years.
This comes after Sharp said Epic Blended Charter School received a total of $63 million in its first two years of operation.
FOX 25 sat down with Sharp Thursday who said the school was provided allocation money through the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) for grade levels the school doesn’t provide.
“The first year they were in existence we gave them $23 million. For the second year now, we gave them $40 million. That is an excessive amount of money particularly for kids that’s aren’t being accommodated in the school. That is a problem,” Sharp said….
Sharp said he submitted an Open Records Request to the Oklahoma State Department of Education in March.
“In June, I received an email that they would not provide that information to me because of the extensive hours involved without an $850 fee. Which again, as a state senator, I found that to be a little bit unusual. Now I have been requesting quite a bit of documentation here from the OSDE,” Sharp said….
Sharp also questioned how many students actually show up to Epic Charter School on-site locations.
“Are there enough individuals? If 7,000 are showing up to two sites at any one period of time that, you have to make sure you have proper facilities for them. Individuals of which are able to monitor them and again, how many kids are coming in before school and after school?” Sharp said. “They even say at all these sites they have a 99% attendance rate. Which is absolutely amazing as a 38-year teacher — you cannot get 99% of your kids there at a school each day.
Now here is a nasty job, but someone has to do it (if the price is right.) Even “reformers” agree that virtual charters are a disaster, a sector with horrible results that is populated by entrepreneurs and grifters.
Peter Greene reviews an effort by “reformers” to salvage the rightly blemished record of this industry of scammers.
Can it be done? Not really.
First, he examines the connections of the writers of this report. Gold-plated reformers, for sure. Then he shows that their “insights” are either old hat, commonplace, or silly.
The report was written by Public Impact, whose staff has few actual educators.
Like most such groups, Public Impact likes to crank out “reports” that serve as slickly packaged advocacy for one reform thing or another. Two of their folk have just whipped together such a report for Bluum. Sigh. Yes, I know, but it’s important to mark all the wheels within wheels if for no other reason than A) it’s important to grasp just how many people are employed in the modern reformster biz and B) later, when these groups and people turn up again, you want to remember what they’ve been up to before.
What is Bluum?
So Bluum. This Idaho-based is a “non-profit organization committed to ensuring Idaho’s children reach their fullest potential by cultivating great leaders and innovative schools.” Its 2016 990 form lists that mission, though it includes some more specific work. “Bluum assists the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation determine where to make education investments that will result in the growth of high performing seats in Idaho.” (I will never not find the image of a high-performing seat” not funny.)Then they monitor the results. The Albertsons are Idaho grocery millionaires with an interest in education causes.
Blum’s CEO is Terry Ryan, who previously worked for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Ohio.
Bluum partners with Teach for America, NWEA. National School Choice Week, the PIE Network, and Education Cities, to name a few. And they are the project lead on the consortium that landed a big, juicy federal CSP grant to expand charters (that’s the program that turns out to have wasted at least a billion dollars).
Just so we’re clear– this report did not come from a place of unbiased inquiry. It came from a place of committed marketing.
Of “reform-style” mushrooms, the supply is endless, and the money is infinite. The results are consistently negative. Yet they keep trying.
The Albertson Foundation in Idaho is a rightwing foundation that shares the Betsy DeVos agenda.
Indiana is one of the state’s that has been all in for choice. One of the choices pushed by former governors Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence is Virtual Charter Schools. These are online schools that allegedly enroll home-schoolers or students who prefer not to attend a Brick-and-mortar school.
Study after study has found that these online schools have high attrition, low test scores, and low graduation rates. However they are very profitable since their operators are paid far more than their actual costs.
The name of their game is enrollment, since their costs decline as enrollment grows, and they must constantly replace those who drop out.
Unfortunately, the incidence of fraud is high since the online schools are seldom auidited.
Indiana is currently trying to recover $40 million from two online charter corporations and their authorizer, which was stolen by inflating enrollments.
Indiana will try to claw back around $40 million from two virtual charter schools and the public school district charged with overseeing them after an investigation found the charters inflated student enrollment counts and defrauded the state for the last three years.
Daleville Community Schools is the charter authorizer, charged with oversight, for Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy. A state audit found that the schools inflated their enrollment counts, which are used to determine how much money the schools receive from the state.
A report, provided by Daleville, showed that hundreds of students counted in the online schools rolls were never assigned a single class. In the 2016-17 school year, 740 students took no classes in the first semester and 1,048 took no classes in the second semester.
Many students were re-enrolled by the school, even after they had left. In at least one case, the school re-enrolled a deceased student, said State Examiner Paul Joyce.
Joyce told the State Board of Education at its meeting Wednesday that the schools’ action could be considered criminal.
Is it a novel idea to treat the theft of millions of dollars as “criminal?” That certainly did not happen in Ohio, where the operator of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) closed his doors rather than repay the state some $60 million in inflated charges. Over the years, ECOT collected nearly $1 billion, and there were no audits or efforts to recapture public funds until the past year. No criminal charges either.
You know the old saying: If you steal a fortune, you are treated as a gentleman, if you steal a loaf of bread, you go to jail.
Larry Cuban recounts the short history of AltSchool, which was intended to be a progressive moneymaker but flamed out and has been replaced by another company called Altitude Learning.
Another chapter is added to the annals of the for-profit education history.
Cuban writes:
Begun by wealthy high-tech entrepreneur (and ex-Google executive) Max Ventilla in 2013, AltSchool made a splash with its string of private “micro-schools” in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area (tuition was $26,000)–see here, here, and here. Ventilla saw AltSchool as a string of lab schools where progressive ideas could be put into practice and the individualized software that staff designed and used in the “micro-schools” could be bought and used in public schools.
AltSchool “micro-schools’ were ungraded, used project-based learning complete with individually designed “playlists,” small classes, and experienced young teachers. Were John and Evelyn Dewey alive, they would have enrolled their six children in AltSchool.
I stopped here to wonder what the socialist John Dewey, the philosopher of democracy and the common good, would have thought about for-profit schools.
Ventilla’s dream collapsed when he realized that he was spending $40 million a year and taking in revenues of $7 million.
So AltSchool is now evolving into Altitude Learning, a “platform” that will be sold to charters, public schools, and other customers.
Ventilla passes the torch:
In a blog post six months earlier, Ventilla signaled readers that AltSchool would be changing.
In 2017 we were fortunate to attract a number of world-class career educators and administrators to our team, to guide everything we do. Moving forward, I am pleased to announce Ben Kornell will become President of AltSchool. Ben joined our team back in 2017 as VP of Growth. He’s dedicated his life to reducing educational inequity; he started as a Teach for America middle school teacher and later went to Stanford Business School to learn how to cultivate educational change broadly. As COO of Envision, he helped lead a network of charter schools and scaled a performance assessment system to public schools across the country. Since joining AltSchool, Ben’s led our company’s transition to partnering with public and private schools nationwide. As we continue to integrate the platform into existing school systems, it is essential to have education leaders like Ben at the helm.
Another entry into the annals of Corporate Reform.
My suggestion to corporate reformers hoping to get rich by investing in the education industry.
Read Jonathan A. Knee, Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.
And Samuel Abrams’ illuminating account of the rise and fall of the Edison Project, in Education and the Commercial Mindset.
Mercedes Schneider knows that Democratic candidates righteously day they oppose “for-profit” charters. Carol Burris explained that there is little or no difference between for-profit charters and nonprofit charters.
Tom Ultican writes here about the biggest charter fraud in history (to this date).
This fraud was not one of those one-day wonders that people read about and forget the next day.
This one should wake up state legislators and produce genuine reforms of the state’s super-permissive charter law.
Ultican writes about the indictment of 11 people for the theft of $50 million. Other writers, however, peg the loss to the state and its students at $80 million.
Whether it’s $50 million or $80 million, it should catch the attention of those who are devoted to ethical behavior.
Ultican explains that charter advocates designed the law so that it would NOT regulate who got the money or how it was spent. The California charter law is an open invitation to graft and corruption.
And they walked through an open door, reaping millions from the state’s lax law. Deregulation and lack of oversight was supposed to spur innovation. But it mostly spurred theft.
He writes:
The state of California puts more than $80 billion annually into k12 education. Because that money is a natural target for profiteers and scammers, extra vigilance is needed. However, California’s charter school law was developed to provide minimum vigilance.
During its early stages, several billionaires like Carry Walton Penner, Reed Hastings and Arthur Rock made sure the California charter school law was designed to limit governmental rules and oversight. For example, charter schools are not required to meet the earthquake standards prescribed in the 1933 Field Act, which hold public schools to higher building code requirements. Since its enactment no public schools have collapsed in an earthquake. The picture of the Education Collaborative School above is evidence that students in a known earthquake zone are now at increased risk of injury and death.
A few weeks ago Louis Freedberg observedthat a key weakness in California’s chartering law is that there are no standards for authorizers and a lack of expertise. He also wrote about the number of charter authorizers saying, “unlike many states, California has hundreds of them: 294 local school districts, 41 county offices of education, along with the State Board of Education.” Among these 336 authorizers, several are school districts of less than 1,000 students which have neither the capacity nor training to supervise charter schools. Some of these small districts look more like charter school grafters than public school districts.
The California law is deeply defective. It assumes that the market will produce better schools. We now know that isn’t right.
Angie Sullivan teaches children in a Title 1 elementary school in Las Vegas. Many of her children are poor and don’t speak English. Her school is underfunded. Angie frequently sends blast emails to every legislator in the state, as well as journalists. She refuses to allow them to ignore her students, while they cater to the whims of billionaire casino owners, like the chair of the state board of education.
Angie wrote these posts recently:
Ironically as many scream for transparency of public schools – they also seem intent on making it as difficult as possible to find information on Nevada Charters. I’m looking at you “fiscal conservatives”.
Finding information on Nevada’s charters is like finding a needle in a haystack.
You can find it if you have 100 years. Or have time to puzzle it together. It took me hundreds of hours to develop just a list of Nevada charter campuses a few years ago.
I might come across the name. Or not.
Currently the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority (SPCSA) is the only sponsor accepting applications for new charter schools
The main source of information I have found is the Nevada Charter Authority.
You could look there for the names charters use. As you know, charters can change their names and I have found up to 15 names for the same address. Multiple campuses with different names are stacked under one charter.
The Nevada Secretary of State website can be searched.
I do know that business licenses with multiple names often come up as a topic in the Las Vegas City Council. Mainly because charters open many businesses under different names and/or expand without permission (like open an on-line in a brick and mortar). They forget to get licenses for all their “businesses”.
Charters are a nuisance. They do not consider traffic at pick up and drop off. They do not monitor kids and often do not have a playground. The public regularly complains about charter “business practice” in Las Vegas City council meetings. Sometimes I find information about them because they are a pain and citizens complain in public forums.
There should also be a way to follow the money since the receiverships are so plentiful. But there is not a easy way that I have found.
Aaron Ford who got a PHD in charters before becoming our Attorney General is not likely to ask for accountability anytime soon.
It is for all these reasons – lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and poor business practice: Nevada Assembly considered a moratorium on charters. It did not pass but it should have.
So long story short.
I would not surprise me if you found a someone running a charter in Nevada using a sham company. Who doesn’t? Throw a rock and hit a charter scam.
The bottom dwellers have all attempted to come here too. Sometimes as the FBI is chasing them out of other places.
I can hunt and peck around. The name does not ring a bell but these shady characters come and go and change their name so often in my corporation friendly state – they could be right under my nose and I see nothing.
You are welcome any time to come and I will find a venue for a movie showing. I’m just a teacher and have no money – we pulled together enough to have a viewing of the Matt Damon Film last year with Congresswoman Dina Titus and Candidate for Governor turned Governor Steve Sisolak. They did not watch the film but spoke at the beginning of the event.
You have a true champion in Congresswoman Dina Titus if you ever need one.
You need to avoid anyone from Team Harry Reid – he attended the Gulen Coral opening at the Air Force Base and supports Gulen charters fully. May even be key to bringing them to Nevada.
Teachers are most likely going to strike in the fall – so no union resources. The union actually owes me one because VP Theo Small held a union event with a charter expert as a headliner.
Gulen is a problem.
Academica is the charter monster in Nevada. It’s a real estate grab.
Along with the Agassi-Turner Hedgefund. It’s also a real estate grab.
We need money so badly – all of this is worse than a shame. Robs all the kids I love. All of them. Robs kids. Hurts kids.
Angie Sullivan
I would love to hear what new appointment Rebeca Feiden thinks of all of the above. Lack of information or accessible information is long running. And she knows it.
TFA creates data monsters who then are well paid to ignore data.
Then Angie wrote this post:
The Nevada Department of Education has been very pro-Charter under the direction of Casino Billionaire Elaine Wynn, Nevada State School Board President.
The other Nevada Gulens which are named Corals – even displaced the Air Force Teachers by offering to build a new school for the base. They forced the military wives off the base because the charters could not match salary. Gulen Corals clumped their data by north and south. Their administrators came to some meetings I held and became verbally irate telling folks about how great they are. How would anyone know? The Gulen Corals have not shown three years of data for their campuses yet. Opened for decade plus and zero data by campus.
Now I suspect they will just manipulate the data. There have been limited campus visits so no one makes sure there are testing protocols in place.
How do you keep a Nevada Charter from opening?
If someone can figure that out – I will employ that technique non-stop. It is difficult to even find a place to voice opposition.
They have agenda here:
Meetings are held during the day when teachers work. The person in charge of the 100+ charter campuses is a very young former TFA without a curriculum vitae to manage one charter let alone a $350+ million money distribution.
Most of the agendas are charter expansion.
And talking about charter problems without ever doing anything.
I would love to know how to actually prevent Nevada from being scammed by these corporations that other states are kicking out.
Please. Let me know.
Reason does not work.
Logic does not work.
Data does not work.
Nevada insists on pouring money into the charter toilet.
Crazy folks go nuts for choice – even as it is explained to them it the worst choice in the nation.
There is zero accountability. Nevada does not close charters for financial corruption/receivership. Nevada does not close charters for lack of data or lack of graduation. One charter might have closed because it literally had only one student.
Basically I keep pointing out to all the elected legislators, these businesses are failing to educate children. I try to shame folks taking money $350+ million and not providing anything to the tax payer.
Shaming.
Put them in the local newspaper. That is about the best tool I have.
Failing charters that are bottom
dwelling scum are what Nevada attracts because our per pupil spending is last in the nation.
So of course Gulen wants to open more.
What a scam.
Angie Sullivan
Diane Ravitch's blog 