Bruce Baker employs a series of tweets to demonstrate the fallacy of “the money follows the child.” Public money is collected for the public good. Public money supports services and institutions for future generations, not just for those now using them. The oft-heard demand that “the money follows the child” is fallacious. It is used to privatize institutions created for all.
Archives for category: For-Profit
As reported earlier today, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed legislation that would have allowed privately managed charters to be authorized without the approval of the local school board. This legislation would have invited into Virginia all the scandals, frauds, scams, and profiteering that have marred the charter industry in other states.
The state’s major newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispath, blasted Governor McAuliffe’s veto. It claimed that the Governor was stopping innovation, yet it didn’t name a single innovative practice that charter schools engage in. Is it innovative to treat children like convicts in a chain gang, punishing them for the slightest infraction? Punishing them if their shirt is not tucked in? Punishing them if they speak out of turn? Punishing them if they don’t walk in a straight line?
Is it innovative to expect teachers to work sixty or seventy hours a week, so they leave after a year or two, burned out?
The newspaper says Virginia should have charter schools because Florida and North Carolina have charter schools. Does the editorial demonstrate that charter schools in these states have produced better education? No. Does it admit that charter schools in these states are enriching entrepreneurs who profit by leeching taxpayer money from public schools? Does it acknowledge the hundreds of charter schools in Florida that have closed because of financial or academic deficiencies? Does it acknowledge that charters in some states–like Nevada and Ohio–are among the lowest performing schools in the state? No.
The newspaper falsely claims that charter schools are public schools; they are not. Whenever they are hauled into court for violating the rights of students or teachers, they defend themselves by insisting they are NOT state actors, they are private corporations with state contracts. Let’s take their word for it. They are private contractors, not public schools.
The newspaper doesn’t acknowledge that privately managed charter schools are not obliged to accept children with disabilities or English language learners. Leaving them out falsely boosts the scores of charter schools.
The newspaper editorialist might learn from the example of Michigan, which embraced charters at the behest of Betsy DeVos and saw its national rankings plummet from the middle to the bottom 10% on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Governor McAuliffe was absolutely correct to veto this legislation, which would have undermined local control and given free rein to raiders of public funding.
The legislation was probably written by ALEC (the noxious American Legislative Exchange Council, which hates public education and any role for government).
Governor McAuliffe, the Network for Public Education thanks you for standing up for the 90% of children who attend public schools, real public schools under democratic control. Your vote strengthened our democracy and warded off the privatization plans of Betsy DeVos and ALEC.
God Bless Governor McAuliffe!
Betsy DeVos just reversed an Obama administration rule that limited the fees that student debt collectors can charge, and one of the beneficiaries has a direct connection to her. As we are learning, making money is a sign of virtue in DeVos’s world, and the more money, the more virtue.
Americans who default on some of their federal student loans are likely to pay more after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reversed an Obama administration directive limiting some fees. But it turns out the Trump administration decision has some beneficiaries—including the father of a key DeVos lieutenant who just quit.
DeVos’s decision, announced Thursday in a memorandum to the student loan industry, allows companies known as guaranty agencies to charge distressed student debtors fees equivalent to 16 percent of their total balance, even when borrowers agree within 60 days to make good on their bad debt.
The reversal is almost certain to hand United Student Aid Funds Inc., the nation’s largest guaranty agency, a victory in its two-year legal battle against her department. The fees could translate into an additional $15 million in annual revenue for the company, filings in a related lawsuit suggest. Until Jan. 1, United Student Aid Funds was led by Bill Hansen, who served as Deputy Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. His son, Taylor Hansen, a former for-profit college lobbyist, was until three days ago one of the few DeVos advisers with professional experience in higher education.
The younger Hansen resigned from the Education Department on Friday, department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said in an e-mail. Hansen couldn’t be immediately reached for comment on his departure.
ProPublica writes about the abuses that occur in certain for-profit schools designed especially for difficult children. The very concept of a public school that operates for profit is absurd, because every dollar from taxpayers is meant for the children, the teachers, and the schools, not investors. But this article is specifically about a for-profit chain for difficult students.
An alternative school for sixth- through 12th-graders with behavioral or academic problems, Paramount occupied a low-slung, brick and concrete building on a dead-end road in hard-luck Reading, Pennsylvania, a city whose streets are littered with signs advertising bail bondsmen, pay-day lenders, and pawn shops. Camelot Education, the for-profit company that ran Paramount under a contract with the Reading school district, maintained a set of strict protocols: No jewelry, book bags, or using the water fountain or bathroom without permission. Just as it still does at dozens of schools, the company deployed a small platoon of “behavioral specialists” and “team leaders”: typically large men whose job was partly to enforce the rules.
Over six months in 2013 and 2014, about a half-dozen parents, students and community members at Paramount Academy — billed as a “therapeutic” day program — complained of abusive behavior by the school’s staff. One mother heard that staff restrained students by “excessive force” and bruised the arms of a female student, according to email exchanges between Camelot and the district. Another mother, Sharon Pacharis, said she visited the school to complain about manhandling and was told, “That’s just what we do.” Camelot’s own written reports to the district documented one incident in which a teenager was scratched and another in which a bathroom wall was damaged. Both resulted from “holds” — likely a reference to Camelot’s protocol for restraining students during a physical encounter.
Camelot tended to blame the students in its weekly reports to the district, calling them “out of control”; school officials referred several to police. It was, after all, a place partly for students whom the district had deemed too disruptive for a traditional school setting.
But an incident on April 24, 2014, abruptly shifted the focus to Camelot’s staff.
Ismael Seals, a behavioral specialist, walked into a classroom with several loud and boisterous students and commanded them to “shut the fuck up,” decreeing that the next one who talked would get body-slammed through the door, according to a subsequent criminal complaint. Moments later, Seals fulfilled his promise. After 17-year-old Corey Mack asked and received permission from his teacher, Teresa Bivens, to get up to sharpen his pencil, Seals pushed him repeatedly against a door and then shoved him into the hall, where a school surveillance camera recorded most of the rest of the incident. Seals, 6 feet 4 inches tall and 280 pounds, lifted Mack, 5 feet 8 inches tall and about 160 pounds, by his shirt and swung him into the wall headfirst, later pinning him to the ground as other staff members arrived, according to court documents.
Mack later showed a string of bruises and scratches on his back to a program director at a center for children with behavioral and mental health challenges. The program director called a juvenile probation official, who contacted the police.
Reached by telephone last fall, Corey Mack struggled to remember the details of his altercation with Seals, including what he had said just before the behavioral specialist shoved him, and the precise sequence of events. But he was clear on the essential point: “He beat me up,” Mack said.
Is this what taxpayers support? They should not.
DeVos should be challenged. For profit schools should be prohibited, not subsidized by taxpayers.
Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform posted a photograph in which leaders of charter schools met with their new champion: Secretary Betsy DeVos. She was joined by charter leaders from D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and California. The Ohio charter leader didn’t make it because of the snow. There were also leaders from the for-profit sector, including the virtual charter sector.
Betsy DeVos is one of them. Their hero now is in charge of the U.S. Department of Education, and she wants to divert billions of dollars from children in public schools to feed the charter industry. O happy day!
The charter industry and DeVos are on the same page. They hope to make enormous gains during her tenure in office. They see the public schools not as a public good or a civic institution, but as a target, a prize to be conquered, defeated, looted, and depleted. But it’s all for the kids!
Scholars Preston C. Green III, Bruce D. Baker, and Joseph Oluwole investigate whether the charter industry is repeating the errors of Enron.
Their peer-reviewed article appears in the Indiana Law Journal.
Here is the abstract:
“In 2001, Enron rocked the financial world by declaring bankruptcy due to the effects of an accounting scandal. Special purpose entities (SPEs) were instrumental to Enron’s demise. Enron parked assets in the SPEs to improve its credit rating.
“Enron violated accounting principles by not revealing that its SPE partnerships were related-party transactions. Andrew Fastow, who was Enron’s CFO, made millions of dollars by managing the SPEs. He also used these illegal proceeds to invest in other ventures. Enron’s gatekeepers failed to protect against this accounting fraud.
“Related-party transactions are now posing a threat to the charter school sector. Similar to Fastow, individuals are using their control over charter schools and their affiliates to obtain unreasonable management fees and funnel public funds into other business ventures.
“In this article, we discuss how some charter school officials have engaged in Enron-like related-party transactions. We also identify several measures that can be taken to strengthen the ability of charter school gatekeepers to protect against this danger.
“This article is divided into four parts. Part I describes how Fastow used his management of Enron and the SPEs to obtain illegal profits. Part II discusses why financial sector gatekeepers failed to stop these related-party transactions. Part III shows how charter school officials are benefitting from their control over charter schools and their affiliates in a manner similar to Fastow. Part IV analyzes pertinent statutory and regulatory provisions to identify steps that can be taken to increase the gatekeepers’ ability to protect against harmful related-party transactions.”
This report from In the Public Interest:
Earlier this month, the Seattle City Council voted not to renew its contract with Wells Fargo, pulling more than $3 billion in city funds from the Wall Street giant. Headlines focused on the bank’s financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its recent fake account scandal. And rightly so—Wells Fargo defrauded over two million of its own customers.
But Seattle divested also because Wells Fargo bankrolls private prison companies. The city’s resolution highlighted the privately operated Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, run by GEO Group, where immigrants and refugees from across Washington State are detained as they await deportation hearings.
GEO Group and its main competitor, CoreCivic (formerly CCA), rely on financing from Wells Fargo, along with five other banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. That means Wall Street profits from deportation.
That also means what Seattle did has broader implications. Though only a fraction of the $1 trillion Wells Fargo had in deposits last year, Seattle’s money sends a message, one that rings out not only on Wall Street but also in the White House.
Trump keeps handing gifts to the private prison industry. Yesterday, new Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded an Obama administration order to end the use of private prisons for undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes. Earlier in the week, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced it would build more immigration detention centers.
It’s safe to assume GEO Group and CoreCivic will build and operate many of those centers. That’s because today’s detention system is highly privatized—65% of detention space is operated for profit. And it’s safe to assume Wall Street will provide some of the cash needed to build them.
By following the money, Seattle made that a little tougher. So did the University of California system and the cities of East Orange, NJ, and Alameda City, CA.
There are many ways to disrupt Trump’s mass deportations, from sanctuary cities to #FreedomCities, and following the money is one of them.
But bottom line: public money—our money—shouldn’t be in the hands of those profiting from deportation.
Please share this story on Facebook, Twitter, or by forwarding it to a friend.
Sincerely,
Donald Cohen
InthePublicInterest.org
John Kuhn is an eloquent, wise superintendent in Texas who spreads truth to power.
In this address to the Association of Texas Professional Educators, he warned that the very existence of public education was under fire by a coalition of the rich and the greedy.
He is so brilliant, so eloquent, and so on target that it is hard to excerpt his speech. I urge you to read it in full. If you know anyone in Texas, share it. Send it to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the politician who wants to monetize and privatize the state’s underfunded public schools. That’s his game. That’s his shame. Be sure to tweet JOHN Kuhn’s speech to Dan Patrick @DanPatrick and @LtGovTX
Kuhn says:
“It all really comes down to vouchers. This has been the end-game the whole time. Going back through the decades from TABS to TEAMS to TAAS to TAKS to STAAR [the acronyms for successive state tests], it was never about assessing student learning. It was always about smearing teachers and manufacturing a crisis. Vouchers were always a solution in search of a problem, and the test-and-punish industrial complex arose to create that problem. In reality, testing has always shown us the same thing, always. Well-off and middle class American public school students academically outperform kids from private schools and kids from other nations, when matched socioeconomically. And poor American kids outperform poor kids in those other countries and in private schools, when matched socioeconomically. It is only when you lump all the kids together–because we have so many more poor kids testing than they systems they compare us to–that American public school results look bad. It is a trick. We don’t have an educational problem. We have a social inequality problem that politicians and privatizers dress up as an educational problem. And this statistical sleight of hand, this deliberate misdirection has one goal: to justify the need for vouchers and the dismantling of public education as a state responsibility.
“The voucher movement is about money and adult interests. It isn’t about children. It’s not even mostly about parents who want a discount on their private school tuition; it’s mostly about the interests of other adults, very wealthy adults. It’s about the interests of tycoons and political players who are funding school voucher campaigns across our state and nation not because they want to improve schools, but because they want to engineer a cheaper education so their property taxes will go down. They want to hobble teachers’ unions and reduce wages and benefits. And on top of cheapening a system that already has one of the lowest levels of per pupil spending in the nation, Texas privatizers also want to make money on theback end, they want a piece of the education pie, which billionaire school choice advocate Rupert Murdoch said was a $500 billion dollar industry just waiting to be “transformed.” He meant to say hijacked.
“They don’t really want a piece of the education pie. They want the whole thing. They want to convert a public good into a private enterprise. They want to take this public education system that was created by wiser and more selfless people long ago as a public trust, that belongs to the people—controlled by voters engaged in the Democratic process, free to attend, and open to all children—this is the vision of public education as we know it, and this is what is facing an existential threat….
Texas voters and Texas lawmakers have rejected vouchers over and over again. But the voucher lobby cynically repackages the idea under new and confusing names. Let’s call vouchers Opportunity Scholarships. The voters figured that out, time to change the name. Let’s call them Education Savings Accounts. Let’s call them School Choice. Let’s rebrand them over and over until everyone is thoroughly confused and don’t realize they’re voting for vouchers. The Dallas Morning News had a better term for vouchers in a recent headline: “Private School Vouchers are the Fool’s Gold of Better Education.”
Fool’s gold. Pyrite. A worthless material that is just shiny enough to trick the uninformed into believing that it has value. That’s exactly what vouchers are, even if you call them something else. And why would you call them something else? Why would voucher advocates feel the need to trick people by re-branding their pet policy?
Maybe it’s because vouchers are a terrible idea. Maybe they change the name because the research is in, and it’s clear: vouchers just don’t work. In fact, research shows unequivocally that vouchers don’t just fail to make student achievement better; they actually make student achievement demonstrably worse. Vouchers aren’t the civil rights movement of our time; they’re the civil wrongs movement of our time, hurting the children they pretend to help. Three different research studies published recently have found that voucher programs harm student learning—including one study sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation and the Fordham Institute, both proponents of vouchers. Students who use vouchers underperform their matched peers who stay in public schools.
You heard me right. I’m not just saying that vouchers don’t help very much. I’m saying voucher programs result in students learning less than if the voucher programs didn’t exist. Giving a student a voucher to improve his education is like giving a struggling swimmer a boulder to help him swim. The Walton Foundation study said: “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.” A study of the voucher program in Louisiana found very negative results in both reading and math. Kids who started the voucher program at the 50th percentile in math dropped to the 26th percentile in a single year. Vouchers are so harmful to children that a Harvard professor called their negative effect “as large as any I’ve seen in the literature.”
Vouchers should come with a surgeon general’s warning like cigarettes. The third study was of a voucher program involving over 10,000 students in Indiana—where our vice president was governor—and it found this: “In mathematics, voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement” and show no improvement in reading. Vouchers are not only not helpful—they’re harmful. And they are not only harmful—they are more harmful than any other educational initiative Harvard researchers have ever seen. They are the educational equivalent of smoking cigarettes to treat lung disease. And the voucher lobby treats research exactly like the tobacco lobby does, by paying think tanks to generate copious amounts of pseudo-science and internet content to try and generate support for the harmful ideology behind their business venture.
In the face of this data showing indisputably that vouchers make things worse for struggling students, why then are vouchers still the big focus this session from so many Texas and Washington political insiders? It’s simple really, and sad. It’s because the voucher push isn’t about student performance at all. That isn’t what this is about. It’s about money in the pockets of adults. Vouchers are not, never were, and never will be about kids….
So I ask what is worse? A government in 1836 so blind to the needs of its citizens that it failed to create a system of public education, or a government in 2017 so deeply held hostage by cronyism and corruption that it is actively, session after session, year after year, trying to dismantle a system of public education that has already been created, a system that was built by the treasure and efforts of many selfless generations of Texas taxpayers and teachers, a system that has expanded since 1836 to cover every square inch of the state, to educate every Texas child who wants to be educated, for free, children of every race and color and creed, regardless of ability or disability, regardless of which side of the tracks they were born on, regardless of their home language or any other personal characteristic. Public schools are for the children. Vouchers are for cronies and conmen. When rich elites refuse to invest in the education of the children of the poor, they sow seeds of disenchantment that eventaually unravel the social fabric. They don’t realize what a dangerous game they play.
The public education movement was and is and will always be about the interests of poor and middle class children and families who see education as their path to a more prosperous future. The voucher movement is about funneling tax dollars to schools that have the right to exclude kids that don’t fit their mold. Voucher schools will have academic entry requirements to keep out the riff raff. Voucher schools will have behavior contracts to keep out the riff raff. Voucher schools will have parent volunteering requirements to keep out the riff raff. The voucher schools will have fees for extracurricular activities, fees for books, fees for uniforms, fees to keep out the riff raff.
But they aren’t riff raff. They’re children, and they are all welcome in our public schools.
The voucher movement rests on a foundational lie that the free market will sort good schools from bad when parents choose. But this is smoke and mirrors, because they have no intention for the marketplace of schools to be truly free. The voucher movement wants to create a system in which public schools give STAAR tests—lots of STAAR tests—but the voucher schools give none. That’s not a free market. That’s the government picking winners and losers. And the voucher movement wants public schools graded with A-F grades based on those STAAR tests, but it doesn’t want the voucher schools graded on the same A-F scale, because A-F grades for schools are based on the STAAR TESTS that voucher schools will never ever be required to give. School vouchers are not a free market, they are the government picking winners and losers and guaranteeing that the winners will be private schools that are exempt from the crushing bureaucratic regulations that our state and federal governments have heaped upon the state’s public schools for decades.
It is a cynical ploy, a corrupt, self-serving campaign. Vouchers are not about children, they are 100% about adult interests.
And school choice is not really about giving students their choice of schools. The best private schools cost over $20,000 per year in tuition. The state is talking about giving out $5000 vouchers. That won’t get poor kids into leafy green academies, it will get them into pop-up franchises that some of the voucher lobby’s largest donors are going to launch all over the state. It will get them into online for-profit schools where one teacher at a computer will “teach” 400 kids clicking through modules online, and we will all pretend this is an education, that this clicking through modules is preparing those kids to be engaged, civically-minded, well-rounded citizens.
I’m just going to say that a real education should look a lot like real life, with flesh and blood encounters with teachers and classmates, face-to-face interactions with diverse friends and neighbors, conflicts and shared lunches, recesses and sports teams, student councils and class officers and mums and bonfires, parades down main street led by the band, and news clippings in the gas station about a buzzer-beater win. Letter jackets and class rings, kissing in the stairwell, loud stereos in the parking lot and quiet tears in the counselor’s office. This is the hum and rattle of community, the pulse, the heartbeat of our neighborhoods, this is public school.
Public schools are about the children. Public schools mold the future when they educate our kids, and they always have. When our politicians brag about how great Texas is and how strong the economy is, remind them that it was public school teachers, not politicians, who built Texas, and we built it by educating 95% of the students in this state.
Kevin Carey is doing a great job exposing the failure of vouchers to help the children who are allegedly supposed to be saved by them. In his latest article in the New York Times, he shows how slick politicians and entrepreneurs are cashing in to enrich themselves while administering tax credit programs.
Trump and DeVos are likely to promote school choice through tax credits since it is the fastest way to avoid state constitutional challenges and to divert public money (that would have been paid as taxes) into private religious schools.
Carey looks at the tax credit program in Arizona, where a politician named Steve Yarbrough has made the program his private honey pot. Yarbrough is president of the state senate. Vouchers have made him a very wealthy man.
“The Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization (Acsto) is one of the state’s largest voucher-granting groups. From 2010 to 2014 (the latest year recorded in federal tax filings), the group received $72.9 million in donations, all of which were ultimately financed by the state.
“Arizona law allows the group to keep 10 percent of those donations to pay for overhead. In 2014, the group used that money to pay its executive director $125,000. His name? Steve Yarbrough. Forms filed by the organization with the I.R.S. declare that he worked an average of 40 hours per week on the job — in addition, presumably, to the hours he worked as president of the State Senate.
“Yet the group doesn’t do all the work involved with accepting donations and handing out vouchers. It outsources data entry, computer hardware, customer service, information processing, award notifications and related personnel expenses to a private for-profit company called HY Processing. The group paid HY Processing $636,000 in 2014, and millions of dollars in total over the last decade.
“The owner of HY Processing? Steve Yarbrough, along with his wife, Linda, and another couple. (The “Y” in “HY” stands for “Yarbrough.”) According to The Arizona Republic, Acsto also pays $52,000 per year in rent. Its landlord? Steve Yarbrough. In June 2012, Mr. Yarbrough bought a car for $16,000. In July 2012, Acsto reimbursed him the full amount.”
The Los Angeles Times ran a first-page story about the latest charter school scandal, only a day before the school board election that will decide whether charter advocates will take control of the Los Angeles school board.
There will likely be a low voter turnout for this special election, and the question is turnout: Will enough parents vote to save their public schools, or will the profligate spending of the charter industry on propaganda and false attacks ads enable them to privatize the schools of half the students in the district? If the charter billionaires win, look for more privately run charters that produce incompetence, plunder, profit, and power for the elite.
The big story today is about Celerity Education Group, a charter chain that is thriving with public money. Its CEO is Vielka McFarlane.
In 2013, she earned $471,842, about 35% more than Michelle King, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, makes today.
McFarlane was prospering, and it showed. She wore Armani suits, ate at expensive restaurants and used a black car service.
Financial records obtained by The Times show that, as Celerity’s CEO, she paid for many of these expenses with a credit card belonging to her charter schools, which receive the bulk of their funding from the state.
It could not be determined whether McFarlane, 54, ever reimbursed the charter schools for her credit card purchases. Neither she nor a lawyer hired by Celerity responded to requests for comment about the transactions.
At a time when charter school advocates are determined to increase the number of such schools in L.A., the story of McFarlane and the Celerity schools offers a case study of the growing difficulty of regulating them. The task of spotting and stamping out risky financial practices in charters largely falls to the school district’s charter schools division, which employs about a dozen people dedicated to monitoring the schools’ fiscal health.
But as the number of L.A. charter schools has grown to more than 220, enrolling about 111,000 students, oversight has become a challenge for district officials, who are at once competitors and regulators.
In 2012, L.A. Unified’s charter schools division made a routine request for financial records from the Celerity Educational Group.
When the school network’s credit card statements arrived that fall, many of the transactions had been blacked out. One page was nearly all black.
Concerned school district staff grew even more alarmed when they received the full records, which showed that McFarlane had paid for lavish meals and out-of-state travel on the nonprofit’s credit card.
In one month in 2013, she had spent $914 at the Arroyo Chop House in Pasadena, $425 at The Lobster, a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica, and $355 at Paiche, a now-closed Peruvian restaurant in Marina del Rey.
From the arrival of the credit card statements until 2015, when it refused to allow Celerity to open two new schools, L.A. Unified took a gentle approach to the charter group’s unorthodox practices. It sent notices urging the organization to institute tighter financial controls, but continued to renew the schools’ charters when they came before the school board.
L.A. Unified officials referred Celerity’s credit card transactions to the district’s inspector general, who eventually opened an investigation into the group’s finances. Then, in late January, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and other agencies raided Celerity’s offices, as well as the headquarters of a related nonprofit, Celerity Global Development, and McFarlane’s home. The focus of the federal investigation is unclear, and the district’s inquiry is ongoing…
While the district investigated, Celerity went national, expanding into Ohio, Florida and Louisiana, where it operates four schools in addition to the seven it runs in Southern California. McFarlane launched Celerity Global Development, the parent company of the schools in her growing empire, and began offering herself as a consultant to other charter school leaders.
In 2015, McFarlane became the CEO of Celerity Global, an organization that took in millions of dollars in management fees from Celerity’s schools. But Global wasn’t just supporting the schools; it had the power to control Celerity Educational and could appoint and remove the school network’s board members.
The Celerity schools were often short on supplies, but McFarlane spent lavishly on herself and arrived at school in a chauffeur-driven limousine.
She told staff that education was a business. And she knew how to make money–for herself and her lavish tastes.
As the CEO of Celerity Educational Group — and now of Celerity Global — McFarlane steered hundreds of thousands of public dollars to several companies providing services to her schools. Those companies are registered to her, state records show, and list their addresses as either Celerity Educational’s or Global’s offices.
Celerity Educational Group’s check register for the 2015-16 school year shows payments totaling nearly $1 million to an information technology company called Attenture, a general contracting company called Celerity Contracting Services, and Celerity Development, a limited-liability corporation that buys properties and rents them to McFarlane’s charter schools.
The organization has also paid thousands of dollars to Orion International Academy, a private high school in Chino Hills that McFarlane founded in 2013, and where she is still the CEO.
The flow of money from the charter schools to Celerity Development is documented going back to 2011, when Celerity Educational Group signed a 10-year lease with the company, which at the time had only one owner — McFarlane. That made her, in effect, both landlord and tenant of the two sites in South L.A. on which she expanded Celerity Dyad Charter School.
McFarlane’s brother and son are on the company’s payroll. The financial entanglements among the many companies raise ethical and legal questions. Some quoted in the article suggest that there may be felonious behavior.
By late 2015, L.A. Unified officials decided they had seen enough.
Having concluded that Celerity’s financial issues had become too serious to tolerate, they recommended that the school board refuse the group’s request to open two new schools, and the board agreed. Celerity’s leaders appealed to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which could have intervened, but chose not to.
“This is effective ongoing oversight,” Jose Cole-Gutierrez, the director of L.A. Unified’s charter schools division, said in a recent interview.
Not that it stopped Celerity’s Southern California expansion.
State law allows charter schools that have been denied at the local level to appeal to the state. Last November, over the objections of L.A. Unified and the county, the State Board of Education voted to let Celerity keep growing.
More public money will flow Celerity’s way this fall when it opens two new L.A. charter schools.
Question: In light of the FBI investigations, in light of the LAUSD investigations, in light of the concerns about conflicts of interest and self-dealing, why did the California State Board of Education overrule the LAUSD recommendation and the L.A. County Office of Education? Why did the State Board of Education decide that this charter chain should open two more charters before the investigations are completed? Why aren’t the legal authorities intervening to protect citizens and the law?
If you live in Los Angeles, vote tomorrow.
Vote for either Carl Petersen or Lisa Alva.
Vote for Steve Zimmer.
Do not vote for anyone endorsed by the California Charter School Association, which defends corporations like Celerity. Taxpayers should not pay for Armani suits, chauffeur-driven limousines, or expensive meals. Citizens should support those who want to strengthen and improve the democratically controlled public schools of Los Angeles.
Diane Ravitch's blog 