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Tennessee Charter Scandals: Tweets by Amy Frogge

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2022 //
6

Amy Frogge was elected twice to the Nashville Metro school board. She is a lawyer, a public school parent, and executive director of Pastors for Tennessee Children.

As a board member, Amy quickly learned about the big money behind charter schools, especially when she was outspent 5-1 when she ran for office. Tennessee received a grant of $500 million from Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top competition and spent $100 on its “Achievement School District.” The ASD gathered the state’s lowest scoring schools into a new district and handed them over to charter operators. The leader of the ASD promised that within five years, the schools at the bottom would be in the top quarter of schools across the state. The ASD was a complete failure. None of the lowest performing schools reached that goal and remained at the bottom.

Amy Frogge posted the following thread on Twitter about the charter scandals in Tennessee.

Tennessee is considering opening 100 new charter schools, removing ALL local control of charter approvals, and giving charter schools free access to public school buildings. Last week, I shared charters’ dismal performance rates. Now let’s consider 10 horror stories:

1. Memphis Academy of Health Sciences closed after 3 leaders were indicted for stealing $400k for personal use- for Vegas trips, a hot tub, NBA tickets, auto repair, etc. 750 students were displaced.

2. The Executive Director of Legacy Leadership Academy was charged w/2 counts of theft and 3 counts of forgery after the comptroller found she inflated amounts on phony invoices to steal $4595 from the school.

3. New Vision Academy in Nashville shut down after state and federal investigation into financial irregularities and failure to comply with federal laws re: EL students and special needs students. Its leaders- a husband/wife team- earned $563k per year to oversee a school serving only 150 students. New Vision also violated the fire code by cramming too many kids into classrooms.

4. Knowledge Academies in Nashville failed to pay teachers, used uncertified teachers, lost hundreds of thousands in an online phishing scheme, changed grades and transcripts, understaffed the school, forced poor kids to buy expensive uniforms, failed to properly serve. special needs and EL students, ran for-profit businesses out of the school, posted terrible academic results, and more. After $ went missing, its CEO/founder disappeared. Nashville shut it down and THE STATE FORCED IT BACK OPEN. It’s now operating w/a $7.9 million deficit.

5. Two KIPP charter schools in Memphis abruptly closed without notice or community discussion, displacing about 650 students.

6. Gateway University Charter School in Memphis shut down after it falsified grades, used uncertified teachers, gave credits for a geometry class that didn’t exist, and pulled children out of class to clean school bathrooms, classrooms, and hallways. (!)

7. Southwest Early Charter School in Memphis closed after using uncertified teachers, failing to serve special needs students, losing its partnership with a community college and having “no institutional control,”according to the district.

8. Rocketship in Nashville forced open a brand new ASD school, even though its school was in the bottom 3% of schools statewide. (The ASD is supposed to bring up low-performing schools, not open new ones.) This new school closed after only one month. Rocketship, based in CA, is amassing millions in TN tax dollars through substantial management fees, facilities fees and “growth” fees. It also accessed a nearly $8 million tax-free bond for facilities through a back room deal.

9. Drexel Preparatory Academy in Nashville closed after using unlicensed teachers, a carbon monoxide leak that impacted students, and ongoing poor performance.

10. Boys Preparatory Academy in Nashville shut down after only 2 years after district officials found flaws in its special education services, manipulation of enrollment data and “other troubling patterns.” – And this is just a sampling. THERE’S MORE.

Charter schools are unregulated, and there is essentially zero oversight into their use of public tax dollars. Meanwhile, only 5 TN charter schools (out of over 100) has a success rate over 20%, according to the state Report Card.

Wake up, Tennessee! It’s a scam.

Ask our senators to vote no on SB2168. Please contact: Sen. Akbari @SenAkbari; Sen. Mike Bell; Sen. Rusty Crowe @RustyCroweTN; Sen. Farrell Haile; Sen. Joey Hensley @joey_senator; Sen. Brian Kelsey @BrianKelsey; Sen. Jon Lundberg; Sen. Bill Powers; Sen. Dawn White @VoteDawn @MarkWhiteTN

BONUS: A friend reminded me of perhaps the most egregious charter scandal in Nashville- Nashville Global Academy. It was poorly planned from the start and delivered students home after midnight on the first day of school. Then it forgot a student on a bus, leaving the child on the bus parked offsite all day. An investigation of the school revealed poor communication, a non-workable transportation plan, inadequate board oversight, poor administration of exceptional education, failure to meet accepted standards of fiscal management & accounting practices, failure to administer required state assessments, failure to pay teachers, etc. The school misappropriated funds to the tune of $149k and failed to pay food services ($35k), gas charges ($14k), bus leases (over $23k) and employee benefits ($200k). It also failed to reconcile Charter Startup Program Grant funds totaling $81k. It collapsed nearly $500k in debt, leaving the district, teachers and vendors holding the bag. Guess who paid? Us- the taxpayers (not once, but twice).

My comment: Despite this long record of failure and fraud, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the Legislature want more charter schools! Gov. Lee has invited conservative Hillsdale College of Michigan to open 50-100 Christian-themed charters. Who knew that Republicans despise local control? Why would they want to outsource Tennessee public education to a Michigan college?

Categories Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Tennessee

John Oliver Explains the Link Between “Critical Race Theory” and School Choice

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2022 //
50

John Oliver explained the Republican hysteria over “critical race theory.” At bottom, as he shows, the GOP goal is to persuade parents to escape “CRT” by abandoning their local public schools and enrolling in charter schools or seeking vouchers. The leading anti-CRT crusader, Chris Rufo, made this linkage explicit, as Oliver demonstrates, as did Betsy DeVos. The big money supporting the anti-CRT campaign is coming from the same people funding school choice. And, as Oliver explains, “school choice” has its roots in the fight to block school desegregation in the 1950s.

The fight against CRT is being used to silence any teaching about racism today. Teachers are supposed to teach slavery and racism as a strange aberration from our founding principles and to pretend that it no longer exists.

But if it really were the terrifying problem that people like Rufo describe, why was there no uprising against it in the past 40 years? Why didn’t George W. Bush speak up about CRT? WhY was Trump silent about it until 2020? Why now? Is it mere coincidence that the anti-CRT madness took off after the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests against racism?

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fake News, Fraud, History, Lies, Privatization, Race, Racism, School Choice, Vouchers

A Site That Unmasks the Leading Anti-Vaxxers

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2022 //
22

The New York Times recently wrote about Twitter’s suspension of the personal (not the official) account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter applied its rule of “five strikes and you’re out” because she posted misinformation about COVID and vaccines that could cause harm to others. Among other things, she had posted on Twitter that COVID was not dangerous and that vaccines should not be mandated; that the vaccines were “failing”; and that many people who got the vaccines had died.

While reading this article, I learned of a website called The Center for Countering Digital Hate. This organization published research on the dozen most influential social influencers who spread misinformation about vaccines.

The Center surveyed major social media platforms and found that 12 people were the source of 2/3 of the lies about COVID and the vaccines. The only name familiar to me was that of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The leading influencer was one Dr. Joseph Mercola. His Twitter handle was @drmercola. Perhaps he was banned by Twitter. But he now reappears as @mercola.

At the time the CCDH report was written, the COVID death toll in the U.S. was 500,000. It is now over 800,000. It’s likely that the Dirty Dozen caused some of those deaths (and will be responsible for many more) by encouraging resistance to the life-saving vaccines.

Categories Accountability, Fake, Fraud, Health, Media, Safety, Science

Billy Townsend: A Handy Guide to the Latest Education Scandal in Florida

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2022 //
15

Blogger Billy Townsend (Public Enemy #1) here summarizes the latest Florida education scandal.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Scandal

Billy Townsend: The DeSantis-Corcoran Scandal Grows Uglier

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2022 //
10

Billy Townsend digs into the burgeoning scandal surrounding Governor DeSantis and state commissioner of education Richard Corcoran.

The Tampa Bay Tribune-Miami Herald reported that the two top officials tried to steer a multi-million dollar contract to a firm led by a friend of Corcoran. (The link is in Billy’s post).

Townsend notes that the top lobbyist for the Florida charter school association participated in their meetings. This is the same man that DeSantis kicked out of his campaign in 2018 for his “disgusting” and “racist” remarks.

Why would the top lobbyist for charter schools be known for vile, racist remarks?

Categories Education Reform, Florida, Fraud

Leonie Haimson: The Rise and Fall of a Charter Entrepreneur

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2022 //
26

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters and a member of the board of the Network for Public Education, wrote “a short history” of the rise and meteoric fall of Seth Andrews. He founded a no-excuses charter chain called Democracy Prep, which received adulatory praise from the media and millions of dollars in grants from foundations and the federal government. He moved in the top Ed reform circles. He knew all the key players. He was one of them.

After Andrews invited Leonie to tour his charter school, she wrote:

I found him an intriguing character, obsessively throwing a rubber ball against the wall while we walked through the halls of the school, and never taking off his baseball hat though the network had a rigid dress code for students, who were forbidden to wear hats, wear the wrong color socks or the wrong kind of belt.  When we were touring the school, he stopped one student in the hall and berated her for having her Uggs showing. I wondered how long he would last at his own charter school before being suspended or pushed out.  I later learned that his baseball hat was something of a calling card for Seth, and it is even mentioned in the indictment document.

Democracy Prep  is a “no excuses” charter chain, known for its strict disciplinary practices and high attrition rates.  I questioned him about their demerit system which called for keeping students after school for small lapses of behavior, to sit in a room silently, without being able to read or do homework.

But then he was arrested for embezzlement of more than $200,000 from the bank accounts of the charter he founded. His schools were allegedly teaching civic virtue. He is not an exemplar of civic virtue, nor of following the rigid rules he set for his students.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Fraud, New York City

Peter Greene: Pennsylvania Cybercharters Get $pecial Treatment

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2022 //
9

Cyber charters in Pennsylvania are a money pit because they are not subject to the same rules as public schools. Charter lobbyists must have written the charter laws as they have in other states. And they protect their freedom from scrutiny despite the fact that the founder of the first and biggest cyber charter operator in the state was sentenced to prison in 2018 for his failure to pay taxes on $8 million that he skimmed from the school’s funds. (Note that he was not jailed for embezzling funds but for not paying taxes on the money.)

Peter Greene discovered another way that the state’s cyber charters get favored treatment. Public schools are not allowed to sit on millions of dollars of rainy day funds. Cyber charters are.

I remember what charter advocates promised back in the late 1980s when the idea of charters was first being sold. Charters would be more “accountable” than regular public schools.

But now we know:

Accountability is for public schools, not for charter schools.

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Pennsylvania, Virtual Charter Schools

Steve Hinnefeld: Will Virtual Charter Schools Repay Indiana for Miseducation?

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2022 //
4

Perhaps you recall when Betsy DeVos testified at her Senate hearing about her worthiness to be Secretary of Education. Among her most memorable lines was her fulsome praise of virtual charter schools. This was both sad and hilarious, coming as it did more than a year after the Walton-funded CREDO at Stanford released a report finding that a year at a virtual charter school was akin to not going to school at all (students in these schools lost the equivalent of 72 days in reading and a full year in math).

Over the past few years, there have been several major virtual charter school scandals involving the loss of many millions of dollars (the EPIC scandal in Oklahoma, the Pennsylvania CyberCharter School scandal, the A3 scandal in California, the ECOT scandal in Ohio).

Now Steve Hinnefeld writes about a virtual charter school scandal in Ohio.

He writes:

A Hamilton County court hearing this week may determine whether Indiana taxpayers have a chance to recover $154 million from two virtual charter schools and their leaders and business partners.

The hearing, set for 1:30 p.m. Wednesday before Hamilton Superior Court Judge Michael Casati, concerns motions to dismiss a lawsuit to recover charter school funds that were allegedly obtained by fraud or improperly spent.

Attorney General Todd Rokita filed the suit in July 2021 on behalf of the state. Defendants include the schools — Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy — and several of their officers and employees. Also named are businesses that were affiliated with the schools.

The lawsuit relies on an investigation by the State Board of Accounts, the findings of which were released in early 2020. Auditors found that the online schools inflated their enrollment or failed to ensure students were being taught, resulting in overpayment of more than $68 million by the state. Auditors also identified more than $85 million in improper payments to vendors and businesses.

The schools closed in 2019 after their authorizer, Daleville School Corp. revoked their charter. The previous year, their claimed enrollment peaked at more than 7,000 students.

Problems with the schools came to light in 2017, when Chalkbeat Indiana revealed poor test scores, abysmal graduation rates and hefty payments to businesses connected to the school’s founder. Indiana Virtual School employed only one teacher per 200 students and spent just 10% of its funds on instruction, Chalkbeat found.

But the schools enjoyed political connections. They employed a state legislator as a consultant and had a retired state appeals court judge on the school board. Businesses affiliated with the schools gave $140,000 to Indiana Republican election campaigns. The schools paid a lobbying firm $300,000.

When will state legislators stop pumping money into these money pits?

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Indiana, Virtual Charter Schools

New Hampshire: Legislature Tables Unpopular Voucher Bill!

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
5

This is good news that few expected.

The New Hampshire legislature, with Republican majorities in both houses and a Republican Governor, tabled a sweeping voucher bill. In hearings, public sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to vouchers for private schools, religious schools, and home schooling, but Republicans seemed determined to push through their proposal.

The voucher bill was tabled (not passed, put on hold). It could come back for a vote. When I learn more, I will share with you.

This article by a school board member, Janine Lesser, appeared in the Monadnock (NH) Ledger Transcript this morning.

In March 2019, the ConVal School District sued the State of New Hampshire over its ever-decreasing funding. This is the sixth time the state has been sued for avoiding its constitutional mandate to fund an adequate education.

The first lawsuit was in 1993. The New Hampshire Supreme Court struck down state efforts to limit or decrease public school funding in Claremont I, II and III, the 2006 Londonderry, and 2016 Dover cases.

“With recent tweaks to the education funding formula and reductions in funding, many say that towns are at a breaking point. Teacher layoffs, cuts in programming, and even the threat of school closures have pushed the issue…” (Reaching Higher NH, Jan. 7, 2019 “The Big Question for 2019: How Will We Pay for Our Schools?”). And that was three years ago, before COVID. Meanwhile, Gov. Chris Sununu has taken the most-radical approach yet to this decades-long funding deficit. Rather than increase state education funding, as the court instructed, the governor gave large businesses four tax cuts. Meanwhile, he appointed a person with no educational credentials to lead the state’s Department of Education.

Commissioner Frank Edelblut has a master’s degree in divinity and has diverted public funding to non-public schools, mostly religious. When New Hampshire schools faced the pandemic crisis, the commissioner appointed people without experience in school administration to write “guidelines” that came out too late to be of any use to any boards or administrators. The message from the state was clear – you are on your own.

If it weren’t for the financial help from federal relief funds, no district could have survived. But the Department of Education delayed those funds to public schools as long as possible by placing bureaucratic hurdles for district business managers. Meanwhile, Edelblut swiftly sent federal support to non-public schools, barely trying to conceal his disdain for the public school system established by our state’s founders, which has been the great equalizer for Americans since our nation began.  

When thousands of residents signed in against the 2021 Republican EFA voucher bill, the Republican-led legislature hid it in the budget. That let them and the governor establish the most-aggressive voucher program in the United States without further public scrutiny. These “Education Freedom Accounts” have loose limits on eligibility, no government oversight on how taxpayer-funded vouchers are spent and no spending cap. In other states, voucher programs have been rife with fraud. Public school districts, on the other hand, are audited every year and spending is controlled by local taxpayers.

Lack of voucher spending controls became apparent quickly. Edelblut estimated $130,000 for budgeting purposes; the actual cost is now projected at over $7 million, with 10% going to a tiny, unsupervised New Hampshire agency and its Florida financial firm. Why did the budget increase? A Koch-supported lobbying group, Americans for Prosperity, mailed postcards and even canvassed door-to-door to encourage parents to sign up.

Contrary to statements from EFA proponents, such as state Sen. Denise Ricciardi, taxpayers will bear the burden of vouchers. Wealthy communities may expand funding to support all types of schools, but poor towns will have to close schools. New Hampshire now has one of the best public school systems in the nation, but this cannot continue if the state tries to fund ever more schools. Because vouchers are too low to pay most private school tuition, only wealthy families get to choose which school their child attends. If public schools close in poor and rural towns, many children will need to learn remotely, an option that has proven deficient during the forced experiment of the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, thousands of educators and school employees will lose jobs. New Hampshire taxpayers will foot the bill for students’ out-of-state boarding schools and for-profit online schools. In the current session, 175 proposed bills plus 30 retained bills pertain to education, most further eroding communities’ public schools. I differ from Free Staters and the Liberty Caucus promoting these bills. I believe that community is important, and we are stronger when we invest our time and treasure in our community, together.

Our country and communities are at a crossroads. As citizens, we must scrutinize what our governing bodies are deciding in our names. When I questioned Ricciardi about her position on a few of the worst pending bills, I did not receive an answer. 

Through its lawsuit, ConVal has stood up and required the state to pay its constitutional duty to public schools, because local property taxpayers cannot continue to shoulder this unfair system. Sununu’s administration supports vouchers, even though they will cost more, and will fail to provide many children a competitive education for a global economy.

Janine Lesser is a Peterborough representative to the ConVal School Board. She is not writing on behalf of the board.

Categories Education Industry, Fraud, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Trump Advisor: How Steve Bannon and I Planned to Overturn the 2020 Election

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
85

Peter Navarro was Trump’s Trade Advisor. He recently published a book about his time in the Trump administration. The most fascinating part of his book, according to those who have read advance copies, is his story about the plan to overturn the 2020 election and keep Trump as president. He has done several media interviews. This account in Rolling Stone relies on this one that appeared in The Daily Beast.

Navarro says that he and Steve Bannon orchestrated a plan called the Green Bay Sweep.

Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson writes:

The plot sought to keep Trump in office by exerting maximum pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the Electoral College votes from pivotal swing states, by drawing out the proceedings on national television for as long as 24 hours. “It was a perfect plan,” Navarro told the Daily Beast. “We had over 100 congressmen committed to it…

Navarro is a Harvard-educated economist whom Trump tapped, originally, to escalate his trade war with China. But as coronavirus struck, Navarro’s role at the White House expanded to include pandemic response, in which he pushed the quack treatment of hydroxychloroquine. By the bitter end, Navarro was compiling cockeyed dossiers of (now-exhaustively-debunked) allegations of election fraud — “receipts” Navarro believed justified tin-pot measures to keep Trump in the White House.

So what was the Green Bay Sweep? The plot, Navarro writes, was named after a famous football play designed by storied 1960’s NFL coach Vince Lombardi, in which a Packers running back would pound into the end zone behind a “phalanx of blockers.”

For the 2021 Green Bay Sweep, Navarro writes, Bannon played the role of Lombardi. The plan was to have members of the House and Senate raise challenges to the counts of Electoral College votes from six pivotal battleground states.

“The political and legal beauty of the strategy,” Navarro writes, is that the challenges would force up to two hours of debate per state, in each chamber of Congress. “That would add up to as much as 24 hours of nationally televised hearings,” Navarro writes. The hearings would enable Republicans to “short-circuit the crushing censorship of the anti-Trump media,” Navarro hoped, and broadcast their Big Lie that Democrats had stolen the election “directly to the American people.”

The goal was not to get the election overturned on Jan. 6. Instead, they aimed to create such a spectacle that Pence would be forced to exercise his authority as president of the Senate to “put the certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks” while Congress and the state legislatures pursued the “fraud” allegations. The dark particulars for how Trump would remain in office after that are not spelled out, and Navarro did not immediately answer an email seeking clarification. But he writes that the Green Bay Sweep was the “last, best chance to snatch a stolen election from the Democrats’ jaws of deceit.”

The problem with the plot was that its success hinged on “Quarterback Mike” — and Pence wasn’t solidly on board. Navarro writes that he tried, with Trump’s backing, to brief Pence on his claims of election irregularities, but that Pence was kept off-limits by his chief of staff, Marc Short. (Navarro seethes that Short was part of the Koch brothers wing of the GOP, having previously worked for a nonprofit backed by the Kochs. When Short came to work for the vice president, Navarro writes, “it was like the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe. As an Iron Koch Curtain fell over the vice president, the only way you could speak to VPOTUS was to go through Short.”)

Regardless, Jan. 6 began auspiciously — to Navarro’s view of things. He told the Daily Beast that Trump was “on board with the strategy,” which he writes also had the backing of “more than 100” members of Congress. Navarro elaborated that the plan started off “perfectly” as Congress opened the proceedings to count Electoral College votes. Rep. Paul Gosar objected to results from his home state of Arizona, seconded by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — an action that received standing applause from GOP colleagues in the chamber.

Navarro insist that the violence at the Capitol disrupted the Green Bay Sweep by putting pressure on Congress to conclude the certification. Apparently he forgot to tell Trump to keep his mob away from the U.S. Capitol, because Trump urged them to march to the Capitol, told them that they had ”to fight” or they would lose their country, and egged them on to do what they did: Storm and ransack the Capitol. some were chanting ”Hang Mike Pence,” which may have stiffened his spine.

Two things are clear: Mike Pence didn’t deliver for Trump, Bannon, and Navarro, and Trump was too dumb to remember that he was not supposed to send his mob to disrupt the Congressional proceedings.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Trump
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