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Peter Greene: Charter Thievery and the Worst Legislature in America

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2019 //
20

 

Peter Greene writes here about the open theft of public funds, transferred from public schools to to charter schools, in Florida. He raises a question that I have often wondered about: When did Republicans become the enemies of local control? The answer in Florida is obvious: when the money is there to pay the legislators to change their views, they change their views. It is not about improving education, since they are reducing the funds available to educate the vast majority of Florida’s children. This is a pay-to-play sellout of public education. When people vote to put thieves in office, they should not be surprised when the thieves rob them and their schools.

He writes:

“Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that’s futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message– “That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block.”

“Congratulations. You live in Florida.

“Florida’s elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a “public school system.” I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, “I did not throw that pencil at Chris” even though he watched me watch him do it.

“The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:

“Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.

We’ll put Swampland Charter right here.

“Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them– they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state-level neglect. They stepped up to solve the problems the state caused.

“Last week, Florida GOP legislators pooped out a proposal to stop all this locally controlled self-reliant bootstrapping (because, you know, conservatives hate local control, self-reliance, and bootstraps, apparently, now). The bill, proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee led by Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, says those local districts must hand over some of those tax dollars to charter schools or the state will just cut their state funding even more.

“This is just nuts on so many levels. In addition to pissing on the conservative values of local control and self-reliance, this also thumbs its nose at one of the traditional arguments for charter schools– that competition will make public schools up their games. I’d call bullshit on that point, except that’s exactly what happened here– with their ability to compete hamstrung by Tallahassee tightwads, these local districts found a way to be competitive, including competing for teachers in the midst of Florida’s well-deserved and completely predictable teacher shortage.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Burris and Ravitch: An Open Letter to Betsy DeVos about the Failure of the Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2019 //
8

 

In this post on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post, Carol Burris and I respond to Betsy DeVos’s putdown of the Network for Public Education’s meticulous documentation of the failure of the federal Charter Schools Program. Our report, “Asleep at the Wheel,” showed that the U.S. Department of Education had handed out hundreds of millions of dollars–close to a billion dollars–between 2006 and 2014, to nearly 1,000 charter schools that never opened or that closed soon after opening. DeVos, as you will see, dismissed the report out of hand, and we assume that she never read it. The report was carefully documented, with references drawn mainly from government sources, including the website of the U.S. Department of Education. And for an added bonus, we show that 42% of all charter schools in DeVos’s home state of Michigan that received federal funding either never opened or closed soon after opening. What will she do to correct the lack of oversight in her own department?

We write:

Here is a link to 109 Michigan charter schools, called “academies,” that were awarded Charter School Program (CSP) grants from 2006-2014 but either never opened or closed. That number represents 42 percent of all recipients. Those highlighted in maroon shut down. Those highlighted in tan are schools that received funds but never opened. You will find ample documentation for your staff to review our work.

As anxious as you are to open new charter schools, if nearly half of them do not make it, we suggest that something is wrong with the selection process.

In total, $20,272,078 was awarded to defunct Michigan charter schools. And yet, in 2018 you awarded the State of Michigan an additional $47,222,222.

Your home state is not alone. Posted here is a similar list from the state of Ohio showing the names of 117 charter schools (40 percent) that received CSP funds between 2006-2014 that also never opened or are now closed. The total of CSP awards to those schools is $35,926,693. Please note that in all of these states, far more charter schools have failed than just those that received federal SEA funds. In the case of Ohio, the list of closed charters (293) is nearly equal to the number of schools that are presently open (310).

Dare I say that the U.S. Department was scammed because of its own negligence?

Read on.

There is more about Louisiana, California, and other states.

We are talking here about our taxpayer dollars. There are needy schools in the U.S. Yet the Department of Education squanders money on failed and failing charter schools. This must stop!

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
39

Ann O’Leary is Chief of Staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Previously she was education advisor to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She is a lawyer and a very accomplished person, with a long history in Democratic politics. She was leading the Clinton transition team right before the election of 2016. For several years, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which strongly defends charter schools and Obama’s failed Race to the Top program.

During the 2016 campaign, when it was clear Hillary would be the nominee, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and I went to see O’Leary at the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn. We tried to persuade her that Hillary should oppose charters. After all, school choice is a Republican priority. It is supported by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, ALEC, the DeVos family, and every Red State Governor. Democrats should support public schools, we argued, not privatization. We failed. We went back again, after the convention. O’Leary was unmovable. The best we could get from her was a promise that Hillary would oppose for-profit charters.

We knew that was a meaningless offer, because large numbers of nonprofit charters hire for-profit management companies.

We were thrilled when Gavin Newsom and Tony Thurmond were elected, because the charter industry placed its bets on Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, who ran third, and on Marshall Tuck for Secretary of Education. Tuck’s campaign spent twice as much as Thurmond’s and vilified him with false advertising. Thurmond barely beat Tuck, the charter industry’s favorite and former leader of a charter chain.

Newsom promised to create a task force to advise on reforming the state’s notoriously weak charter law, which has enabled fraud, embezzlement, and grifters to cash in. Thurmond would chair the task force.

But then the task force was named, and it was clear that the charter industry was running the show. Of the 11 members, seven are connected to the charter industry. Two appointees are directly employed by the charter lobby.

Here are the members:

The task force members are:

  • Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive officer, Green Dot Public Schools California (charter chain);
  • Dolores Duran, California School Employees Association;
  • Margaret Fortune, California Charter Schools Association board chair; Fortune School of Education, president & CEO (charter lobby);
  • Lester Garcia, political director, SEIU Local 99 (Local 99 took $100,000 from Eli Broad to oppose Jackie Goldberg, a critic of charters, and its former national president, Andy Stern, is CEO of the Eli Broad Center);
  • Alia Griffing, political director, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 57;
  • Beth Hunkapiller, educator and administrator, Aspire Public Schools (charter chain);
  • Erika Jones, board of directors, California Teachers Association;
  • Ed Manansala, superintendent, El Dorado County; the El Dorado County Office set up a Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) specifically to service students with disabilities in charter schools and wooed charter students away from their local districts, even students who live hundreds of miles away; 
  • Cindy Marten,  superintendent, San Diego Unified School District;
  • Gina Plate, vice president of special education, California Charter Schools Association (charter lobby);
  • Edgar Zazueta, senior director, policy & governmental relations, Association of California School Administrators (ACSA endorsed Marshall Tuck against Tony Thurmond). 

Only four members of the task force are not connected, politically or financially, to the charter industry: Cindy Marten; Dolores Duran; Alia Griffing; and Erika Jones.

Who selected this skewed task force?

A tip came from someone with a direct line to the Governor’s Office.

Ann O’Leary.

Ann, I hope you read this because I want you to know that you are protecting an industry that tolerates corruption and malfeasance.

Please read this report, “Charters and Consequences,” written by Carol Burris, which begins with a description of charter operators in California who hire family members, run multiple charters with appallingly low graduation rates and continues to describe a state law that is sorely in need of real reform.

Why does California have a law that ignores graft and corruption? The California Charter Schools Association fought any reform. Yet you put the chair of the board of this lobby on the task force to reform the charter law! And to make it worse, you added another employee of CCSA! This is the lobby that fought any reform of the law, that fought previous efforts to ban nepotism and conflicts of interest, that fought accountability and transparency.

And now the Network for Public Education has documented how charter operators in California have wasted millions of federal dollars. 

Nationally, about one-third of federally-funded charter schools either never opened or closed soon after getting the money. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federally funded charters is 39%.

California charters won almost $326 million from the federal Charter School Program between 2006-2014. To be exact: $325,812,827. Of that amount, $108,518,463 went to 306 charter schools that either never opened or soon shut down. Of that 306, 75 never opened at all. But the charter operator kept the money.

In addition, the ACLU of Southern California in its 2016 report, ”Unequal Access,” identified 253 charters in the state that engage in discriminatory—often illegal—practices. That number, they said, was the tip of the iceberg, because these were the charters that put their discriminatory policies on their website! Thirty-four California charter schools that received federal CSP grants appear on the ACLU of Southern California’s updated list of charters that discriminate—in some cases illegally—in admissions.

One can only imagine how much the waste has grown since 2014, with the Obama and Trump administrations adding even more millions to expand charters that divert resources from public schools.

So, this is on you, Ann.

Will the task force protect the charter industry? Will it come up with meaningless “reforms” that do nothing to rein in waste, fraud, and abuse?

Will it protect the power of districts to authorize charters in other districts, far away, without the permission of the receiving district, so the authorizers gets a fee and the charter has no oversight?

Will it continue to allow charters to open with no consideration of the fiscal impact on the district where it chooses to open?

Will it continue to allow endless appeals when the host district rejects a new charter?

Will it continue to allow corporate chains to Walmartize what were once public schools? Will it continue to allow non-educators to open and operate charter schools?

Will it ignore the expansion of Gulen schools, schools run by a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania, schools which import Turkish teachers and relies on Turkish boards?

Is it possible for a task force to regulate an industry when industry insiders are a majority of the task force?

I know you are very busy, but I hope you will take the time to think about these questions and respond.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Fraud

Former President of Milwaukee School Board Charged with Taking Kickbacks from Charter Chain

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
3

 

 

Michael Bonds, former president of the Milwaukee Public Schools’ Board, was charged in federal court for taking kickbacks from a charter chain. 

“Bonds is accused of conspiracy and violations of the Travel Act for allegedly accepting kickbacks from executives of the Philadelphia-based Universal Companies in return for votes beneficial to the company between 2014 and 2016. Two unnamed executives of the Philadelphia-based company were implicated in the scheme but not charged.

“According to the charging document, the executives used fake invoices to make payments totaling $6,000 to African-American Books and Gifts, a company purportedly created by Bonds. Efforts to locate a Wisconsin company by that name were not immediately successful.

“The document says Bonds also received “things of value” but did not elaborate. It is seeking $18,000 in forfeitures from Bonds.

“The document identifies the executives only as Universal’s president and chief executive officer, and its chief financial officer. The Philadelphia Inquirer used tax records to identify those individuals as former CEO Rahim Islam and current CFO Shahied Dawan.

“The charges come five months after the FBI raided Universal’s offices and Islam’s home.

“Universal was chartered by MPS to operate the Universal Academy for the College Bound in three Milwaukee school buildings from 2013 until it abruptly left the district in 2017, leaving hundreds of children stranded in the middle of the school year.

“The school received at least $11 million in taxpayer funds in its first two years, according to the court document, yet it struggled academically and financially from the beginning.”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Fraud, Milwaukee, Philadelphia

Ohio: School Districts Sue Facebook for Helping to Defraud Them

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2019 //
2

Eight school districts in Ohio are suing Facebook for recruiting students for the failing online charter school ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow). Real public schools that enroll and educate real students lost money to the for-profit virtual charter school, whose owner pocketed millions and ultimately went bankrupt rather than pay back any of the millions it collected from the state. Over the nearly 20 years that ECOT operated, it received close to a billion dollars that did not go to public schools where students actually showed up and were counted.

Ohio School Districts Sue Facebook Over Failed Online Charter School

By Doug Livingston, The Akron Beacon Journal Education Week April 14, 2019

Cuyahoga Falls, Woodridge and six other Ohio school districts are suing Facebook for about $250,000 in public education funding lost when the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow imploded last year.

The districts, which may never be made whole for state funding they lost when ECOT inflated attendance, are alleging that Facebook knew the online charter school was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT boost enrollment. That, under Ohio law, would be an illegal and “fraudulent transfer.”

Founded in 2000, ECOT grew to be the largest charter school in Ohio, claiming 15,239 students enrolled in 2016 when the Ohio Department of Education ran an attendance audit.

The virtual headcount found students spending as little as an hour a day on home computers. But the state was funding the charter school, using tax dollars diverted from local school districts, as if kids were attending full time.

Related

The attendance scandal forced ECOT founder Bill Lager, who had donated $2.1 million to school choice supporters, to return $2.5 million monthly until taxpayers got back the $80 million the school overbilled the state in just 2016 and 2017.

ECOT folded in January 2018 before making the first repayment.

Now, every public school district in Ohio that lost students and state funding to ECOT is in line for what’s left. Governor and then-Attorney General Mike DeWine announced in August a lawsuit to hold Lager, his companies and top ECOT executives personally liable for the lost public funds.

 

From Bill Phillis, unofficial ombudsman for school funding in Ohio:

School Bus
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Districts that are attempting to intervene in the Attorney General’s lawsuit against the ECOT gang have added Facebook to their pursuit for recovery of funds
Attorney General DeWine brought suit against ECOT, ECOT companies and some employees of ECOT. Eight school districts are attempting to intervene in the suit. Additionally, the districts are pursuing claims against three companies with which ECOT did business. Most recently the districts added Facebook to the list. They are alleging Facebook knew ECOT was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT enroll students.
A lot of individuals and companies were attracted to ECOT for the purpose of making easy money. Taxpayers were the losers.
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| www.ohiocoalition.org
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2019 //
20

 

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is outraged that The Audacious Project is honoring the Waterford online preschool program, which will use this platform to expand their efforts to open additional  online preschools. Early childhood experts agree that this is harmful to children. I say it is a mean and stupid idea. Efforts to put little children in online schools should be denounced, not celebrated. Children need real interaction with real human beings.

Please sign the petition.

 

For Immediate Release

Contact:
David Monahan, CCFC: david@commercialfreechildhood.org; (617) 896-9397

Early Childhood Advocates Call On The Audacious Project to Reconsider Major Award for Online Preschool
A TED philanthropy project would widen educational inequality and deprive children of the hands-on preschool experiences they deserve.

BOSTON, MA – April 12, 2019 – Early childhood advocates are calling on The Audacious Project, housed at TED and designed to fund ideas for social change, to postpone plans to designate Waterford UPSTART, an online “preschool” program, as one of the participants in its funding program for 2019.  Award winners will be announced at TED2019 in Vancouver on April 16. Last year’s award winners averaged $63 million in new funding. According to a Waterford representative, the funding will allow UPSTART to dramatically increase the number of children enrolled in its program.

In their call for The Audacious Project to postpone funding, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Defending the Early Years (DEY) point to their October 2018 Position Statement on Online Preschool, which has been endorsed by more than 100 experts in child development and early education. The experts and advocates say that online preschool programs like UPSTART are poor substitutes for high-quality early education, and that funding online programs instead of high-quality early education will make inequality worse, not better.

“There is a tremendous need for universal pre-K, and it’s admirable that The Audacious Project wants to address educational inequalities, but online preschool is not the answer,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD, Professor Emerita at Lesley University and DEY Senior Advisor. “Kids learn by playing, exploring, and interacting with peers and caring adults – not by memorizing letters, numbers, and colors presented to them on screens. Children who receive UPSTART’s screen-based version of a preschool experience will be disadvantaged compared to children from more resourced communities who have play-based, experiential early education. A truly audacious project would take the funding intended for these online programs and direct it instead to giving low-income, rural, or otherwise underserved children the high quality, face-to-face education they deserve.”

UPSTART, which started with public funding from the state of Utah and has spread to at least seven other states, claims to promote “kindergarten readiness” through 15 – 20 minutes per day of online instruction. But advocates say that UPSTART’s lessons are poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate. An analysis of one UPSTART lesson by DEY found it was pedagogically unsound, “confusing” and “overloaded with distracting images.” UPSTART also recommends that children wear headphones and complete lessons alone, contrary to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that parents “co-view with your children [and] help children understand what they are seeing.”

“Online preschool should never be rewarded or considered a legitimate alternative to high-quality early care and education,” said Denisha Jones, PhD, JD, Director of Teacher Education at Trinity Washington University and Director of Organizing for DEY.  “I implore The Audacious Project to reconsider giving money to a screen-based program at a time where early childhood experts are increasingly concerned with screen time and the loss of high-quality interactions between children and educated early childhood teachers. Programs like UPSTART may be less expensive than real universal preschool, but those savings come at the expense of the low-income kids and kids of color they purport to help. We should be investing our money, time, and resources to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality, early childhood education.”

Last year, seven of The Audacious Project designees were granted a total of $441 million from partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It is not yet known which groups are funding UPSTART, or exactly how much money the program will receive, but an email from a Waterford PR representative indicated that the award will be enough to “provide an opportunity for every four-year-old to be ready for kindergarten.” (Emphasis in original.)

The DEY/CCFC letter pointedly states, “We don’t believe your impressive list of funders and partners would be satisfied if their own children spent 75 minutes a week on a computer in isolation as a substitute for face-to-face preschool rooted in caring relationships and social interaction.” It also warns that a major expansion of online preschool could derail the growing movement for real universal preschool. It asks The Audacious Project to postpone the award and meet with advocates to better understand their concerns.

Added Josh Golin, Executive Director of CCFC, “Over and over, we’ve seen educational technology such as 1:1 programs, virtual charter schools, and personalized learning software falsely marketed as a panacea for inequality. Now the EdTech evangelists have set their sights on preschoolers. Isolated children on computers guided by algorithms can never replicate the joyful exploration and interactions at the core of the preschool experience. We urge The Audacious Project to rethink this award.”

The DEY/CCFC letter can be read in full here.

Categories Childhood, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Online Education

Jeff Bryant: Stop Federal Funding of Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2019 //
8

 

 

Jeff Bryant was co-author of the Report by the Network for Public Education’s on waste, fraud, and abuse in the $440 million federal Charter Schools Program. It is titled “Asleep At the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride.”

The report found that nearly $1 billion had been wasted in the past 25 years on charter schools that never opened or closed soon after opening.

Jeff summarized the report in this article, which has been widely reprinted in regional newspapers.

The article is a condensation of one that Jeff wrote in “The Progressive.”

“In California, the state with the most charter schools, between 2004 and 2014, 306 schools that received direct or indirect federal funding closed or never opened, 111 closed within a year, and 75 never opened at all — a 39 percent failure rate. The cost to taxpayers was more than $108 million.

“Of the charter schools in Michigan that received federal money, at least 27 never opened. Many more opened and quickly closed, and of the schools that managed to stay open, we found troubling results, including a grant recipient that received $110,000 in federal funds but is actually a Baptist Church.

“In Idaho, federal grants totaling more than $21.6 million included more than $2.3 million going to schools that never opened or closed after brief periods of service. A state commission imposed a range of academic sanctions on 13 of the 25 charter schools up for renewal in the state. Of those 13 schools, nine had received federal grants.

“At the root of these problems is the slipshod process used by the Department of Education to review charter school grant applications. We often found contradictions between the information provided by applicants and publicly available data. Numerous applications cherry-picked or massaged achievement and/or demographic data that reviewers never bothered to fact-check.”

Public money must be accompanied by public accountability. In the federal Charter Schools Program, $4 Billion has been handed out with no accountability. It’s just free money for entrepreneurs, for-profit management organizations, and grifters.

This program must be eliminated. Let the Waltons and the Koch brothers and John Arnold and Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates and other billionaires pay for their own hobby.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization

Bill Phillis: Ohio and Indiana Race to the Bottom to Waste Money on Cybercharters

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2019 //
2

 

Bill Phillis, retired deputy superintendent of the Ohio Department of Education, writes here about a sector with a reputation for providing a lossy Education but high profits, this ripping off taxpayers:

 

 

Indiana and Ohio are in a tight race to the bottom in the online charter industry
 
Whether in Ohio or Indiana, the online charter fraud seems to continue unabated.
 
Some entrepreneurs can smell a dollar a mile away. Online charters have an enticing fiscal aroma. The fact is that the online charters have a guaranteed income based on all students whether or not they participate in the program.
 
These privately-operated charters should be shut down. School districts have the capacity to provide online services to the students who need such programs. Let the online entrepreneurs switch to growing earthworms.
 
 
 
 
 
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540| ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| www.ohiocoalition.org
Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Fraud, Indiana, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Houston: Charter School Superintendent and IT Specialist Charged with Embezzlement

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2019 //
3

 

The superintendent of a Houston charter school and a school employee have been charged with embezzling more than $250,000 from the school’s bank account. 

The head of a Houston-area charter school and another school employee have been indicted on federal embezzlement charges, accused of siphoning more than $250,000 from the school for themselves and using some of the money to buy a car and condominium.
A grand jury in the U.S. District Court’s Southern District of Texas handed up charges this week against Houston Gateway Academy Superintendent Richard Garza, including one count of conspiracy, two counts of theft concerning programs receiving federal funds, three counts of wire fraud and two counts of engaging in monetary transactions involving criminally acquired property. Ahmad Bokaiyan, a technology support specialist at the school, was charged with conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud. They are now considered fugitives, according to a federal court records…
According to the indictment, Garza awarded a $280,841.85 no-bid contract in 2014 to a group called Hot Rod Systems to build an IT infrastructure at the new school, even though construction on the school had not yet begun. Hot Rod Systems was owned by Bokaiyan. Prosecutors say the two Houston Gateway Academy employees agreed that Bokaiyan would wire some of that contract money into one of Garza’s personal bank accounts. Within days of receiving the contract money from Garza, Bokaiyan wired the superintendent $164,381.
The indictment alleges Garza used more than $50,000 of those funds to buy a new Nissan Armada sport utility vehicle, more than $86,500 to help purchase a condominium, and nearly $26,000 to help make payments on a house loan in Cypress.
Garza’s school enrolls 2,400 students. He had plans to expand to nearly 10,000. He took over the school when it had low scores.
He began an aggressive plan to improve academics on state-mandated standardized tests, placing countdown clocks to test days in all classrooms and requiring even the youngest students to complete three-ring binders filled with practice tests and worksheets. As a result, their Coral middle school campus shot up the nonprofit Children at Risk’s annual school report card rankings, rising to the ranking’s number three spot. All of its 110 fifth and sixth grade students passed the math portion of the STAAR, an exceedingly rare feat for any school, let alone one that serves predominately low-income students. 
One wonders whether he worked the same magic with the test scores that he did with the finances.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Houston, Privatization, Texas

Bob Braun Blasts the Weak-Kneed Charter Expose in New Jersey Press

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2019 //
19

 

Bob Braun was a reporter for New Jersey’s biggest newspaper—the Star-Ledger—for fifty years. Now he writes what he wants, without any constraints.

In this post, he lacerates the series of articles about charter school corruption and theft of public dollars in New Jersey because it failed to reach the logical conclusion of the evidence it produced. The logical conclusion would be to call off the heist of public funds by grifters, real estate developers, and corporate chains.

He writes.

“The series, far from calling for an end to the theft of public school funds to finance charter expansion, promotes so-called “reforms” that would make it easier for charters to expand—and further degrade  public schools. ..

“Wrong because, the basic, irrefutable truth about charter schools is this:

“Privately-operated charters take away money (construction and operating funds) from public schools—especially in New Jersey’s largest cities where resources are scarce. They are replacing public schools, using public money that should be used to repair public schools.

“Charters are replacing regular public schools and that was never the intent.

“Following the series’ suggestions would mean more charter schools, less money for public schools, and a continuation–even enhancement–of the racism that propels public education policy in New Jersey’s cities.

“The truth about privately operated charters and how they are built and operated with public funds  has been glaringly obvious for years—but few in the commercial press wanted to look at it, including The Record (northjersey.com).”

Once again, like the series in the Los Angeles Times that documented corruption on a grand scale, the series concludes with a timid proposal that pleases and is sure to embolden the charter lobby.

Braun describes in detail how Governor Chris Christie, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Education Entrepreneur Chris Cerf and their allies engineered the charter school coup, with the help of the Star-Ledger’s zealous Charter love:

“Yes it is too bad that charter schools—with the connivance of Christie, Booker, Cerf, former state-appointed Newark superintendent Anderson and former state education commissioner David Hespe, among others—were able to channel tens of millions of public dollars to privately-owned charter school operations.

“But that wasn’t the worst of it.

              “Children suffered—and the mainstream media didn’t give a damn. Anyone who expressed sympathy for Newark’s children was denounced as a conspiracy theorist.”

To understand the moral and ethical corruption at the heart of charter schools in New Jersey, read Braun’s article in full.

The moral and ethical corruption was even worse than the real estate deals and graft.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization
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