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Florida Outrage! Voucher and Charter Advocates Try to Sneak Constitutional Amendment onto the Ballot to Repeal Requirement for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2018 //
25

Someone is trying to pull a fast one on the people of Florida. Voters are supposed to consider an amendment to the State Constitution that bundles several different proposals into a single amendment, to the utter confusion of voters, who will not be able to vote individually on the proposed changes.

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida filed a brief to the panel of his former colleagues, asking that they either seek justification for this bundling or toss it off the ballot.

How can it be possible to justify an effort to mislead and trick voters?

One member of the Constitutional Revision Commission was Patricia Levesque, who heads Jeb Bush’s foundation; she said that the state constitution was obsolete because it did not contemplate the creation of charter schools, online education or other innovations of the current era. Another Commission member is a charter school founder, who claimed that the current wording in the state constitution was designed to protect the “education monopoly.”

Retired Florida chief justice Harry Lee Anstead has asked his former panel to require justification for why six proposed constitutional amendments including Amendment 8 should remain on the November ballot, or to toss them out.

Anstead, joined by former Florida Elections commissioner Robert Barnas, contend in their filing to the state Supreme Court that the six proposals from the Constitution Revision Commission are unconstitutionally bundled, preventing voters from making a simple “yes” or “no” decision on them.

They challenge Amendment 8, which includes three ideas collectively grouped under education, as well as amendments 6 (rights of crime victims), 7 (first responder and military survivor benefits), 9 (offshore oil drilling and vaping), 10 (state and local government structure), and 11 (property rights).

Their key argument:

“Petitioners submit herein that each and every one of the foregoing proposed revisions bundles independent and unrelated proposals in a single ballot question in a manner that requires a voter to vote ‘yes’ for a proposal that the voter opposes in order to vote ‘yes’ for an independent and unrelated proposal the voter supports and to vote ‘no’ for a proposal the voter supports in order to vote ‘no’ for an independent and unrelated proposal the voter opposes. This is logrolling and a form of issue gerrymandering that violates the First Amendment right of the voter to vote for or against specific independent and unrelated proposals to amend the constitution without paying the price of supporting a measure the voter opposes or opposing a measure the voter supports.”

The plaintiffs recognize the CRC’s ability to propose a comprehensive revision of the state constitution. However, they argue, this would require several discrete amendments and not a single overarching one.

The CRC has instead bundled independent and unrelated items, they argue: “All are beyond the power the Constitution has bestowed upon the Constitution Revision Commission and must be removed from the ballot.”

Additionally, regarding Amendment 8, they specify that the proposal does not clearly state its intent.

“This ballot language is clearly and deceptive misleading because it does not disclose to the voter that the proposed amendment to Article IX § 4(b), adding the language ‘established by the district school board,’ eliminates the constitutional requirement in Article IX § 1(a) that Florida have a uniform …system of free public schools, which has been a continuous constitutional imperative in Florida beginning with the Constitution of 1868. This measure seeks sub silentio to subvert decisions such as Bush v. Holmes, 919 So. 2d 392 (Fla. 2006),” they write. “This subterfuge must not be perpetuated upon Florida voters.”

One senses the hand of Jeb Bush in this subterfuge.

Never forget: Dark money never sleeps.

This is a quote from the first link, dated August 14, 2018:

Retired Florida chief justice Harry Lee Anstead has asked his former panel to require justification for why six proposed constitutional amendments including Amendment 8 should remain on the November ballot, or to toss them out.

Anstead, joined by former Florida Elections commissioner Robert Barnas, contend in their filing to the state Supreme Court that the six proposals from the Constitution Revision Commission are unconstitutionally bundled, preventing voters from making a simple “yes” or “no” decision on them.

They challenge Amendment 8, which includes three ideas collectively grouped under education, as well as amendments 6 (rights of crime victims), 7 (first responder and military survivor benefits), 9 (offshore oil drilling and vaping), 10 (state and local government structure), and 11 (property rights).

Their key argument:

“Petitioners submit herein that each and every one of the foregoing proposed revisions bundles independent and unrelated proposals in a single ballot question in a manner that requires a voter to vote ‘yes’ for a proposal that the voter opposes in order to vote ‘yes’ for an independent and unrelated proposal the voter supports and to vote ‘no’ for a proposal the voter supports in order to vote ‘no’ for an independent and unrelated proposal the voter opposes. This is logrolling and a form of issue gerrymandering that violates the First Amendment right of the voter to vote for or against specific independent and unrelated proposals to amend the constitution without paying the price of supporting a measure the voter opposes or opposing a measure the voter supports.”

The plaintiffs recognize the CRC’s ability to propose a comprehensive revision of the state constitution. However, they argue, this would require several discrete amendments and not a single overarching one.

The CRC has instead bundled independent and unrelated items, they argue: “All are beyond the power the Constitution has bestowed upon the Constitution Revision Commission and must be removed from the ballot.”

This is the second, published April 16, 2018:

Despite calls to treat each idea separately, the Florida Constitution Revision Commission has sent a proposal to voters that would set school board member term limits, require civic education in public schools, and allow for the creation of a state charter school authorizer.

Commission member Roberto Martinez, a former State Board of Education chairman and key legal adviser to Jeb Bush, pressed the panel Monday to unbundle the package [P 6003].

The portion to give control of some public schools to an entity other than a local school board would be a “game changer” that would radically alter public education governance, Martinez argued. Voters should have a clear understanding of the proposal and then decide on its own merits — not because it’s tied to another concept, he said.

“These are three separate issues,” former state senator Chris Smith said in agreement. “I don’t even realize how I’m going to vote. I’m strong on some of it. I’m against some of it.”

The opposition reflected a growing drumbeat across Florida, where several organizations have raised concerns about the “power grab” they suggested Republican government leaders are attempting. They had a coordinated campaign in newspapers over the weekend, signaling this could likely be a most challenged ballot item, and wrote a letter to CRC chairman Carlos Beruff asking for each proposal to be taken up independently.

Beruff was among the 22 members to vote against unbundling the proposals, and among the 27 to support placing the package on the November ballot. A proposal needed 22 votes to advance.

Unlike those who suggested the measure would decimate local control of public education, supporters of the initiative said the ideas “absolutely” belong together because they are all part of Article IX.

They contended it would unshackle the Legislature in any future efforts to come up with new ideas to improve the system.

The current constitutional language of Article IX authorizes local school boards to operate, supervise and control all free public schools within their jurisdiction. The amendment would limit that authority to the schools “established by the district school board.”

That has been read by many observers as a method to allow creation of an unelected state charter school approval system, which in the past has been rejected in court because of this section of the constitution.

Commission member Patricia Levesque, who heads Jeb Bush’s education foundation, argued that a state charter authorizer is not spelled out in the proposal. Rather, Levesque said, the idea is to upgrade 50-year-old language written when Florida’s population was less than half of what it is now.

Floridians did not contemplate charter schools, online education, dual enrollment or other ideas that have emerged since. Levesque contended that new concepts face political hurdles because of the constitution, and called for the change.

Commission member Erika Donalds, a Collier County School Board member and charter school founder, said the constitution needs to be forward looking.

“When these reforms run their course, will [lawmakers] be able to respond?” asked Donalds, who is attempting to open charter schools outside Collier County.

The time has come, she suggested, to get rid of the “unfair, antiquated” wording that is used to “protect the education monopoly,” and to give parents more opportunities for school choice.

“It is our duty to take the hogtie off the Legislature,” said Donalds, whose husband serves in the state House and recently sponsored a measure to create a private school scholarship for students who claim to be bullied in public school.

Commission member Frank Kruppenbacher, a longtime lawyer for district and charter schools, rejected that the Legislature cannot make any education reforms it wishes.

“What it needs is the leadership to do it,” he said, noting all the initiatives that have been implemented over the years.

Kruppenbacher was among the 10 members to vote against the proposal. The others were Martinez, former Florida Bar president Hank Coxe, state Rep. Jose Felix Diaz, State Board of Education members Tom Grady and Marva Johnson, former state Sen. Arthenia Joyner, state Sen. Darryl Rouson, Indian River County Commissioner Bob Solari, and Florida education commissioner Pam Stewart.

The ballot measure would require 60 percent voter approval to become effective.

One other education proposal, which would allow high-performing school districts to avoid certain portions of the state education code similar to charter schools, is to be considered separately. Commission Style and Drafting chairman Brecht Heuchan explained that the fourth proposal could not fit with the others and meet the wording limitations for amendments.

UPDATE: The “innovation school districts” proposal failed 13-23.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Florida, Fraud, Vouchers

Gulen-Bay Tech Charter School in Trouble Again

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2018 //
21

Recently we learned that the principal of the Bay Tech Charter School in Oakland gave himself a generous severance package of $450,000, then left for Australia.

Bay Tech is a Gulen School, connected to the reclusive Imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania while overseeing one of the largest charter chains in the U.S. You can tell a Gulen school by the disproportionate number of Tirkish people on its board and teaching staff. The repressive autocrat Erdogan in Turkey wants to extradite Gulen, claiming j
He fomented a failed rebellion against the government. Critics of Gulen believe he uses the money he extracts from his charter chain to subsidize his movement. I don’t know much about Turkish politics, but I wonder why Turkish citizens are taking control of American public schools, whose first obligation is to teach the duties of American citizenship.

California taxpayers are very generous indeed to those who work in the charter sector.

Now it turns out that the school has been forcing students to pay for their graduation gowns, which is illlegal, and requiring parents to buy tickets for the graduation ceremonies, which is also illegal.

You see, it’s simple. In California, laws are written to regulate public schools, not charter schools. The most powerful lobby in the state is the California Charter Schools Association, and it fights any regulation or accountability or even prohibition of conflicts of interest. And to top it off, Governor Jerry Brown vetoes any legislation that might hold charters accountable or block conflicts of interest. So charters are free not to hold open meetings, free to keep their records secret, free to give contracts to relatives, because Governor Brown protects them from transparency.

What a sad stain on an otherwise great legacy.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Gulen Charter Schools, Oakland, Privatization

Betsy DeVos: Stealing from Students to Enrich For-Profit Colleges

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
15

Is Betsy DeVos the meanest woman in America?

She has just taken the steps needed to remove protections from students defrauded by predatory for-profit “colleges.”

Like others in the despicable Trump maladministration, DeVos thinks that consumers should fend for themselves. If they get defrauded, it’s their own fault for making a bad choice.

You can see where this is going. Government protects the marketplace, not the consumers. If you happened to get suckered by slick advertising, that’s your fault. Don’t expect the government to police the marketplace. Caveat emptor is your job.

DeVos previously rolled back regulations that allowed students who were defrauded to get a refund.

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos formally moved Friday to scrap a regulation that would have forced for-profit colleges to prove that the students they enroll are able to attain decent-paying jobs, the most drastic in a series of policy shifts that will free the scandal-scarred, for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

“In a written announcement posted on its website, the Education Department laid out its plans to eliminate the so-called gainful employment rule, which sought to hold for-profit and career college programs accountable for graduating students with poor job prospects and overwhelming debt. The Obama-era rule would have revoked federal funding and access to financial aid for poor-performing schools.

“After a 30-day comment period, the rule is expected to be eliminated July 1, 2019. Instead Ms. DeVos would provide students with more data about all of the nation’s higher education institutions — not just career and for-profit college programs — including debt, expected earnings after graduation, completion rates, program cost, accreditation and other measures.

“Students deserve useful and relevant data when making important decisions about their education post-high school,” Ms. DeVos said in a statement. “That’s why instead of targeting schools simply by their tax status, this administration is working to ensure students have transparent, meaningful information about all colleges and all programs. Our new approach will aid students across all sectors of higher education and improve accountability.”

“But in rescinding the rule, the department is eradicating the most fearsome accountability measures — the loss of federal aid — for schools that promise to prepare students for specific careers but fail to prepare them for the job market, leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay back their taxpayer-backed loans.

“The DeVos approach is reversing nearly a decade of efforts to create a tough accountability system for the largely unregulated for-profit sector of higher education. In recent years, large for-profit chains, which offer training for everything from automotive mechanics to cosmetology to cybersecurity, have collapsed under mountains of complaints and lawsuits for employing misleading and deceptive practices.

“The implosions of ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges generated tens of thousands of complaints from student borrowers who said they were left with worthless degrees. The Obama administration encouraged the expansion of public community colleges as it forgave at least $450 million in taxpayer-funded student debt for for-profit graduates who could not find decent jobs with the degrees or certificates they had earned.

“The regulations passed in the wake of those scandals remade the industry. Since 2010, when the Obama administration began deliberating the rules, more than 2,000 for-profit and career programs — nearly half — have closed, and the industry’s student population has dropped by more than 1.6 million, said Steve Gunderson, the president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, the for-profit industry’s trade association.”

There is a simple principle that every student should think about: Avoid for-profit “Colleges”and “universities.”

Don’t be scammed by the next fake “Trump University.”

Categories Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education

Congressman Collins and Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
7

By Now, you have probably read about Congressman Chris Collins (R-NY), who has “suspended” his campaign while promising that he would be vindicated after the FBI accused him of insider trading. He allegedly alerted his son to dump stock in a drug company whose premier drug failed clinical trials, causing the shares to drop 90% of their market value.

The story is worse than what has been widely reported.

“The three-term congressman’s infectious enthusiasm for Innate Immunotherapeutics, the tiny biotech firm, led to his indictment on Wednesday, when he and several other investors were accused of insider trading. Prosecutors said that he tipped off his son to the poor results of the company’s clinical drug trial for a notoriously intractable form of multiple sclerosis before they were public, allowing the son and others to dump their stock and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mr. Collins sat on the company’s board until May, and at one point was its largest shareholder.

“The stock scandal has rippled through Congress, where his favorite stock tip had enticed at least seven former or current House Republicans into investing along with him, his two grown children and other friends. It provided new ammunition for Democrats seeking to take back the House, and forced Mr. Collins to announce on Saturday that he would not seek re-election to a fourth term.

“In his statement, Mr. Collins called the insider trading charges “meritless” and vowed to fight them to have his “good name cleared of any wrongdoing….”

Mr. Collins may have been the largest investor in health companies on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but one-third of its members also bought and sold biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device stocks, an analysis by The New York Times has found. Republican Representatives William Long II and Markwayne Mullin served with Mr. Collins on the panel’s health subcommittee and invested in Innate. The subcommittee weighed in on topics ranging from the Food and Drug Administration’s authority over speeding up approval of new drugs to the Affordable Care Act.

“Beyond Innate Immunotherapeutics, Mr. Collins, among the wealthiest members of Congress, has held leadership roles in other biotech companies that were little known or mentioned on Capitol Hill. Until this past week, he was chairman of the board of directors of ZeptoMetrix, a private lab company based in Buffalo that he co-founded and that has received millions of dollars in federal contracts, according to government records. He also reported owning between $25 million and $50 million in shares of the company, but has since transferred an unknown amount into his wife’s name, a company spokesman said. In June, he sold as much as $1 million of stock in Chembio Diagnostics, a medical tests and equipment manufacturer, according to his ethics disclosure forms.

“Mr. Collins did not disclose these ties in committee hearings when topics overlapped with his business interests, including the development of a test for the Zika virus and whether the F.D.A. should more closely regulate some types of lab tests. Earlier, in 2013, he brought up the experimental drug that Innate was developing in a hearing about brain research, but did not mention his financial stake in the company.

“Mr. Collins had no business serving on this publicly traded company from the get-go,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a Washington ethics watchdog organization, who noted that such a practice was not permitted in the Senate. “The House needs to update its rules.”

“Since 2012, a federal law has prevented members of Congress from trading stocks based on confidential information they receive as lawmakers. Members of both chambers are permitted to hold stocks and members of the House of Representatives may serve on boards as long as they disclose it. Generally, lawmakers don’t have to recuse themselves from a vote or other action that might affect their holdings unless they are virtually the only investor who would benefit…

“His involvement with Innate surfaced in December of 2015, and came up again during the confirmation of Tom Price for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Price’s active investment in pharmaceutical and health care stocks drew scrutiny — and calls for an investigation — from Democrats. Mr. Price divested from his stock in Innate before becoming secretary, and later resigned from his Cabinet post after his use of expensive charter flights on government trips became public.

“By comparison, little attention has been paid to Mr. Collins’s connection to ZeptoMetrix, a company he helped found in 1999 that supplies viruses, bacteria and other products to laboratories around the country.

“Mr. Collins has said that his 50-percent holdings in ZeptoMetrix are in the name of his wife and daughter. The family’s interest in the company ranges from $25 million to $50 million, according to Mr. Collins’s financial disclosure forms. They earned $1 million to $5 million in interest from ZeptoMetrix. His wife, Mary Collins, receives a salary from the company, according to the disclosure….

“A spokeswoman for Mr. Collins on Friday pointed to statements that he made during a hearing in 2016 about bioresearch labs that disclosed that he founded and led a lab company. However, Mr. Collins did not reveal during the hearing that he remained on its board, nor his ongoing financial stake.

“In January, the outgoing chief executive of ZeptoMetrix, Gregory R. Chiklis, sued the company in New York State Supreme Court, accusing the company of financial irregularities, including paying “phantom employees” annual salaries of $500,000. Mr. Chiklis also said that Mr. Collins “unilaterally” made most decisions.”

Categories Accountability, Corruption, For-Profit, Fraud

Jan Resseger: How High-Stakes Testing is Ruining Education

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
20

In this post, Jan Resseger reminds us why Daniel Koretz’s book, The Testing Charade, is essential reading.

Read this book about the failure of NCLB and Race to the Top before you listen to Arne Duncan repeat his baseless claim that we need more testing and more of what already failed.

How has high stakes testing ruined our schools and how has this strategy, which was at the heart of No Child Left Behind, made it much more difficult to accomplish No Child Left Behind’s stated goal of reducing educational inequality and closing achievement gaps?

Here is how Daniel Koretz begins to answer that question in his 2017 book, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better: In 2002, No Child Left Behind “mandated that all states use the proficient standard as a target and that 100 percent of students reach that level. It imposed a short timeline for this: twelve years. It required that schools report the performance of several disadvantaged groups and it mandated that 100 percent of each of these groups had to reach the proficient standard. It required that almost all students be tested the same way and evaluated against the same performance standards. And it replaced the straight-line approach by uniform statewide targets for percent proficient, called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)…. The law mandated an escalating series of sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for each reporting group.” Later, “Arne Duncan used his control over funding to increase even further the pressure to raise scores. The most important of Duncan’s changes was inducing states to tie the evaluation of individual teachers, rather than just schools, to test scores… The reforms caused much more harm than good. Ironically, in some ways they inflicted the most harm on precisely the disadvantaged students the policies were intended to help.”

Koretz poses the following question and his book sets out to answer it: “But why did the reforms fail so badly?”

I recommend Daniel Koretz’s book all the time as essential reading for anyone trying to figure out how we got to the deplorable morass that is today’s federal and state educational policy. I wish I thought more people were reading this book. Maybe people are intimidated that its author is a Harvard expert on the design and use of standardized tests. Maybe it’s the fact that the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. But I don’t see it in very many bookstores, and when I ask people if they have read it, most people tell me they intend to read it. To reassure myself that it is really worth reading, I set myself the task this past weekend of re-reading the entire book. And I found re-reading it to be extremely worthwhile.

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Tom Ultican: Rightwing Shill Smears Teachers and Their Union

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2018 //
24

Tom Ultican formerly of Silicon Valley, now retired as a teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has had it with the rightwingers who sit in air-conditioned offices and complain about teachers. And whine about their unions, who dare to defend them.

In this post, he eviscerates a jerk from a rightwing think-not tank and questions why this highly political organization has a tax-exempt status. We should all wonder why ALEC, the political arm of rightwingers and corporations, is also tax-exempt as if it were a charity, when it is a mean-spirited cabal intent on grinding down the lives and hopes of the 99%.

Ultican writes:

“The article by Edward Ring was a slanted hit piece intended to undermine support for public sector unions and teachers’ unions in particular. This is clearly a political document that has nothing to do with charitable giving, but anyone giving money to further this political agenda can claim a charitable deduction. That means as a citizen I am supporting the propagation of a political ideology I find abhorrent.

“Large giving to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or the Center for American Progress is political giving. It not only should be taxed; the details of the donations should be made available to the public. Much of the giving at the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, etc. is clearly designed to promote a political point of view. That is not charity. That is politics. It does not or at least should not qualify for non-profit status.

“If we stop this tax cheating, we might see fewer of these baseless attack articles that divide people and communities.”

Stopping this theft of public dollars won’t happen during the Trump administration. Everyone around him, including the family, is stuffing their pockets as fast as possible. Not even Obama dared to challenge the perks of the far-right, like hitting a hornet’s nest.

Maybe, someday we will have an ethical federal government who fearlessly cleans up the IRS deductions for political bill mills.

Categories Accountability, California, Fraud, Lies, Teachers, Unions

Don’t Cry for Alex Jones, His App Is Trending

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
40

Recently we have had some exchanges on this blog about whether it was right or wrong for big media companies like Facebook and Apple to delete the vile slanderer of murdered children, Alex Jones.

I said that he has no more right to put his content on a private platform than I have a “right” to have my opinions published by a newspaper. When they reject me, I don’t claim censorship. Others disagreed, and thought it was dangerous to ban hate speech, slander, and lies.

Well, for those worried about Alex Jones’s ability to reach his audience, here is good news for you:

“Just days after Google, Facebook and Apple purged videos and podcasts from the right-wing conspiracy site Infowars from their sites, the Infowars app has become one of the hottest in the country.

“On Wednesday, Infowars was the No. 1 overall “trending” app on the Google Play store, a metric that reflects its sudden momentum. Among news apps, Infowars was No. 3 on Apple and No. 5 on Google, above all mainstream news organizations. And the app stood at No. 66 overall on Google, excluding game apps, while on Apple it reached No. 49, above popular apps like LinkedIn, Google Docs and eBay.

“The Infowars app, which includes news articles and the shows of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, had likely been downloaded a few hundred to a few thousand times a day on average after its introduction last month, said Randy Nelson, head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower, which tracks app data. Now, it is likely getting 30,000 to 40,000 downloads a day, Mr. Nelson estimated based on its ranking.”

I will continue to hope that Mr. Jones loses the many lawsuits filed by those he has defamed and injured, including the families of the children and educators massacred like animals at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2014. Because of his vicious claims that the massacre was a hoax, that no one died, and that the victims were actually child actors, these bereaved families have been subject to death threats. Our Founding Fatheres would have put him in the stocks.

Categories Accountability, Fake News, Fraud, Hoax, Lies

Oakland: Charges of Fraud Fly at Gulen-Connected Charter School As Principal Resigns and Leaves the Country

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
49

The Bay Area Technology School, a charter school in Oakland, California, was thrown into chaos and confusion when the principal suddenly resigned and left the country amid a financial investigation.

The school is believed to be part of the Gulen charter network associated with the reclusive imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in seclusion in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania, because of the unusual number of Turkish board members.

Just before the end of the last school year, the principal of Oakland’s Bay Area Technology School, Hayri Hatipoglu, suddenly resigned. At least four other senior staff and two of the charter school’s five board members also abruptly quit. As a result, the organization was thrown into chaos. And then Hatipoglu disappeared. According to several sources, he left the country with his family for Australia, where he is a citizen.

Afterwards, the Oakland Unified School District, which is responsible for overseeing the BayTech charter school, opened an investigation. BayTech’s three remaining board members also hired an independent party to carry out their own internal review.

While OUSD and BayTech have both attempted to keep the mini-crisis under wraps, the Express has learned that BayTech’s three remaining board members are accusing Hatipoglu of defrauding the school. They allege that Hatipoglu surreptitiously changed his employment contract to provide himself with three years’ worth of severance pay totaling about $450,000, an unusually large sum for a small school with an annual budget of approximately $3 million. His previous contract provided for only six months of severance pay, a standard in the education sector.

“We believe he changed his contract,” said BayTech board member Fatih Dagdelen in a recent interview. “According to his contract, he’d get paid a six-months salary if he resigned, but all of a sudden his contract said he’d get paid two-and-a-half years further.”

Remaining board members suspect fraud.

In an unusual and unsolicited email to the Express sent on June 28, Hatipoglu wrote that the school’s Turkish board members conspired to punish him for his decision to break ties with a Southern California-based nonprofit. The nonprofit, Accord Institute, happens to be controlled by the followers of a powerful Turkish imam who leads a global Islamic political force called the Gülen movement.

Founded in the 1970s by the religious leader Fethullah Gülen, the Gülen movement is an Islamic-inspired social and political force that globalized as its followers immigrated to Europe, Australia, and the United States. The Turkish government considers the Gülen movement a terrorist organization because its members helped organize the 2016 coup attempt against President Recep Erdogan, and Erdogan has ordered thousands of Gülenists jailed. (The U.S. government, however, does not classify the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization.) Fethullah Gülen currently lives in self-exile in Pennsylvania, but he’s considered one of the most powerful men in Turkish politics. His followers also set up and operate one of the largest chains of charter schools in the U.S. BayTech is one of these schools.

Might I suggest that these events are evidence that public schools that are funded by taxpayers should be subject to public supervision and oversight–not by private and unaccountable boards– and should be staffed by certified teachers and other staff? Charter schools in California operate without any accountability or transparency, which is an open invitation to rob taxpayers.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Gulen Charter Schools, Oakland, Privatization

The Best Quote of the Year

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
7

Do you remember that the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” warned about the terrible condition of America’s public schools, setting off the frenzy of “reform” that has now fermented into high-stakes testing, privatization, profiteering, closing schools, firing teachers and principals, and enriching testing companies?

Here is a description of the composition of the Commission that wrote the report:

The commission included 12 administrators, 1 businessperson, 1 chemist, 1 physicist, 1 politician, 1 conservative activist, and 1 teacher. … Just one practicing teacher and not a single academic expert on education. It should come as no surprise that a commission dominated by administrators found that the problems of U.S. schools were mainly caused by lazy students and unaccountable teachers. Administrative incompetence was not on the agenda. Nor were poverty, inequality, and racial discrimination.

Perhaps the most famous line in the report was this one:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

A reader of this blog who goes by the tag “Ohio Algebra Teacher” offered a new version of that famous line:

If a foreign country had inflicted upon our public education system what Ed Reform plutocrats and their toadying political sycophants have implemented upon it, we would have considered it an act of war.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Ohio: Supreme Court Rules Against ECOT and the Virtual Charter School is DEAD!

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
26

It has taken nearly 20 years, and cost Ohio taxpayers $1 billion or more, but the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) died in court this week.

The owner William Lager became a millionaire many times over, supplying goods and services to his corporation.

The “school” had a high attrition rate and the highest dropout rate of any high school in the nation, but it was protected by politicians who received campaign contributions from Lager. The contributions were piffle compared to Lager’s profits.

After embarrassing stories, the ECOT authorizer withdrew its sponsorship. The state, after years of ignoring the horrible performance of ECOT and its huge profits, eventually got around to auditing it and found many phantom students and asked ECOT for an accounting. ECOT insisted that when students turn on their computer, they were learning even if they didn’t participate in activities.

ECOT attorneys argued that the state illegally changed the rules on how to count students in the middle of a school year, and that state law did not require students to participate in class work in order to be counted for funding purposes.

Perhaps foreshadowing the final decision, as attorney Marion Little’s argued before the court in February that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow should get full funding for students even if they do no work, Chief Justice O’Connor interjected, “How is that not absurd?”

After a long battle in court, the Supreme Court voted 4-2 to support the state in its decision to force ECOT to pay back money for students who never received instruction.

Since opening the school in 2000, Lager went from financial distress to a millionaire, with his for-profit companies, IQ Innovations and Altair Learning Management, collecting about $200 million in state funding for work done on behalf of ECOT. At its peak, the school was graduating more than 2,000 students annually, but also had the highest dropout rate in the state.

Lager and his associates also donated $2.5 million to Ohio politicians and political parties, the vast majority to Republicans, with the ECOT scandal boiling into a major issue ahead of the Nov. 6 election featuring the gubernatorial race between DeWine and Democrat Richard Cordray.

Be it noted that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a huge fan of online charter schools and was an investor in K12 Inc., which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Farewell, ECOT. You won’t be missed. Besides, K12 Inc. and other e-schools are rushing in to Ohio to grab your market share.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Scandal, Virtual Charter Schools
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