Read about his funders here.
In the current campaign, he has the support of 18 billionaires, including Bill Gates.
Archives for category: Funding
The photograph below was taken during the UTLA strike last January. The guy in the center is famous rocker Stevie Van Zandt, who loves teachers and public schools and unions. Stevie is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He played in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.
Stevie is constantly giving back, and he gave back in Los Angeles, where he picketed in the rain. Stevie will be a featured speaker at the Network for Public Education national conference in Philadelphia, March 28-29, 2020. Be there!
Stevie made a great video to celebrate International Teachers Day.
Jeremy Mohler of “In the Public Interest” writes:
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What a payoff!
A principal in Florida doubled his salary when his public schools converted to a charter, which is what the rightwing governor and legislator want to happen.
Meanwhile teachers In the state are raising money to pay for basic school supplies for their students.
Lincoln Memorial Academy principal Eddie Hundley, the subject of a federal investigation, earned more than twice the average salary of middle school principals in Manatee last year.
Former Lincoln Memorial Academy principal Eddie Hundley, who is currently the subject of a federal investigation into fraud, bribery and embezzlement, earned roughly $204,000 last year, according to Manatee County School District general counsel Mitch Teitelbaum.
Hundley’s salary nearly doubled overnight when Lincoln converted from a traditional district middle school to a charter on June 30, 2018. Before the conversion, school district officials say Hundley was earning $105,560, but as of July 1, 2018, his base pay increased to $174,990 plus a supplement of $2,450 per month.
“This may not be the entire compensation received by Mr. Hundley,” Teitelbaum said in an email.
Hundley’s salary had been a mystery, as school district officials have sought more details about Lincoln’s finances. The school was declared in “dire financial condition” in May. Lincoln was found to have missed roughly $60,000 in payments to the Florida Retirement System, and the city of Palmetto has threatened to turn off the school’s water twice due to unpaid bills…
Hundley’s base salary and monthly supplement, not including benefits, puts his earnings well above middle school principals in Manatee, who on average earned $83,200 in 2018-19, according to the school district.
However, Hundley’s salary it is not out of the realm for charter school principals in the district. In 2017 the Herald Tribune compiled salaries of the highest paid employee at all charter schools in Sarasota and Manatee. At that point, Manatee School for the Arts principal Bill Jones earned roughly $184,000. Fred Spence, the founder of Bradenton’s Team Success, earned $237,000 in 2014, the last year of salary data available before management of the school was handed over to his management firm. The highest paid employee at a charter school in Sarasota in 2017 was Vickie Marble at the Student Leadership Academy, at $143,175.
Local officials said the school’s administrative costs had tripled beyond what was expected..
Peter Greene points out in this post that legislatures have a nasty habit of overlooking the central question about charter schools: their funding.
They pretend that they can run two publicly funded school systems without any additional cost.
They pretend that the funding for charters is not subtracted from the funding for public schools.
Public schools are getting hammered by the loss of public tax dollars that have been diverted from public school finances into charter and choice school accounts. Charters, having forgotten the era when they bragged that they could do more with less, complain that they are underfunded compared to public schools.
The problem here, as with several other choice-related issues, is in a false premise of modern school choice movement. That false premise is the assertion that we can fund multiple school districts for the same money we used to use to fund one single public system.
This is transparent baloney. When was the last time any school district said, “We are really strapped for funds. We had better open some new schools right away!” Never. Because everyone understands that operating multiple facilities with multiple staffs and multiple administrations and multiple overhead expenses– all that costs more than putting your operation under one roof.
But the choice pitch has always been some version of, “Your community can have twelve different schools with twelve different flavors of education in twelve different buildings with twelve different staffs– and it won’t cost you a nickel more than what you’re paying now!” This is carnival barker talk, the same kind of huckster pitch as “Why buy that used Kia? I’ll sell you a brand new Mercedes for the same price!”
Adding charters and choice increases educational costs in a community. Sometimes we’ve hid that by bringing in money from outside sources, like PTA bake sales to buy a public school office equipment, or pricey benefit dinners for charters, or increasing state and federal subsidies to help charters stay afloat.
But mostly school choice is the daylight savings time of education– if we just shuffle this money around in new and different ways, somehow there will be more of it.
This trick never works. And we talk all too rarely about why it never will.
Bernie Sanders recently was invited by the United Teachers of Los Angeles to speak to its Leadership Conference.
I was invited to make a tape introducing him. I did but you won’t see it or hear it. Technical problems. Just wait. You will hear Bernie loud and clear. He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.
The State Education Department is taking over the Providence School District but thus far it has not released any hint of a plan.
The only thing that seems sure is that the state will not put any new money to the district where schools are in disrepair.
Despite having been working towards a Providence School takeover for more than three months, Rhode Island’s Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green is now backing away from promises of transparency.
Her office is now refusing to layout plans as to how to improve Providence Schools.
Appearing on GoLocal LIVE this week, Speaker of the House Nick Mattiello discussed Rhode Island Department of Education voting to take over the beleaguered Providence public schools, following the Johns Hopkins report which identified the glaring problems in Providence — including school buildings. He voiced concern that there is no public plan.
Mattiello warned that the state was not prepared to assist with additional financial resources beyond those already provided.
“If you don’t invest each and every year you’re going to have a disaster on your hands. They have a problem in Providence and that’s going to have to be addressed. The state is not going to come in with a large sack of money and address the Providence infrastructure needs,” said Mattiello. “They have to come up with a plan. I’m disappointed that I don’t see one at this point.”
Texas Public Radio reported on the devastating effect that charter expansion is having on the public schools of San Antonio. The city leaders, in their ignorance, decided not to improve the public schools, but to create a parallel private system to compete with them. Both sectors are funded by the public, but the charters choose their students and some do not offer transportation.
The city’s population is growing but enrollment in its public schools is shrinking.
The main reason for the apparent contradiction is an exponential growth in publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools. Charter school enrollment in the San Antonio metro area has grown by more than 200% since 2009, according to a Texas Public Radio analysis of a decade of enrollment records obtained through public information requests.
In the past two years alone, charter networks in the San Antonio metro area gained nearly 11,000 students. For traditional school districts, that meant a corresponding loss in funding. State funding is based on attendance.
The big charter networks, like IDEA and Great Hearts, have selective enrollment practices. IDEA has received more than $200 million from Betsy DeVos and the federal Charter Schools Program.
Some local parent groups are fighting back, but they are vastly outspent by the charter networks and undercut by state policy, which favors privatization.
Charter favoritism guarantees that the local public schools, which enroll most children, will be underfunded and will serve a disproportionate number of students with the highest needs.
Some parents have organized to fight back:
Standing in the neighborhood next to Oak Meadow Elementary in the North East school district, Cameron Vickrey said her daughters’ school “experienced a kind of mass exodus” a few years ago to go to Great Hearts. Great Hearts is a charter network that uses a classical curriculum similar to private schools.
“When all of those people left there was a volunteer vacuum,” Vickrey said. “That was when I came to the school, and as a new kindergarten mom I was put on the PTA board… because they pretty much had to create a PTA board from scratch.”
Vickrey’s neighborhood is mostly one-story, ranch-style houses a short walk or drive from the elementary school.
Trimmed yards are sprinkled with white signs that say “Proudly RootEd in NEISD.”
Vickrey and a few other Oak Meadow parents started making the yard signs after hearing other parents say that nobody in the neighborhood goes to the traditional public school.
“And we stopped and thought about it, and we were like, ‘That’s not true! Of course people go to that school.’ They just don’t know those neighbors, right, because maybe they’re not in their clique or whatever.”
From there, RootEd grew into a nonprofit with a mission of spreading positive stories about district schools — both by word of mouth and on social media using the hashtag RootEd.
“RootEd just wants to say, ‘Wait, hang on a second. Remember that these schools are here. And there are awesome things happening in them still,’” Vickrey said. “Make that your first stop, the first thing that you look into and if it doesn’t work for you for whatever reason, nobody’s going to fault you for that. You have a right to do that but we just want to make sure that people don’t discount their public schools.”
Vickrey said she also wants parents to consider the “unintended side effects” of choosing charter schools: less money and volunteers for the traditional public school, and a tendency to choose a school where people look like you.
“Our middle school that we’re zoned for here is a Title I (low-income) school, Jackson Middle School,” Vickrey said. “And it’s fabulous, but so many start choosing their school path for elementary school based on trying to avoid Jackson Middle School.”
Jackson Middle School is 80% Hispanic and 72% economically disadvantaged. San Antonio’s Great Hearts schools are less than 20% low-income and almost 50% white.
According to a study by the watchdog group In the Public Interest, The public schools of the small West Contra School School District in California lose $27.9 million each year due to charter schools, a loss of nearly $1,000 for each student in the public schools. The majority of students suffer budget cuts so a small proportion can attend charter schools that may be no better and may close mid-year.
As of 2016-17, the school year for which the costs in this report were calculated, 28,518 students attended WCCUSD’s traditional public schools, while 4,606 students—14 percent of the total student population—were enrolled in 12 charter schools within the district’s physical boundaries. More recent data indicate an explosion in charter school enrollment. The proportion of WCCUSD students attending charter schools has more than doubled in four years, from 8 percent of the district total in the 2014 -15 school year to 17 percent this year.
The costs of charter schools
When students transfer to charter schools, funding for their education follows—but costs remain. Because charter schools pull students from multiple schools and grade levels, it’s rare that individual traditional public schools can reduce expenses enough to make up for the lost revenue. While WCCUSD schools have 14 percent fewer students to serve, a school cannot adjust expenses by, for example, cutting 14 percent of its principal, heating bill, parking lot paving, internet service, or building maintenance. The district also cannot proportionately cut administrative tasks such as bus route planning, teacher training, grant writing, and budget development. Because these central costs cannot be cut, districts are forced to cut services provided to traditional public school students.
Even if such cuts were possible, districts are legally responsible for serving all students in the community and must maintain adequate facilities to reabsorb students when inherently risky charter schools fail. During the 2016 -17 school year alone, 51 California charter schools either closed or were converted into traditional public schools.3
We have recently heard from political candidates who claim they oppose “for-profit charter schools” but support “non-profit charter schools.”
What they don’t know is that this is a distinction without a difference. Many “non-profit charter schools” are managed by for-profit EMOs (Education Management Organizations). Some are theoretically “non-profit” but pocket big money on their lease agreements (paying exorbitant sums to lease their space from a real estate company who is owned by the charter owner).
Peter Greene explains here how non-profits make a profit. It is legal graft, in which entrepreneurs figure out how to profit from taxpayers’ money intended for students and teachers.
His article originally appeared in Forbes.
He writes:
There is such a thing as a business that specializes in charter schools and real estate. In some states, the government will help finance a real estate development if it’s a charter school, and in general developers have noted an abundance of cash. Though, as one charter real estate loan bond financier told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s a ton of capital coming into the industry. The question is: Does it know what it’s doing?” Many states have found a problem with charters that lease their buildings from their own owners as well.
Why such interest in charter real estate? One reason: the Clinton-eraCommunity Tax Relief Act of 2000 made it possible for funds that invested in charter schools to double their money in seven years. And the finance side can become so convoluted that, as Bruce Baker lays out here, the taxpayers can end up paying for a building twice– and the building still ends up belonging to the charter company.
Management Companies
Once you’ve set up your nonprofit charter school, hire yourself as a for-profit charter management organization. Over the last decade, there have been numerous examples of this arrangement, sometimes called a “sweeps contract,” where the charter school hands as much as 95% of its revenue off to a for-profit management organization. As with real estate, there have been instances where the school’s assets (books, furniture, computers, etc) have been ruled to be the property of the management company— so even if the school tanks, the organizers walk away with assets they can cash in.
Kansas has a State Supreme Court that pays attention to the State Constitution and cares about the future of the state, which rests on the educational opportunities of its children. Isn’t that novel these days!
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