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Mercedes Schneider Reviews the Tax Filings of Florida’s “Step Up for Students” Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2017 //
7

Mercedes Schneider is a careful analyst of tax filings. Although Trump doesn’t have to make his tax returns public, thus revealing any potential conflicts of interest, the law requires charitable organizations to release their financial filings (called their 990 form) with the Internal Revenue Service.

In this post, Schneider reviews the finances of Step Up for Students, which receives donations from corporations to provide vouchers for Students. The corporations, in turn, get a tax credit for their donations. This is Florida’s way of circumventing a provision in the state constitution that forbids spending public money on religious schools. By giving gifts to Step Up, the business supplies the money for the voucher to a third party, not a religious school. Step Up uses the money mostly for religious schools. Many D.C. Insiders think this is the plan that DeVos and Trump will use as a national template because it bypasses thorny Constitutional issues. It is called a “tax credit” program, but it is in reality a way to finance vouchers.

Florida Voucher Nonprofit, Step Up for Students: A Tale of 15 Tax Forms

Categories Betsy DeVos, Florida, Funding, Vouchers

Rolling Stone: Betsy DeVos, the Christian Right, and the Plan to Evangelize America’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2017 //
8

Janet Reitman, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of “Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion,” investigated the like-minded evangelical world of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in this article.

The appointment of DeVos is a big win, she says, in the religious right’s crusade to capture control of American culture. “Her appointment as education secretary marks the crowning achievement of the Christian right’s campaign to infiltrate America’s secular institutions.”

Reitman documents the evangelical organizations that have carefully prepared the way for this moment, building power in state races and now wining the presidency. There is irony, to be sure, in the fact that Donald Trump was their instrument to win national power since he embodies the antithesis of their values in his own life.

The DeVos family is part of a super-rich cabal of the right that has worked behind the scenes for many years to create institutions that would advance their policies and values.

The DeVos family – which includes 91-year-old patriarch and Amway co-founder Richard “Rich” DeVos Sr., his wife, Helen, their four children and their spouses – has been one of the driving forces behind a stealth campaign powered by a small group of Republican billionaires to chip away at America’s secular institutions: the pig bones, so to speak, of our society. According to a recent analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, the family, whose net worth is estimated at $5.6 billion, gave $10 million to national GOP candidates and committees during the 2016 cycle alone. But this amount pales to the gargantuan sums they have channeled into state and local races, evangelical and free-market think tanks, advocacy groups, foundations, PACs, Super PACs and other dark-money organs that have effectively created a shadow political party within the GOP.

Regular attendees at the Koch brothers’ biannual summits, the DeVoses have been healthy benefactors of several Koch-seeded groups that advance an anti-tax, anti-regulatory agenda, including the charitable arm of Americans for Prosperity and the FreedomWorks Foundation. What distinguishes the DeVoses within the Kochs’ circle of power, however, is their conservative Christian worldview, which over the past four decades has helped fuel what is now a $1.5 billion infrastructure composed of thousands of churches and “parachurch” ministries, as well as Christian TV, radio and Internet channels; Facebook pages and other forms of social media; books; conferences; camps; prayer groups; legal organizations – an entire universe that many Americans may be wholly unaware of. Through these channels has come a single, unified message merging social conservatism, free-market capitalism and American exceptionalism: the belief that the rights and freedoms spelled out in the U.S. Constitution were mandated by God….

A staple in modern evangelical teachings is the concept of Christian spheres of influence – or what the evangelical business guru Lance Wallnau dubbed the “Seven Mountains” of society: business, media, religion, arts and entertainment, family, government, and education – all of which urge the faithful to engage in secular culture in order to “transform” it. The goal is a sweeping overhaul of society and a merging of church and state: elevating private charity over state-run social services, returning prayer to school and turning the clock back on women’s and LGBTQ rights. It would also be a system without a progressive income tax, collective bargaining, environmental regulation, publicly funded health care, welfare, a minimum wage – a United States guided by a rigorously laissez-faire system of “values” rather than laws….

What became clear as the 2000s progressed was just how much these two agendas had fused. Under the direction of Charles and David Koch, and with increasing influence from the likes of the DeVos family, the Republican big tent shifted, from the Grand Old Party to what one longtime strategist who’s spent years mapping these networks refers to as the “Grand New Alliance” of libertarianism, populism and religious conservatism. (In the last election cycle, the DeVoses pledged $1.5 million to Freedom Partners Action Fund, which has been called the Koch network’s “secret bank.”) This new perspective, sometimes called the “biblical worldview,” was being sold at special “pastor policy briefings” across the country, in the hopes of politicizing the evangelical leaders who would then, in turn, rally their troops. At one I attended in Orlando, in 2012, David Barton, a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and a leading Christian nationalist, patiently explained to a room of Florida pastors why a radically reduced federal government was part of God’s plan. Jesus, for example, was opposed to the capital-gains tax, Barton said, citing passages in the books of Romans and Matthew.

“Without the libertarians and Tea Party brand, the Christian right would still be somewhat on the fringe of American politics,” the strategist, who asked for anonymity, explains. “But with the economic message, now we’ve got something that is more powerful and more dangerous from a progressive point of view.”

The result has been sweeping electoral power: According to figures published in The Washington Post, in states where the Koch network is most active, including the DeVoses’ home state of Michigan, Republicans control 100 percent of the state legislative majorities, 80 percent of governors, 77 percent of senators and 73 percent of U.S. House members. In 2016, evangelicals and born-again Christians constituted 43 percent of Trump’s total vote. Conservative Christians have been tapped to occupy the top Cabinet posts in the departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Justice; they are also set to serve as the president’s director of National Intelligence and head of the CIA. The vision is simple, as the political strategist puts it: “What they want is for churches and nonprofits and business to run the country.”

The issue that Betsy and Dick DeVos adopted as their own is school choice. They ignored its racist origins and concentrated on selling it to black and brown communities. Their highest priority was vouchers to allow public money to flow to religious schools. When their effort to revise the Michigan state constitution to permit vouchers was revpbuffed by voters in 2000, they embraced charters as the best vehicle to undermine “government schools.”

Betsy DeVos became the chairwoman of several nonprofits that were consolidated to become the national powerhouse behind the movement: the American Federation for Children. Along with its tax affiliate, the Alliance for School Choice, the organization published glossy brochures featuring pictures of smiling children of every race, with endorsements from African-American and Democratic politicians, including Sen. Cory Booker, then an upstart city councilman from Newark, New Jersey, who joined the board of Alliance for School Choice in 2002.

But the movement’s real agenda was less about helping black families than creating a nationwide push for school choice. Leading the charge was the Great Lakes Education Project, or GLEP, a Michigan-based group created by the DeVoses to strong-arm state legislators. The result was a complete overhaul of the Michigan legislature. “In education policy, there would be times where they didn’t have votes – maybe 10 or 15 Republicans who didn’t want to vote for totally expanding the charter-school cap,” says Brandon Dillon, who served in the Michigan Statehouse before becoming the state Democratic chair. “And they would slowly, through the speaker of the house, bring them in, one by one, and basically threaten them with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent against them in the primary.” Though the voucher fight had been lost, charter schools, which receive government funding but operate independently of the public-school system (and are seen by conservative policy groups as a gateway drug to privatization) sprang up across the state.

At the national level, Dick and Betsy DeVos founded a group called All Children Matter, which funded PACs to repeat the process in multiple states. In 2003, its first year, ACM spent $7.6 million “directly impacting statewide and state legislative elections in 10 targeted states,” according to its media materials, winning 121 out of 181 races, “phenomenally successful for a political organization.” Thirty states and the District of Columbia currently have some form of school-choice legislation on the books. Some of the most expansive are in Louisiana, Arizona and Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels, backed by ACM, launched a private-school vouchers program in 2011. Two years later, then-Gov. Mike Pence greatly expanded the program, creating what Mother Jones described as “a $135 million annual bonanza almost exclusively benefiting private religious schools.”

The downside of this, as became clear in public-school systems across the country, is charter schools and voucher programs entice parents with the promise of more “options,” while weeding out the children that neither charters nor private schools have the capacity to educate. Many parents have opted for “choice,” only to be turned away. This is particularly acute with regard to kids with behavioral issues like attention-deficit disorder. “The words are ‘Your child may be better served elsewhere,’ ” says one Michigan legislator.”

Her goal: diminish the role of government, rely on the private sector.

To see that philosophy at work, Reitman traveled to Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan, home of the DeVos family and Amway. There she interviewed a man who works for the family and praised their generosity:

“If there’s a kid on the corner without a coat, the city will rally behind him and there’ll be hundreds of coats donated,” Ross says. “But very rarely does anybody take the time to ask, ‘Why doesn’t he have a coat?’ ”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Deregulation, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Leonie Haimson: Dropping the ESSA regulations is No Big Deal

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2017 //
10

Leonie Haimson explains here the significance–or lack thereof–of the Senate’s decision to kill former Secretary of Education John King’s highly prescriptive regulations to implement the 2015 federal law called Every Student Succeeds Act.

There were some who reacted with joy to see the King regs killed. King was known for his love of high-stakes testing.

Others worried whether the death of the regs meant that the states would be free to ignore the neediest kids because of the withdrawal of federal oversight.

I worked in the U.S. Department of Education for two years. What I learned is there are very few educators who work for ED.

The Feds have two important roles:

1. Supplying extra money for equity purposes

2. Protecting the civil rights of children

The federal government has zero capacity to direct or measure academic quality.

The people who work in the Department of Education are clerks, not educators.

THE ED has no capacity whatever to assure or ascertain quality of education. Very few people who work there have a view about what education is or should be. That is not their job. Most have worked for ED for many years, regardless of which party is in power. They do not express their views. They do their job. They write checks, collect data, review contracts. They can tell you how many students are served in which programs. They can determine how much money is allocated and spent. The Department consists of clerks and bureaucrats. I was there. Nothing has changed. Educators are in schools, not at the U.S. Department of Education.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Funding, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Karen Francisco: Indiana and the Great Voucher Scam

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2017 //
8

Karen Francisco, editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in Indiana, reviews the state’s disastrous experiment with vouchers. In 2011, state lawmakers started the voucher program with the promise of helping low-income children get better schooling. As time has passed, the income level for eligibility has gone up, the costs have gone up, but the vouchers have never fulfilled their promise. Instead, they have become a permanent drain on public school funding even as the schools remain unaccountable and non-transparent. Over time, they have become a subsidy for private school parents who never sent their children to public schools and never intended to. Over time, they have developed a strong political constituency in the legislature that is unwilling to hold voucher schools accountable for performance.

The Choice Scholarship Program annual report – quietly released by the Indiana Department of Education late last month – shows voucher participation grew by 4.9 percent this year, while the cost grew by 8.4 percent, topping $146 million for the 2016-17 school year. The percentage of voucher students who have never attended a public school also grew, to 54.6 percent. The state improbably claims that it is saving money by sending children to voucher schools, but most of these students would never have attended public schools anyway.

The voucher program has turned into an entitlement for middle-income and low-income families to send their child to a religious school at public expense, and for some, a means of white flight from diverse public schools.

The results of the millions of dollars spent on vouchers are not easily obtained, but they are unimpressive and troubling:

Indiana lawmakers have mostly abandoned the pretense of helping struggling students in favor of an argument that parents should be allowed to choose the best schools for their children. But their failure to hold voucher schools accountable leaves parents without the information they need.

In Fort Wayne, Horizon Christian Academy III earned letter grades of D in both 2013-14 and 2014-15, as enrollment grew from 236 last year to 433 this year. Voucher payments to the Wells Street school increased from $1.14 million last year to $2.43 million this year. At Cornerstone College Prep, voucher funding grew from $631,000 to more than $687,000 this year, even as voucher enrollment fell from 127 students to 122 this year and the school earned an F on its school report card. Its earlier performance results are shielded by student privacy law and no information is available about teacher certification. Only public schools are required to report information about educator evaluations, student performance on college aptitude exams and more.

Transparency is in short supply at voucher schools. Cornerstone’s address is listed as a post office box and its website has been disabled, although a woman answering the phone confirmed the school is at 3501 Harris Road, at Destiny Dome Embassy at Cathedral of Praise Ministries International.

Voucher schools are not subject to public access or open records law; they agree only to “cooperate” in an audit of school records.

When Indiana became a pioneer in so-called school choice, research on the effectiveness of voucher programs was slim, as there were too few subjects to study. Milwaukee was the first major city with a voucher program; Cleveland and Washington, D.C., later adopted programs. Florida had a voucher program for special education students.

Indiana, a follower in almost every other policy area, became the first to approve a statewide voucher program open to all income-eligible students. As large voucher programs developed in Louisiana and Ohio, the data available to study effectiveness have grown.

The results are poor.

• In Ohio, the pro-voucher Fordham Institute commissioned a Northwestern University research team to study the state’s choice program. It found voucher students tend to be more economically advantaged and higher-performing academically when they enter private schools, but they post worse educational results than their peers who stayed behind in public schools.

• In Louisiana, a major study found voucher students – predominantly black, from low-income families and coming from public schools that had received poor ratings from the state – posted disastrous results. Students who started at the 50th percentile in math and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school fell to the 26th percentile in a single year.

Results were still well below the starting point in the second year.

• A report released last week by the Children’s Law Clinic at Duke Law School concluded this of North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Grant Program: “Based on limited and early data, more than half the students using vouchers are performing below average on nationally standardized reading, language, and math tests. In contrast, similar public school students in North Carolina are scoring above the national average.”

• Mark Dynarski of the Brookings Institution summarized large-scale research done on the Indiana and Louisiana voucher programs to find public school students who received vouchers scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students who remained in public schools.

“The magnitudes of the negative impacts were large,” Dynarski wrote. “In education as in medicine, ‘first, do no harm’ is a powerful guiding principle. A case to use taxpayer funds to send children of low-income parents to private schools is based on an expectation that the outcome will be positive. These recent findings point in the other direction.”

The accumulating research about the negative effects of vouchers doesn’t matter to Indiana legislators. Indiana already has the largest voucher program in the nation, and the legislature wants to make it even bigger.

Indiana lawmakers aren’t backing down, however. The state has almost 20 percent of the nation’s 178,000 voucher students, yet there were multiple bills filed in this legislative session to increase the eligibility pathways for a voucher. The most noxious is attached to the preschool pilot program expansion.

The House version of the bill makes any child who receives an On My Way Preschool grant as a 4-year-old eligible for vouchers for the next 13 years, provided their families meet the generous income eligibility guidelines (up to $91,020 a year for a family of four next year). The estimated cost? Another $10.5 million added annually to the nation’s most costly voucher program.

A powerful school voucher lobby maintains a tight grip on Indiana’s legislative leaders, who in turn maintain a tight grip on the GOP House and Senate caucuses.

There are many more public school parents than voucher school parents. Why don’t they hold their legislators accountable for transferring public funds to religious schools that get worse results than public schools? Why continue to give public money to failing private schools? Indiana was once known for its community public schools. Soon, it will be known as a national laughing stock for its dedication to a failed idea: vouchers for failing private and religious schools.

Categories Funding, Indiana, Vouchers

Laura Chapman: HR 610 and Manufactured Chaos

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2017 //
33

The House Republicans have cooked up a bill to empower states with unencumbered control over federal funds. It is called HR 610. In DC, they refer to the principle of the bill as”block grants.” Otherwise known as send the money without strings so the states can do what they want. An earlier post by Denis Smith explained that federal funds without oversight leads to waste, fraud, and abuse.

Laura Chapman explains more here:

“HR 610 has the Arne Duncan trick of requiring a change in state law if vouchers are not on the books. So the new national system must be voucher-compliant or no federal funds will be available. Federal funds to states are in the range of 8% to 12%, average about 10%. Given that many states have already cut their state budgets for education, and most are in Republican hands, this law is likely to pass. Notice that the same bill invites a lot of junk food contractors to get in the game of providing food to all children.

“Some key passages in the bill.

“From these amounts, each LEA shall: (1) distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child, and (2) do so in a manner that ensures that such payments will be used for appropriate educational expenses.

“To be eligible to receive a block grant, a state must: (1) comply with education voucher program requirements, and (2) make it lawful for parents of an eligible child to elect to enroll their child in any public or private elementary or secondary school in the state or to home-school their child.”

“This is part of the same bill.

“No Hungry Kids Act

“The bill repeals a specified rule that established certain nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs. (In general, the rule requires schools to increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat free milk in school meals; reduce the levels of sodium, saturated fat, and trans fat in school meals; and meet children’s nutritional needs within their caloric requirements.)”

“Notice that money goes to states, then to local districts where the administrative burden for distributing money is located with no state oversight or consideration of how districts can make sure that payments to parents “will be used for appropriate educational expenses.” Follow them to Walmart? to Target? to Staples? This is a ridiculous bill. It is legislation from Republicans who want to create chaos.”

Categories Funding, U.S. Department of Education

New York: Parents Sue Cuomo to Release “Frozen” Funds for Neediest Schools

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2017 //
7

The Education Law Center is suing Governor Cuomo on behalf of parents at some of New York state’s neediest schools, seeking the release of $37 million the state owes these schools. :


PARENTS ASK NY APPEALS COURT TO RELEASE ILLEGALLY FROZEN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT FUNDS

Parents of students in three public schools are asking a New York appeals court to immediately release over $37 million in improvement grant funds frozen a year ago by Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The latest request comes in a lawsuit filed by the parents charging the Cuomo Administration’s budget director, Robert Mujica, with violating the law when he refused to release grants previously appropriated by the Legislature to boost programs and services in twenty, high need schools across the state. Education Law Center represents the plaintiff parents and students.

On December 28, 2016, Judge Kimberly O’Connor in Albany found that the budget director exceeded his legal authority in withholding the grants and ordered the funds be immediately released to the NY State Education Department for distribution to support vital programs in the schools.

Governor Cuomo decided to appeal Judge O’Connor’s ruling last month. Under New York law, the appeal triggers an automatic stay of the order to release the funds. The parents are now asking the appeals court to lift the stay, citing the irreparable harm to students if the schools are unable to implement the programs supported by the grant funds.

“If the grant money is not released pending this appeal, hundreds of children in New York’s neediest schools will lose educational opportunities that they cannot regain,” said Wendy Lecker, ELC senior attorney. “Education is cumulative, so when students are deprived of the support needed for learning that not only limits their achievement this year, but impedes progress as they move to subsequent grades.”

In affidavits filed in support of the parents’ request to the appeals court, administrators from three of the schools deprived of the grant funds – Hackett Middle School in Albany, Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, and JHS 80 Mosholu Parkway Middle School in the Bronx – detailed the essential programs they can no longer provide without the grants. These include extended learning time, social work and counseling, family outreach, academic intervention and professional development. The programs were implemented in 2015-16 with the first year of grant funds, but are on hold since the Governor decided to withhold the second year of funding.

Numerous programs have been held up by the Governor’s action:

Hackett Middle School discontinued extended instructional time to provide students with additional academic assistance and professional development for teachers.

Roosevelt High School cut a literacy/math coach and parent coordinator; discontinued professional development opportunities for teachers; and eliminated or sharply curtailed weekend and after-school extended learning time, college visits and CTE pathways.

JHS 80 Mosholu Parkway Middle School could not implement any of its proposed programs, including mentoring for at-risk students, social workers and guidance counselors for their extended day program, and professional development for teachers.

The appropriation for the grants will lapse in March 2018. If the funds are not released pending the appeal, the schools may lose access to the remainder of the funds, permanently depriving students of the opportunity to benefit from the programs and services the grants were intended to support.

Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24

Categories Accountability, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, New York, New York City

Mercedes Schneider: Why Did Trump Move HBCU Funding from US Ed to White House?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
7

Mercedes Schneider writes that someone at the White House transferred the funding and oversight of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the U.S. Department of Education to the White House.

When I first read this, I laughed out loud. First, because this happened the day after Betsy DeV pointed to HBCUs as a wonderful example of “choice,” when they were in fact created because so few institutions of higher education would admit black students. If anything, they were created because black students had no choice. They were a refuge for black students who wanted higher education and a path to a profession in a deeply racist society.

So, boom, the HCBUs are removed from the oversight of the clueless Ms. DeV. (By the way, if you watched the Senate confirmation hearings, you know that Ms. DeVos prefers to be called Mrs. DeVos.)

But my second reaction was bafflement. The White House is the home of the President and his family. It doesn’t fund or supervise programs. Presumably, the funding will follow the program. But there is no one on the White House staff who can answer a question about federal regulations or the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Does this mean the White House will take control of every program that one of its cabinet members insults? Will it manage the Great Lakes Restoration Project, whose budget will be cut by EPA de-administrator Scott Pruitt from $300 million to $10 million?

This is one of the nuttier developments in an era of the inexplicable.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Funding, Higher Education, Trump

Los Angeles Rocked by Another Charter School Scandal: State Awards Two New Schools to Ethically Challenged Charter Chain

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
8

The Los Angeles Times ran a first-page story about the latest charter school scandal, only a day before the school board election that will decide whether charter advocates will take control of the Los Angeles school board.

There will likely be a low voter turnout for this special election, and the question is turnout: Will enough parents vote to save their public schools, or will the profligate spending of the charter industry on propaganda and false attacks ads enable them to privatize the schools of half the students in the district? If the charter billionaires win, look for more privately run charters that produce incompetence, plunder, profit, and power for the elite.

The big story today is about Celerity Education Group, a charter chain that is thriving with public money. Its CEO is Vielka McFarlane.

In 2013, she earned $471,842, about 35% more than Michelle King, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, makes today.

McFarlane was prospering, and it showed. She wore Armani suits, ate at expensive restaurants and used a black car service.

Financial records obtained by The Times show that, as Celerity’s CEO, she paid for many of these expenses with a credit card belonging to her charter schools, which receive the bulk of their funding from the state.

It could not be determined whether McFarlane, 54, ever reimbursed the charter schools for her credit card purchases. Neither she nor a lawyer hired by Celerity responded to requests for comment about the transactions.

At a time when charter school advocates are determined to increase the number of such schools in L.A., the story of McFarlane and the Celerity schools offers a case study of the growing difficulty of regulating them. The task of spotting and stamping out risky financial practices in charters largely falls to the school district’s charter schools division, which employs about a dozen people dedicated to monitoring the schools’ fiscal health.

But as the number of L.A. charter schools has grown to more than 220, enrolling about 111,000 students, oversight has become a challenge for district officials, who are at once competitors and regulators.

In 2012, L.A. Unified’s charter schools division made a routine request for financial records from the Celerity Educational Group.

When the school network’s credit card statements arrived that fall, many of the transactions had been blacked out. One page was nearly all black.

Concerned school district staff grew even more alarmed when they received the full records, which showed that McFarlane had paid for lavish meals and out-of-state travel on the nonprofit’s credit card.

In one month in 2013, she had spent $914 at the Arroyo Chop House in Pasadena, $425 at The Lobster, a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica, and $355 at Paiche, a now-closed Peruvian restaurant in Marina del Rey.

From the arrival of the credit card statements until 2015, when it refused to allow Celerity to open two new schools, L.A. Unified took a gentle approach to the charter group’s unorthodox practices. It sent notices urging the organization to institute tighter financial controls, but continued to renew the schools’ charters when they came before the school board.

L.A. Unified officials referred Celerity’s credit card transactions to the district’s inspector general, who eventually opened an investigation into the group’s finances. Then, in late January, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and other agencies raided Celerity’s offices, as well as the headquarters of a related nonprofit, Celerity Global Development, and McFarlane’s home. The focus of the federal investigation is unclear, and the district’s inquiry is ongoing…

While the district investigated, Celerity went national, expanding into Ohio, Florida and Louisiana, where it operates four schools in addition to the seven it runs in Southern California. McFarlane launched Celerity Global Development, the parent company of the schools in her growing empire, and began offering herself as a consultant to other charter school leaders.

In 2015, McFarlane became the CEO of Celerity Global, an organization that took in millions of dollars in management fees from Celerity’s schools. But Global wasn’t just supporting the schools; it had the power to control Celerity Educational and could appoint and remove the school network’s board members.

The Celerity schools were often short on supplies, but McFarlane spent lavishly on herself and arrived at school in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

She told staff that education was a business. And she knew how to make money–for herself and her lavish tastes.

As the CEO of Celerity Educational Group — and now of Celerity Global — McFarlane steered hundreds of thousands of public dollars to several companies providing services to her schools. Those companies are registered to her, state records show, and list their addresses as either Celerity Educational’s or Global’s offices.

Celerity Educational Group’s check register for the 2015-16 school year shows payments totaling nearly $1 million to an information technology company called Attenture, a general contracting company called Celerity Contracting Services, and Celerity Development, a limited-liability corporation that buys properties and rents them to McFarlane’s charter schools.

The organization has also paid thousands of dollars to Orion International Academy, a private high school in Chino Hills that McFarlane founded in 2013, and where she is still the CEO.

The flow of money from the charter schools to Celerity Development is documented going back to 2011, when Celerity Educational Group signed a 10-year lease with the company, which at the time had only one owner — McFarlane. That made her, in effect, both landlord and tenant of the two sites in South L.A. on which she expanded Celerity Dyad Charter School.

McFarlane’s brother and son are on the company’s payroll. The financial entanglements among the many companies raise ethical and legal questions. Some quoted in the article suggest that there may be felonious behavior.

By late 2015, L.A. Unified officials decided they had seen enough.

Having concluded that Celerity’s financial issues had become too serious to tolerate, they recommended that the school board refuse the group’s request to open two new schools, and the board agreed. Celerity’s leaders appealed to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which could have intervened, but chose not to.

“This is effective ongoing oversight,” Jose Cole-Gutierrez, the director of L.A. Unified’s charter schools division, said in a recent interview.

Not that it stopped Celerity’s Southern California expansion.

State law allows charter schools that have been denied at the local level to appeal to the state. Last November, over the objections of L.A. Unified and the county, the State Board of Education voted to let Celerity keep growing.

More public money will flow Celerity’s way this fall when it opens two new L.A. charter schools.

Question: In light of the FBI investigations, in light of the LAUSD investigations, in light of the concerns about conflicts of interest and self-dealing, why did the California State Board of Education overrule the LAUSD recommendation and the L.A. County Office of Education? Why did the State Board of Education decide that this charter chain should open two more charters before the investigations are completed? Why aren’t the legal authorities intervening to protect citizens and the law?

If you live in Los Angeles, vote tomorrow.

Vote for either Carl Petersen or Lisa Alva.

Vote for Steve Zimmer.

Do not vote for anyone endorsed by the California Charter School Association, which defends corporations like Celerity. Taxpayers should not pay for Armani suits, chauffeur-driven limousines, or expensive meals. Citizens should support those who want to strengthen and improve the democratically controlled public schools of Los Angeles.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Steven Singer: The Way to Win Trump’s Support for Public Education

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2017 //
34

Steven Singer has dreamed up a way to win Trump’s support for education: Declare a war on ignorance!

https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/how-to-get-trump-to-support-public-education-a-military-proposal/

If Trump can be persuaded that education is part of national defense, he reasons, it will be amply funded.

“Here’s the plan: Trump wants to increase military spending by $54 billion. So we reclassify education as a branch of the military.

“Defense spending already tops $600 billion a year. Federal education spending is only about $70 billion.

“We could combine them and call it an increase in the military!

“I know what you’re thinking. If we do that, the armed forces are going to gobble up school funding. Not necessarily.

“They can’t spend all the money they get now! The waste, fraud and abuse in the military is legendary. Piles of money – literally piles of cash – simply go missing and no one knows where they went or is held responsible.

“But you’re right. We need a reason to prioritize some of that military spending for school kids.

“And there’s a simple solution: disaster capitalism.

“It’s the same way testing corporations and book publishers got the Bush and Obama administrations to invest in high stakes testing and Common Core. We simply make up a problem and then offer a solution that requires all this federal spending.

“I propose we start the following: A WAR ON IGNORANCE!

“Think of it.

“Our country is under attack from ignorance. We can’t let our children get left behind so we need to invest in the Education Forces. We need an army of teachers equipped with brand new military bases (formerly schools) that will protect us from foreign illiteracy. ISIS hates our science and math. Russia is jealous of our reading comprehension and historical acumen. China despises us for our creativity and scholarship.”

A cute satire, but it has already been done. In 1958, the Eisenhower administration used the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite the previous year to call for federal aid for math and science, foreign aid, and school construction. It was called the National Defense Education Act.

It always takes threats of a disaster to get education funding. In 1983, the National Commission of Excellence in Education warned that we were losing a war for global. economic supremacy because of a rising tide of mediocrity. But that didn’t produce new money, money, just new demands and standards.

In 2012, Joel Klein and Condaleeza Rice came up with a new twist on the disaster narrative. They claimed that public schools were so dreadful that they were a threat to national security. They said the way to save the nation was was with vouchers, charters, and the Common Core. For real!

Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?

Thomas Jefferson long ago declared that we should proclaim a “crusade against ignorance.”

Educated people will listen without false alarms. We need more of them.

Categories Funding

Most Expensive Test Prep Rally in History?

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2017 //
35

Eva Moskowitz has rented the Rockefeller Center Radio City Music Hall for her charter chain’s annual test-prep rally.

The charter network’s dance team will perform, school officials will present awards to students for academic excellence and Moskowitz will deliver a keynote speech.

Eva Moskowitz photo angers protesters outside her home
Moskowitz and Success Academy grabbed headlines in 2016 when the network purchased ground-floor classroom space in a luxury Midtown tower for nearly $68 million.

Success Academy reported $49 million in net assets in 2014 and received at least $35 million from hedge fund billionaires in 2016.

The privately run, publicly funded charter network operates 41 city schools with three more set to open this year.

Two years ago, the Success Academy charter chain spent $734,000 on a pep rally in Albany to seek more public funding for their well-funded schools.

At that time, Politico reported:

Success and Families for Excellent Schools, the pro-charter group that officially organized the rallies, have denied requests to disclose its spending on the events, but financial documents obtained by POLITICO New York indicate the network spent at least $734,000 on the 2015 rally.

The spending included $71,900 for the beanies and $62,795 for the T-shirts, according to receipts submitted to Success’s board of directors.

“T-shirts are a critical part of large-scale events,” said one receipt. “They help get the event’s message across, demonstrate mass participation, and provide the primary visual that captures the public’s attention.”

The network also spent $539,923 on busing and $59,375 on lunches for the rally.

The Albany rally represented just a small fraction of Success’s total spending on political advocacy and its public image, according to several internal financial documents.

Success Academy is such a financial powerhouse that one has to wonder why it is funded with public money when it can blow away millions of fabulous rentals and T-shirts and beanies. Real public schools need money for basics. They can’t afford to rent Radio City Music Hall or spend $71,900 on beanies.

Categories Funding, Harlem Success Academy
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