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Los Angeles: Charter School Founder Pleads Guilty to Felony Embezzlement Charge

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2018 //
32

The founder of a Los Angeles charter chain pleaded guilty to a felony count of misappropriating funds intended for the students at the schools.

The founder of Los Angeles charter school network Celerity Educational Group has agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to misappropriate and embezzle public funds, federal prosecutors said Friday.

The felony charge stems from Vielka McFarlane’s years-long habit of using her charter schools’ credit card to pay for expensive clothing, luxury hotel stays and first-class flights for her and her family.

According to the plea agreement made public Friday, she admitted to misspending about $2.5 million in public funds — all of which had been intended for her students.

This tally included taxpayer money meant for McFarlane’s California charter schools that she used to buy and renovate an office building in Columbus, Ohio, where she opened another charter school. At about $2.3 million, the purchase represented the bulk of the misspent funds, prosecutors said.

McFarlane, 56, who served as Celerity Educational Group’s chief executive until 2015, faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison. She is scheduled to appear in court Jan. 7.

“When anyone repurposes public school funds for self-serving reasons, students suffer,” said First Assistant U.S. Atty. Tracy L. Wilkison. “This case involving the former CEO of Celerity demonstrates our ongoing efforts to protect and safeguard public funds, and to hold accountable those who improperly use those funds for their own gain.”
Prosecutors chose to take a softer approach to her network of charter schools.

According to a non-prosecution agreement reached in June 2017, the government will not file charges against Celerity Educational Group, which has renamed itself ISANA Academies. The nonprofit organization continues to operate six charter schools in L.A. and Compton and has agreed to cooperate with the federal investigation.

Attorneys representing McFarlane and Celerity Educational Group did not respond to requests for comment.

It was Los Angeles Unified School District employees who first stumbled across McFarlane’s misuse of taxpayer dollars. In 2012, the district’s charter division made a routine request for financial records from Celerity.

When the charter network’s credit card statements arrived that fall, many of the transactions had been blacked out. Concerned 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 with the nonprofit’s credit card.

The school district’s inspector general opened an investigation and the federal government eventually stepped in. Nearly two years ago, federal agents raided Celerity’s offices and McFarlane’s home, confiscating computers and copying records.
In her plea agreement, McFarlane admitted that she used public funds meant for her L.A.-area charter schools to pay for personal expenses and to start the Ohio charter school. The document details how, beginning in 2009 — five years after she founded the first Celerity charter — she began to treat her organization’s credit card as if it was her own.

Among the items she paid for with public funds were $3,347 worth of goods from luxury brand Salvatore Ferragamo in Beverly Hills, $7,742 for plane tickets to Washington, D.C., for President Obama’s second inauguration, and $9,299 for two customized recumbent bicycles for her and her spouse. There were flights to Miami and Panama and stays at high-end hotels…

She created a web of for-profit companies that did business with her charter schools. She also founded another nonprofit group, Celerity Global Development, which was ostensibly providing office services. The charter schools gave Global between 10% and 12% of their revenue for bookkeeping, payroll and other tasks.

She often traveled with board members and their spouses, whose expenses were also charged to the taxpayers.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Los Angeles, Privatization

Los Angeles: UTLA Calls for Halt to Charter Expansion

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
2

Just released by the United Teachers of Los Angeles:

MEDIA ADVISORY
Contact: Anna Bakalis
213-305-9654

UTLA calls for immediate cap on charter school growth in Los Angeles and to invest in existing schools

UTLA is calling on civic leaders to place an immediate cap on charter school growth within the Los Angeles Unified School District to address the unregulated expansion of charter operators and its impact on the sustainability of existing district and charter schools.

“The need for our students to have a stable public education system in Los Angeles must be a priority over the aggressive expansion of charter school growth, and that means an immediate halt to opening new charter schools,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said.

Los Angeles is home to 224 charter schools – schools that are funded by public dollars but privately managed — more than any other city in the country. Charter schools in LAUSD have grown more than 250% over the past 10 years and siphon more than $600 million from our existing public schools. That explosive growth has happened without oversight or analysis of the educational and economic impact on the community. Schools are being built without simple questions being answered: Does this neighborhood need another school? Can the land be used for something more impactful for the community, such as housing or green space? In addition, Opening new schools has duplicative administrative costs, facility costs, and so on, further reducing money available for students’ needs.

UTLA represents educators who work in district and in charter schools, and the call for a cap was developed in consultation with the UTLA Charter Educator Standing Committee.

“The lack of oversight means an oversaturation of new schools opening in certain areas, and existing schools suffer underenrollment as a result,” said Carlos Monroy Jr., a Resources Specialist Program teacher at El Camino Real Charter High School in the San Fernando Valley. “We simply cannot continue to have the unregulated growth of new charter schools at the expense of our current students. It is not sustainable for existing district schools or charter schools alike. We need to prioritize investing in the schools we have now.”

Declining student enrollment impacts district and charter schools

The unregulated growth of charters has occurred while shifting demographics and the high cost of housing has meant that overall student enrollment in LAUSD is declining, leaving schools to fight for resources and students. In 2002-2003, the total student enrollment in both district and charter schools in the LAUSD geographic area was 746,831. In 2018-2019, estimated total enrollment has dropped to 609,756—despite the fact there are 200 more charter schools now than in 2002-2003.

This summer, a PUC charter school in Eagle Rock closed its doors because of underenrollment on the fourth day of school, without any notice to students and parents. When a charter school closes during the academic year—due to financial insolvency, misconduct, or low enrollment—students’ academics and families’ lives are severely disrupted.

Unchecked charter school growth hits low-income communities facing gentrification especially hard.

“My school is located in Lincoln Heights, and some of our students’ families are struggling with the harsh realities of housing costs rising substantially,” says Sylvia Cabrera, a charter school teacher at Alliance College-Ready Middle Academy #5. “It seems like every week we get an email notifying us of another student unenrolling because their family is being displaced. Between more charter schools being authorized and the impact of gentrification, we are finding it more and more difficult to meet our enrollment capacity with each passing year as the student population in the community declines.”

Expansion pulls resources from public school system

University of Oregon Professor Gordon Lafer, author of “Breaking Point: The High Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts,” confirms that the expansion of charter schools pulls significant resources from the public school system. District and charter school funding is largely determined by the number of students enrolled at a school, and that per-pupil funding covers much more than the direct costs of educating a particular student. For every student who leaves a public school, there is revenue lost that is greater than the cost of that student. That translates into cuts in schools to libraries, special education, art and music classes, and other essential student programs

Charter schools drift from original mission of innovation

The mission of many charter schools has drifted from teacher-driven laboratories meant to inform and improve public school education to the establishment of a competing system of corporate-managed schools that too often deprive parents and educators of any real input. These forces, combined with the challenge of inadequate funding, are undermining the educational opportunities of our LA student community and the long-term sustainability of the public school district as an essential civic institution.

Charter industry prioritizes expansion over student needs

The proliferation of charter schools is driven by the California Charter Schools Association; its wealthy benefactors, such as Eli Broad; and the LAUSD School Board members it elects through massive political donations. CCSA’s political support has secured the group and like-minded organizations exclusive access to elected board members. Through a public records request, the news organization ChalkBeat obtained a lengthy digest of emails between former CCSA CEO Myrna Castrejón, her staff, and school board members Monica Garcia and Nick Melvoin.

LAUSD Supt. Austin Beutner, a former Wall Street banker with no educational experience, is developing a plan to break LAUSD into 32 networks and build a so-called portfolio district—a Wall Street model that has closed neighborhood schools, turned over more schools to unaccountable private operators, increased segregation, and undermined learning conditions in other cities.

“LAUSD has been a target of unregulated charter expansion by groups like CCSA and wealthy privatizers Eli Broad, who see public education as an industry to be broken up rather than reinvested in and supported,” Caputo-Pearl said. “We call on our civic leaders to finally address the rampant expansion of charter operators at the expense of our current schools.”

Watch the press conference live here.

UTLA, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union local, is proud to represent more than 35,000 teachers and health & human services professionals in district and charter schools in LAUSD.

—
Anna Bakalis
UTLA Communications Director
(213) 305-9654 (c)
(213) 368-6247 (o)
Abakalis@UTLA.net
http://www.UTLA.net
http://www.WeArePublicSchools.org
_________________________________________

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization

New York City Gives Consulting Contract to Ousted Boston Superintendent Tommy Chang

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
15

Tommy Chang was a top assistant to John Deasy in Los Angeles. After Deasy was pushed out in Los Angeles following a billion-dollar iPad bungle, Chang landed a job as superintendent of schools in Boston.

Things did not go well there, and Chang was abruptly pushed out by Mayor Walsh with two years left on his contract.

Now Chang has a job consulting for the New York City Department of Education, where he will be paid $10,000 “to produce a report on the ongoing reorganization of instructional divisions in the agency.”

Apparently there is no one in the vast New York City Department of Education who knows how to organize the instructional divisions.

Being a Broadie means having lifetime protection. When this gig runs out, Eli will find something else for him, maybe another district in need of transformation and closing the gap.

Categories Accountability, Boston, Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, New York City

Bill Raden from Los Angeles: Buckle Your Seat Belts, Strike Ahead!

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
3

Bill Raden, education writer for Capital & Main in California, writes about the looming teachers’ strike in Los Angeles.

Fasten your seatbelts Los Angeles, it’s going to be a bumpy strike. That was the subtext to a tumultuous week that saw over 50,000 L.A. teachers, students and families take to the streets Saturday to support a union faced with budgetary saber-rattling by Los Angeles Unified, and that climaxed on Wednesday with United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl setting a January 10 walkout date — unless Los Angeles Unified negotiators meet key union demands for investments in the district’s highest-poverty students.

Caputo-Pearl’s announcement came a day after L.A. Unified superintendent Austin Beutner erroneously claimed that the union had accepted the district’s six percent pay raise offer, as recommended in Tuesday’s report by state-appointed fact-finders who also urged LAUSD to kick in the modest equivalent of a one to three percent salary increase for new hires to reduce class sizes, and for both sides to work together to lobby Sacramento for more state funding.

Fact-finding panel chairman David A. Weinberg mostly punted on 19 of 21 unresolved equity demands that form the heart of what UTLA has framed as a fight to save L.A.’s “civic institution of public education.” The union won some minor points, like the allowing of teacher input on charter co-locations, and on scrapping a district privilege to unilaterally lift class size caps during fiscal crunches. But by accepting at face value LAUSD’s latest claims of imminent bankruptcy, Weinberg left unanswered a critical question: How could LAUSD annually project catastrophic, three-year deficits and still have its unrestricted cash reserves balloon from $500 million to nearly $2 billion during the same five-year period?

“We have watched underfunding and actions of privatizers undermine our students and our schools for too long. No more,” Caputo-Pearl warned on Wednesday.

Categories Accountability, Class size, Funding, Los Angeles, Resistance, Teachers, Union

Eric Blanc: The Blue State Teachers’ Revolt Is On! L.A. Teachers Plan to Strike on January 10!

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
9

Eric Blanc has covered the teacher revolts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and every other state where teachers said “Enough is enough.”

He writes for Jacobin.

Now, he says, the Blue State Teachers’ Revolt is on!

It’s official: Los Angeles teachers just announced they are going to strike on January 10. They’re challenging not just public education privatizers, but the Democratic Party establishment.

After months of contract negotiations, Los Angeles teachers have announced that, unless the LA school district leadership gives a dramatic set of last-minute concessions, they will begin a strike on January 10. The stakes of the struggle could hardly be higher. In the second-largest school district in the country, educators have thrown down the gauntlet against the forces of big business, gentrification, and privatization — including those within the Democratic Party.

The teachers’ revolt sparked by West Virginia has now spread to the “bluest” state of them all, California. LA’s schools show why the crisis of public education can’t be blamed only on Republicans. Huge class sizes, low per-pupil funding, rampant charter schools, over-testing, a lack of counselors, nurses, and librarians — these are the fruit of years of Democratic rule in the city and the state capitol.

“Corporate Democrats are getting money from the same billionaires and corporations as the Republicans,” explains United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Secretary Arlene Inouye, “so essentially all public educators in this country are targets.” In Los Angeles, deep-pocketed pro-charter ideologues recently installed Austin Beutner — a billionaire investment banker with zero educational experience — as superintendent. Their plan is straightforward: drastically downsize the school district to push students into privately run charter schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization, Teachers, Testing, Unions

Los Angeles: Network for Public Education Action Fund Endorses Jackie Goldberg for School Board

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
4

The Network for Public Education Action Fund is delighted to endorse Jackie Goldberg for election to the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board.

Jackie is the ideal candidate to replace convicted felon and charter school founder Ref Rodriguez.

She has experience, knowledge, integrity, and wisdom.

The Network for Public Education Action has endorsed Jackie Goldberg for the District 5 seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education.

Jackie has a long history as a public servant with a passionate voice in defense of public education. She previously served on the LAUSD board from 1983 to 1991, and the Los Angeles City Council from 1993-2000. She went on to serve in the California State Assembly from 2000-2006, where she chaired the Assembly Education Committee for several years.

With her decades of experience, Jackie has concluded that “the billionaires have stacked the deck against district public schools.” The 2017 LAUSD school board election was the most expensive in history, with almost $10,000,000 in outside spending coming from pro-charter groups.

By winning this election Jackie hopes to prevent a 4 to 7 majority controlled by the board members elected with pro-charter money.

Jackie has remained active with grassroots activism as a founding member of TEAch (Transparency, Equity, and Accountability for Charters), a group dedicated to increasing public accountability within the charter sector. She has also remained active as a community watchdog of the LAUSD board, delivering powerful public comment at meetings.

Jackie will be up against an avalanche of money in this election. The board and staff of NPE Action urge you to vote for Jackie Goldberg in the primary election on March 5, 2019. It will be up to us to show that people power can triumph over the billionaire’s agenda for LAUSD.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund

California: Teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland Preparing for Confrontation

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2018 //
9

Bill Raden of Capital & Main reports on potential strike developments in Los Angeles and Oakland.

Two California teachers unions, which are currently deadlocked in separate contract talks with their respective school districts, are on the verge of launching the West Coast’s biggest teacher walkout since 1989. What happens next will decide far more than fair wages for career educators. At stake are broader principles of equity, expressed as contract demands for smaller class sizes and less testing, the addition of sufficient health and social services staff, and an investment in community schooling and fair funding — aimed at restoring public education as a public good for all Californians, rather than as a private interest granted to the lucky few…

Meanwhile, an estimated 90 Oakland Unified teachers skipped classes December 10 in a one-day wildcat sickout to protest some of the state’s lowest teacher pay — against a backdrop of California’s fast-rising living costs. But a more fundamental grievance is with the $60 million that Oakland Unified must cut over the next two years. It has led superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell to adopt a draconian district downsizing plan that could close up to 24 mostly low-income neighborhood public schools and coordinate the remainder of the 87-campus district with the city’s 34 charters on things like enrollment and transportation. The strategy has been likened to a “portfolio model,” the controversial template for privatized district governance that favors charter expansion at the expense of traditional public schools.

It also bears an uncanny resemblance to “Re-Imagine LAUSD,” the prematurely leaked but still mostly secret pet portfolio plan of L.A. Unified supe Austin Beutner — just one of the issues behind the takeover by 50 placard-carrying protesters at the L.A. school board meeting last Tuesday. Students, parents and teachers seized the floor and unfurled a banner of union-aligned demands: an end to random student searches; reductions in class sizes and testing; and the hiring of more health workers, community schools and per-pupil funding. For good measure, they also chanted down attempts by board president Mónica Garcia to restore order, a caterwaul that eventually drove Beutner and his board allies from the room…

If November’s blue wave means the tide has indeed turned against California’s market-driven ed reformers, grassroots activists aren’t resting on any laurels. That’s why they are circulating a petition launched by the Oakland Public Education Network (OPEN), asking Governor-elect Gavin Newsom to abide by four seemingly common sense hiring principles:

*No conflicts of business interests

*Education-related appointments must strictly mirror California’s 90/10 proportion of public-to-charter-school enrollments

*No more Betsy DeVoses guarding the regulatory henhouse (i.e., appoint only seasoned, public school-committed educators to the Advisory Commission on Charter Schools)

*Genuinely partner with the public schools community to uproot what OPEN considers the predatory incentives and equity barriers that it says are the legacy of California’s 25-year-long ed reform wrong turn.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Oakland, Privatization, Resistance, Teachers, Unions

UTLA: 50,000 Marched for Better Funded Schools!

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2018 //
7

More than 50,000 March for Public Education in LA


LOS ANGELES — In a historic march, tens of thousands of students, parents, educators and community members marched through the streets of Los Angeles today to demand a reinvestment in public education and that the Los Angeles Unified School District stop hoarding the record-shattering $1.9 billion in reserves and use it immediately on our students, our schools and our classrooms.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl told the massive, picket-holding and banner-waving crowd that if there is no settlement by next month, “we will strike in January.”

“If we are forced to strike, it will be to defend our schools; but it will also be because we think our kids deserve more and we deserve more, because we dare to have high expectations,” Caputo-Pearl said to the cheering crowd. “If we strike, it is all of our strike. When we win, it is all of our victory. Are we going to win for our schools? Are we going to win for our kids?”

Then tens of thousands people began the march, chanting throughout the streets of downtown, bringing the momentum and energy of the national teacher rebellion to the doorstep of the nation’s second-largest school district.

The massive demonstration then walked from City Hall, chanting as they marched side by side to demand Supt. Austin Beutner and LAUSD fulfill the promise and hope of a quality public education for all, not just some. The march ended in front of the Broad Museum tohighlight the destructive role billionaires like Eli Broad play in draining money from our public schools and funding privatization schemes like the portfolio model.

“Eli Broad fought against school funding measures and he has funded the charter industry to undermine neighborhood public schools,” Caputo-Pearl said. “Broad has made LA a national experiment in privatization. Who’s ready to turn the tables on that? Who’s ready to fight for the nurses our students need? Who’s ready to fight for the counselors our students need? Who’s ready to fight for the class sizes our students need?”

United Teachers Los Angeles has been in contract negotiations with LAUSD for more than 18 months. In August, 98 percent of union members voted to authorize a strike. Negotiations are near the end of the fact-finding stage, after which the school district can impose its last, best, and final proposal and UTLA members can strike.

With class sizes that are too high and not enough resources in their classrooms and attacks to their profession, teachers are fighting for a profound reinvestment in Los Angeles schools. LAUSD has yet to make any meaningful progress on UTLA’s contract demands, including the ones that don’t cost money or would even save money, such as stopping overtesting and giving parents and educators a voice in school budgets.

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Our address is:
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Categories Broad Foundation, Education Industry, Los Angeles

Los Angeles: Teachers March Was a Great Success!

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2018 //
5

Here is the first report on the thousands of teachers who marched today in Los Angeles.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-teachers-march-20181215-story.html

More funding for schools! Not privatization!

LAUSD Teachers March in DTLA as Union Moves Closer to Calling First Strike in Nearly 30 Years

Categories Los Angeles, Supporting public schools, Teachers

I Support the UTLA March for Education Tomorrow at 10 AM PST!

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2018 //
7

Teachers in Los Angeles will be marching on Saturday December 15 at 10 a.m. PST at Grant Park in downtown Los Angeles.

Teachers are negotiating with LAUSD and its banker superintendent for a fair contract that includes reduced class sizes; improving school safety by adding more school counselors and social workers. Fully funding schools so that all schools have librarians and other support staff. Less testing and more teaching. Ending the drain of privatization, which removes $600 million annually from the public schools.

UTLA is prepared to strike if necessary.

Please go to Twitter to see the gorgeous banners that L.A. teachers have made in case there is a strike. Teachers have the best artwork and the best songs.

I stand with UTLA and the teachers of Los Angeles.

To understand why teachers are ready to go out on strike, please read this article about “the looting of public education in Los Angeles by the 1% and their corporate shills.”

It begins:

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When the pro-charter LAUSD school board majority appointed investment banker Austin Beutner to superintendent earlier this year it effectively declared war on schools of color and communities of color. Nationwide, public schools have been gutted by the rising tide of charterization, privatization, high stakes testing, union-busting, civil rights rollbacks engineered by the Trump/DeVos Department of Education. Teacher walkouts have reverberated across the country as states slash public education funding and schools re-segregate to pre-Brown v. Board levels.

The cynical appointment of the grossly underqualified Beutner (a one percenter white male with no prior public school teaching or administrative experience) signified that the board was essentially handing over the District to these forces on a silver platter in a swaggering f-you to parents, teachers, and students who’ve seen their schools reduced to detention centers.

Resist!

Categories Accountability, Class size, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Testing, Unions
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