Teachers and parents have listed Nick Melvoin on Yelp as a business, and they are rating him. Nick is one of the leading charter advocates on the LAUSD school board. He was elected because of millions from the charter lobby and its billionaire allies.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/nick-melvoin-lausd-board-member-los-angeles
His ratings are terrible. If he were a teacher, he would be fired.
Do you want to understand why Pennsylvania’s charter school law needs to be reformed?
Let Steven Singer explain.
Singer teaches in Pennsylvania. In this post, he describes the dangers that privatization poses to his school district.
I work in a little suburban school district just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is slowly being destroyed by privatization.
Steel Valley Schools have a proud history.
We’re located (in part) in Homestead – the home of the historic steel strike of 1892.
But today it isn’t private security agents and industrial business magnates against whom we’re struggling.
It’s charter schools, voucher schools and the pro-corporate policies that enable them to pocket tax dollars meant to educate kids and then blame us for the shortfall.
Our middle school-high school complex is located at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill in our most impoverished neighborhood sits one of the Propel network of charter schools.
Our district is so poor we can’t even afford to bus our kids to school. So Propel tempts kids who don’t feel like making the long walk to our door.
Institutions like Propel are publicly funded but privately operated. That means they take our tax dollars but don’t have to be as accountable, transparent or sensible in how they spend them.
And like McDonalds, KFC or Walmart, they take in a lot of money.
Just three years ago, the Propel franchise siphoned away $3.5 million from our district annually. This year, they took $5 million, and next year they’re projected to get away with $6 million. That’s about 16% of our entire $37 million yearly budget.
Do we have a mass exodus of children from Steel Valley to the neighboring charter schools?
No.
Enrollment at Propel has stayed constant at about 260-270 students a year since 2015-16. It’s only the amount of money that we have to pay them that has increased.
The state funding formula is a mess. It gives charter schools almost the same amount per regular education student that my district spends but doesn’t require that all of that money actually be used to educate these children.
If you’re a charter school operator and you want to increase your salary, you can do that. Just make sure to cut student services an equal amount.
Want to buy a piece of property and pay yourself to lease it? Fine. Just take another slice of student funding.
Want to grab a handful of cash and put it in your briefcase, stuff it down your pants, hide it in your shoes? Go right ahead! It’s not like anyone’s actually looking over your shoulder. It’s not like your documents are routinely audited or you have to explain yourself at monthly school board meetings – all of which authentic public schools like mine have to do or else.
Read the rest of the post.
Pennsylvania’s largest charter school is the Chester Community Charter School. It is owned by Philadelphia lawyer Vehan Gureghian, who is a major donor to the Republican Party in the State. He was the biggest contributor to former Republican Governor Tom Corbett. What is surprising about his political donations is how little it takes to win the affection of the party in power. The Chester Community Charter School enrolls most of the elementary students in its district and even draws students from Philadelphia, despite the fact that it is a low-performing school on state tests. As you will see in one of the articles below, CCCS received a charter renewal through 2026, an extension not given to any other charter in the state.
The Keystone State Education Coalition posted this list of his political contributions.
Blogger commentary: In an effort to gain a better understanding of the dynamics in Harrisburg, from time to time over the years we have published “Follow the Money” charts using data from the PA Department of State’s Campaign Finance Reporting website:
https://www.campaignfinanceonline.pa.gov/Pages/CFReportSearch.aspx
We’ll leave it up to our readers to draw their own conclusions regarding how such contributions may or may not influence policymakers as they go about the people’s business in Harrisburg.
The chart below lists over $470,000 in campaign contributions made by Mr. and Mrs. Gureghian for PA state offices from 2013 through 2019.
Highlights include $205,000 to the House Republican Campaign Committee, $37,000 to the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, $30,000 to House Speaker Mike Turzai, $82,000 to Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman’s Build PA PAC, $85,000 to Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati and$16,000 to House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler.
While school district budgets, check registers and salaries are public information, charter school management companies like Gureghian’s CSMI are not required to provide any details on how they spend taxpayers dollars. CSMI runs Chester Community Charter School, the state’s largest brick and mortar charter. CSMI’s founder and CEO is Vahan H. Gureghian of Gladwyne, a lawyer, entrepreneur and major Republican donor –the largest individual contributor to former Gov. Tom Corbett. And though CSMI’s books are not public – the for-profit firm has never disclosed its profits and won’t discuss its management fee – running the school appears to be a lucrative business. State records show that Gureghian’s company collected nearly $17 million in taxpayer funds just in 2014-15, when only 2,900 students were enrolled.”
Over the years, Gureghian has spent well over $1 million on political contributions in Pennsylvania.
“As previously reported by the (Palm Beach) Daily News, the buyers in this week’s sale are Philadelphia attorney and businessman Vahan Gureghian and his attorney wife, Danielle. Two weeks ago, they sold their never-lived-in oceanfront mansion on 2 acres at 1071 N. Ocean Blvd. for more than $40 million. That 35,992-square-foot mansion had been on the market for about four years. ….Vahan Gureghian is involved in a number of businesses, he said, including management and consulting in the charter-school industry through a company he founded, CSMI Education Management. His wife provides legal counsel for his business ventures, he said.”
Exclusive: Palm Beach mansion lost by developer in bankruptcy sells for $30.275M
Palm Beach Daily news By Darrell Hofheinz July 12 Posted at 5:46 PM Updated at 6:32 PM
Mortgage-holder sells former home of Robert V. Matthews to couple who just sold a Palm Beach mansion for more than $40 million. As developer Robert V. Matthews awaits sentencing on felony conspiracy and money-laundering charges in Connecticut, the Palm Beach seaside mansion he completed in 2006 has changed hands for a recorded $30.275 million. The deed recorded today shows the house at 101 Casa Bendita was sold by Singer Island Tower Suite LLC, which took title in April via a bankruptcy judge’s order in Matthews’ Chapter 11 case. The seller is identified in court documents as an “assignee” of a Deutsche Bank affiliate owed $31 million from a mortgage it held on the property. Matthews moved out of the mansion with his wife, Mia, shortly after the bankruptcy court’s March 31 order. Matthews developed the long-troubled, never-finished — and since-sold — Palm House hotel-condominium at 160 Royal Palm Way, which is a focus of his federal criminal case in Connecticut. The six-bedroom, two-story residence on Casa Bendita has 15,849 square feet of living space, inside and out, on nearly an acre. With about 188 feet of beachfront, the property lies about a three-quarters of a mile north of Royal Palm way.
Following data is from the Pennsylvania Department of State Campaign Finance website: http://www.campaignfinance.state.pa.us/ContributionSearch.aspx
Selected State Level Campaign Contributions by Vahan Gureghian 2013 – 2019
| Recipient | Date | Amount |
| TURZAI, MIKE FRIENDS OF | 9/5/2013 | $10,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 3/18/2014 | $75,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 9/16/2014 | $27,500.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 10/31/2014 | $25,000.00 |
| TURZAI, MIKE LEADERSHIP FUND | 10/4/2014 | $10,000.00 |
| SENATE REP CAMPAIGN COM | 4/14/2015 | $25,000.00 |
| SENATE REP CAMPAIGN COM | 3/10/2015 | $12,727.91 |
| SCARNATI, JOSEPH FRIENDS OF | 10/31/2016 | $25,000.00 |
| SCARNATI, JOSEPH FRIENDS OF | 10/31/2016 | $25,000.00 |
| BUILD PA PAC | 6/15/2016 | $10,000.00 |
| CORMAN, JAKE FRIENDS OF | 10/26/2016 | $10,000.00 |
| SCARNATI, JOSEPH FRIENDS OF | 11/9/2017 | $10,000.00 |
| BUILD PA PAC | 6/22/2017 | $10,000.00 |
| CORMAN, JAKE FRIENDS OF | 10/16/2017 | $2,500.00 |
| FUND FOR A BETTER PENNSYLVANIA | 6/8/2017 | $5,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 8/29/2017 | $2,750.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 11/2/2017 | $3,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 11/2/2017 | $2,000.00 |
| CUTLER, BRYAN FRIENDS OF | 6/15/2018 | $5,000.00 |
| SCARNATI, JOSEPH FRIENDS OF | 10/31/2018 | $25,000.00 |
| TURZAI, MIKE FRIENDS OF | 9/12/2018 | $10,000.00 |
| BUILD PA PAC | 6/4/2018 | $25,000.00 |
| BUILD PA PAC | 7/25/2018 | $25,000.00 |
| BUILD PA PAC | 10/17/2018 | $10,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 4/24/2018 | $5,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 5/1/2018 | $20,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 7/20/2018 | $10,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 9/18/2018 | $10,000.00 |
| HOUSE REP CAMPAIGN COM 2004, INC | 10/26/2018 | $25,000.00 |
| SAYLOR, STAN CITIZENS FOR | 5/29/2018 | $5,000.00 |
| BUILD PA PAC | 3/29/2019 | $2,000.00 |
| CUTLER, BRYAN FRIENDS OF | 4/3/2019 | $1,000.00 |
| CUTLER, BRYAN FRIENDS OF | 5/28/2019 | $10,000.00 |
| $478,477.91 |
Mansion of embattled Palm Beach developer sells for $30M (Photos)
By Brian Bandell – Senior Reporter, South Florida Business Journal Jul 15, 2019, 12:31pm EDT Updated Jul 15, 2019, 12:44pm EDT
Philadelphia businessman Vahan H. Gureghian paid $30.275 million for the Palm Beach mansion that belonged to embattled Palm Beach developer Robert V. Matthews. Singer Island Tower Suite LLC, part of DB Private Wealth Mortgage, sold the nearly 16,000-square-foot home at 101 Casa Bendita to Gureghian. The lender seized the home in April under orders of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Matthew’s personal Chapter 11 filing. DB Private Wealth Mortgage, part of Deutsche Bank, had a $27.4 million loan on the property. The bank provided a $25.67 million mortgage to Gureghian to help him buy the property. Matthews built the oceanfront home on the 0.88-acre site in 2006. The mansion has six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, two half bathrooms and a pool. Gureghian, the founder and CEO of CSMI, which invests in the charter school industry, can immediately occupy the home.
“The decision means staff and parents at the state’s largest bricks-and-mortar charter – already slated to receive more than $55 million in taxpayer funds this school year – won’t have to worry about its fate for nearly a decade, even if its test scores continue to fall far short of state benchmarks. It also guarantees that CSMI LLC, a for-profit education management company that operates the K-8 school with 4,200 students, will receive millions of dollars in revenue for nine more years. Chester Community’s extension comes as school districts across the commonwealth and nation are wrestling with the growth of charter schools, more privatization in education and the impact on traditional public schools. It also renews lingering questions about the intersection of politics, government and schools.
Reprise Dec. 2017: How Chester Community Charter School got a 9-year deal
Inquirer by Martha Woodall, Posted: December 22, 2017
For years, charter school proponents have been trying to change Pennsylvania law so that operating agreement renewals could be extended from five years to 10. They haven’t succeeded in Harrisburg. But that didn’t deter Chester Community Charter School. One year into Chester Community’s latest five-year agreement, Peter R. Barsz, the court-appointed receiver who oversees the financially distressed Chester Upland School District and wields nearly all the powers of a school board, took the unprecedented step of extending the Delaware County school’s term for five more years to 2026. Barsz contends that the move was designed to protect Chester High School: In return, Chester Community, which already enrolls about 70 percent of the primary grade students in the struggling district, agreed not to open a high school.
“The Pennsylvania Department of Education is questioning the Chester Upland School District’s decision to renew its operating agreement with the state’s largest brick-and-mortar charter school through 2026 while the school was just one year into its current five-year term.”
Reprise April 2018: Judge, state question quick renewal for Chester charter school
Inquirer by Maddie Hanna, Posted: April 20, 2018
The Pennsylvania Department of Education is questioning the Chester Upland School District’s decision to renew its operating agreement with the state’s largest brick-and-mortar charter school through 2026 while the school was just one year into its current five-year term. “If charters are going to be renewed right out of the chute, … they’ve already been approved before they’ve even performed,” said James Flandreau, a lawyer for the department, at hearings this week ordered by a Delaware County Court judge. “Certainly, one year is way too early to evaluate any charter’s performance.” Kevin Kent, a lawyer for Chester Community Charter School, said the court-appointed receiver and school district could reevaluate the charter school at any point. “Nothing’s been compromised,” he said. Peter Barsz, the receiver for the financially distressed district, testified on Thursday that he had reviewed audits and school performance records and had support from the district’s school board before approving the renewal request last year that allowed the charter school to operate through 2026.
Three years ago, the Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale declared that the state’s charter law was the worst in the nation. The scandals and frauds were frequent, and many public school districts teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. But Republican Governor Tom Corbett and the Republican Legislature had no interest in reforming the charter law. A major charter owner was the single biggest contributor to Corbett’s re-election campaign and leader of his education transition team.
Democrat Josh Shapiro is now the state’s Attorney General, and the current Democratic Governor Tom Wolf announced that he intends to issue executive orders and propose legislation to reform the charter law to require accountability and transparency.
Unfortunately, the Legislature is still controlled by charter-friendly Republicans, who betray the families who elected them, whose children go to public schools.
Gov. Wolf announced a plan on Tuesday to improve financial accountability and academics among Pennsylvania’s charter schools, focusing on cyber charters and charter management companies, through executive actions and new legislation.
“Charter schools, like traditional public schools, should be high quality and they should be held accountable,” Wolf said. “But the laws currently don’t allow us to hold charter schools and their operators to the same standards as traditional public schools.”
Wolf called the state’s charter law “irresponsible” and “flawed.” He described the original intent of the law as “creating new and innovative educational opportunities” and said that some charter schools are doing this and doing it well.
“Unfortunately, this is not the case for all charter schools, especially among cyber charter schools,” he said.
On average, Pennsylvania charter schools have not improved student test scores in reading compared to public schools and have done worse in math, according to a study from Stanford University cited by Wolf. It also found that the academic situation was worse among the state’s cyber charters, which dramatically underperform compared to public schools.
The charter lobby was outraged! How dare the governor demand accountability! They think they should be unregulated and unaccountable. Their spokesperson said the governor’s efforts were nothing less than a “ blatant attack” on the charter industry. Never mind that the founder of the state’s biggest cyber charter is serving jail time for tax evasion on $8 million that were spent on personal luxuries. Never mind that the state’s cyber charters have never met academic standards.
Why reform failure and fraud?
Texas Public Radio describes Betsy Devos’s audacious plan to overwhelm San Antonio with charters created by two corporate chains: IDEA and KIPP.
Some of the new charters will open in middle-class areas with good public schools.
Apparently, DeVos just wants to torpedo public schools in a major Texas city.
Camille Phillips of TPR reports:
San Antonio’s largest charter school network is gearing up for a fast-paced expansion over the next three years. IDEA Public Schools plans to add 15 schools in Bexar County by 2022, doubling its local enrollment to nearly 24,000 students.
It is part of an ambitious larger plan by the Rio Grande Valley-based charter network plan to add 120 schools in Texas, Louisiana and Florida by 2024. IDEA has gotten a big boost to help make that plan happen: four federal grants in five years worth more than $211 million combined.
This year, the U.S. Department of Education awarded IDEA its largest grant yet: $117 million to expand classrooms and launch new charter schools.
“We cast a vision for our growth plan, and then it has to be paid for somehow. So this just gives us confidence that what we envision in terms of growth will actually become a reality,” IDEA regional director Rolando Posada said.
When Posada came to San Antonio seven years ago, he said he made it his goal to have an IDEA school less than 10 minutes away from every family.
“We realized that this was one of the biggest cities in the country with one of the biggest needs. And so my vision was to put a school everywhere on the map of the city of San Antonio,” he said….
Several of IDEA’s new schools will likely be located in the Northside school district, one of the region’s wealthier and higher performing districts.
Northside Superintendent Brian Woods said he finds it interesting that charter schools are no longer limiting themselves to areas where the traditional public schools are struggling.
“If you have an area that’s being served extremely well, why would you need to introduce a duplicative service?” Woods asked.
DeVos gave KIPP $88 million, and it too plans to expand its presence in Texas.
Mark Larson, chief external officer for KIPP Texas, said KIPP is creating a growth plan to determine where to expand next in the state, but “a sizeable chunk” of the $88 million awarded to the national KIPP Foundation is reserved for Texas.
“We have full intention to continue to grow and continue to grow in the San Antonio market,” Larson said.
DeVos gave $15 million to another charter network to open new schools in Texas.
One of our readers, who identifies herself as Chiara, recently explained why charters rely on federal funding to expand.
She says they know they would never be funded by popular vote as public schools are. The purpose of the federal funding is not only to help charter schools (like KIPP, funded by billionaires like the Waltons), but to bypass democracy.
She wrote:
“The second of 20 San Antonio IDEA Public School campuses is headed to the South Side and and is scheduled to open in fall 2019.
”The new campus — which has yet to be named — will be built on an eight-acre plot of land on the corner of South Flores Street and West Harding Boulevard.”
If IDEA had to go to the public and ask for facilities financing to build and operate each of 20 new public schools, the public would reject all or some of the new schools, because they would (rightfully) ask why they’re replicating a system they already have. There would be a long public debate on public investment. They would have to scale back plans or scrap them completely.
Charters know this, so they use federal and private financing. If they used local facilities funding they would have to get the consent of the public.
When ed reformers say they want local facilities funding remember that if they had local facilities funding the approval process would have to go thru the public, and the public would object to funding 20 new school buildings that replicate schools they already have. That would make it impossible to plunk down 20 new charter schools.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek posts this story about the rapidly escalating wealth divide: The Walton Family is the richest in the world. Its wealth grows by $4 million every hour of every day.
Twenty-five families in the world control $1.4 trillion.
In the magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s richest families, the Waltons are #1.
The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day.
That’s how quickly the fortune of the Waltons, the clan behind Walmart Inc., has been growing since last year’s Bloomberg ranking of the world’s richest families.
At that rate, their wealth would’ve expanded about $23,000 since you began reading this. A new Walmart associate in the U.S. would’ve made about 6 cents in that time, on the way to an $11 hourly minimum.
Even in this era of extreme wealth and brutal inequality, the contrast is jarring. The heirs of Sam Walton, Walmart’s notoriously frugal founder, are amassing wealth on a near-unprecedented scale — and they’re hardly alone.
The Walton fortune has swelled by $39 billion, to $191 billion, since topping the June 2018 ranking of the world’s richest families.
As educators know, the Waltons use a small part of their vast fortune to undermine public education and replace public schools with privately managed charter schools.
The least you can do is to avoid Walmart. Boycott Walmart. It may only cost them a few pennies, but do it.
In addition to their nefarious role as the single biggest founder of charters in the U.S., they are the biggest retailer of guns. Just another reason to boycott Walmart.
FYI, the founder of Walmart—Sam Walton—was a graduate of public schools. He graduated from David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri.
In this post, Mercedes Schneider tries to untangle the mess created by lack of oversight in all-charter New Orleans.
She begins:
In all-charter New Orleans, New Beginnings Schools Foundation (NBSF) operates three charter schools in New Orleans, one of which is John F. Kennedy High School.
Kennedy is in the throes of an astounding fraud which resulted in almost 50 percent of its Class of 2019 being found to not have actually met state requirements for graduation. As a result, 87 out of 177 students who were allowed to participate in a graduation ceremony and who thought that they would receive diplomas discovered that they would not be receiving diplomas after all. In an effort to mop up this mess, the NBSF board offered post-haste summer school as an option that 53 of the affected seniors participated in. Mind you, this last-minute, thrown-together clean up effort put students who had been offered scholarships at a critical disadvantage because official, complete, state-approved high school transcripts were not available in May 2019, when the students supposedly/legitimately graduated.
It is now August 2019; college/universty fall classes will soon begin, and the Kennedy seniors who participated in the alleged summer-school fixer still have not received copies of their transcripts. (For the extensive backstory and continuing saga, see here and here and here and here and here and here.)
On August 06, 2019, Nola.com reported on Kennedy student and parent efforts to require release of student transcripts via court order.
What is of particular importance in this all-charter arrangement is the fact that the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) (ironically renamed NOLA Public Schools) has no direct authority over those “public” schools to require the schools to release the transcripts. In this “portfolio model,” the school board is left out of any authority over ensuring school data integrity; the charter school deals directly with the state in delivering data, which is part of the problem since the state apparently had no controls in place to audit charter school grading practices.
The district was left out of Kennedy’s grading processes until a whistleblower brought the fraud to district attention, and then the district requested a state audit of all charter high school grading practices.
What comes through loud and clear is that any accountability depends of whistleblowers. The data mean nothing because they are generated by charter schools that are trying to create impressive records, even though fraudulent.
Earlier this year, Ohio’s infamous Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) went into bankruptcy rather than pay the state money owed for “ghost” students. ECOT has collected over $1 billion since its opening nearly 20 years ago. It had the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation. Its owner regularly gave campaign contributions to state officials, which shielded him from accountability until a state court ordered ECOT to pay back state money for students who never showed up.
ECOT is gone, so here comes a new virtual K12 Inc. charter school.
K12 is a for-profit management corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It has high attrition, low test scores, poor educational quality, but it is profitable.
Charter schools in Ohio are called “community schools,” which is a joke, since they suck money away from public schools, which are real community schools. Even corporate charter chains, like the 40 owned by entrepreneur Ron Packard (ex-Goldman Sachs), are called “community schools.” Ha-ha.
The Ohio Digital Learning School (ODLS), authorized by the Ohio Council of Community Schools, will serve students ages 16 to 21 in grades 9-12. It is tuition-free.
Behind the scenes, K12 Inc. is serving as an online management provider, supplying curriculum and the online platform that the school will use, along with other services. The company already is involved in two other virtual high school charters in the state, Ohio Virtual Academy (K-12) and Destinations Career Academy at OHVA (9-12).
Is there any scam too odious for Ohio?
Reed Hastings is the billionaire founder of Netflix. He is also one of the biggest funders of charters schools.
Peter Greene found the phrase that explains Hastings’ philosophy of education: “Stars in every position.”
Hastings has had his hand in many charter pies, from backing outfits like Rocketship and KIPP, as well as serving on the board of California Charter Academy, a chain that collapsed mid-year, leaving 6,000 students high and dry to helping shape charter law in California. Hastings has also had a hand in the launch NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment group that backs ed tech and other edupreneurs. So we’re not talking fringe player here.
So what do we discover in this quote?
First, the “pro sports team, not a kid’s recreation team” aspect. A pro sports teams picks and chooses its players. A public school does not. Nor can a public school “cut” students who don’t measure up.
“Stars in every position” is the same focus. In Hasting’s mind, that may apply only to the staff and administration of a school, but people who actually work in education know that part of what creates the atmosphere and culture of a school is, in fact, the students. Would a school that has nothing but star pupils be a great school? Probably. The job in public education is to educate everyone, but what we see repeatedly with the corporate charter movement is schools that “fire” students and their families.
This is educational gentrification. Gentrification says, “This neighborhood is problematic. But we’ll come in and replace the buildings with better buildings, the stores with better stores, the apartments with better apartments, and the residents with better residents.” Gentrification is about swapping out everything except the latitude and longitude of the neighborhood. In the end, you haven’t “improved” anything– you’ve replaced everything.
You don’t improve a school by replacing everything except the building (and maybe that as well)– you’ve just replaced it, and that’s no achievement.
I also wonder how far down the star system runs. Is everybody toiling away at minimum wage in the Netflix mail room a star? Or is Netflix just another tech firm like Amazon, built on the labor of anonymous overworked underpaid people who are beneath the notice of the big boys. And how could anyone possibly apply that approach to a school?
Greene notes that Netflix is about to be sorely tested as other big corporations enter its streaming space.
To my way of thinking, the starkest contradiction of Hastings’ worldview is implicit in one of its biggest worldwide hits, “Orange is the New Black,” a brutal, sexually explicit, 7-season show about women in prison. When the prison is privatized, the corporation takes over. The only thing that matters is the bottom line. The normally inhumane guards are replaced by even more vicious guards, the GED program is eliminated, the quality of the food deteriorates, and cost-cutting leads to an inmates’ death and a convict rebellion. Does Reed Hastings watch his own shows?
A judge in San Diego ordered two charter schools in the district to close in response to the school district’s complaint that they were operating without local authorization and could not be supervised. About 40,000 students attend Learn4Life centers statewide.
The Learn4Life charters are appealing the decision.
Judge David Danielsen on Monday granted a motion by San Diego Unified School District to close the two Learn4Life locations operating in the district’s boundaries: Diego Hills Central, a charter school authorized by Dehesa School District, and a resource center for San Diego Workforce Innovation High, a school authorized by Borrego Springs Unified School District. Neither of those schools have active locations in the districts that authorized them.
As Carol Burris reported in Charters and Consequences, the Learn4Life charters are storefronts where students meet a teacher once every 20 days. Their graduation rates are abysmal. Typically, they are authorized by small rural districts to operate in urban districts hundreds of miles away, where they operate without oversight. The authorizing district gets a commission for every student who enrolls.
Diane Ravitch's blog 