Archives for category: Privatization
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Alabama Education Association Sues Gulen School, Alleges Fraud

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2019 //
19

The Alabama Education Association has filed a lawsuit against a proposed charter school associated with the Gulen Movement.

The school, Woodland Prep, applied to open in rural Washington County. The state hired the National Alliance for “Public” Charter Schools to review charter applicants, and it rejected the proposal. The state charter commission approved it anyway.

Local people were outraged about the opening of a charter, which was sure to draw away money and students from the local public school. The founder, Sonar Tarim, planned to pay himself a large salary,

Despite the uproar, the charter was expected to open but it delayed its opening for a year after only 50 students showed up, while the school projected an enrollment of 260 students.

School employees in south Alabama today filed suit against a planned charter school, alleging the charter’s approval and contract was obtained through fraud and deception. The lawsuit also alleges the charter is illegally recruiting students from nearby Mississippi.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Arizona: Charter Founder Is Sued for Using School Funds for Gym Fees, Trip to Hawaii, Other Personal Expenses

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2019 //
16

 

This is a puzzling case. One of the founders of the Starshine Academy in Arizona is being sued to egregious misuse of the school’s money.

The school was closed in 2018 because of misuse of its money.

Now the founder is in court, where she is being sued to replenish the money she misused.

But there are no criminal charges for embezzling taxpayers’ money.

Ryan W. Anderson, an attorney representing the bankruptcy trustee suing McCarty, said this case is “one of the worst” cases of inappropriate use of school funds he’s seen.

“You don’t usually see allegations of misappropriation at this level,” he said. 

Bankruptcy court documents detail suspect purchases from 2016 until early 2018, which include $3,500 to a beach hotel in Hawaii and $500 to the “home of the largest quartz crystal in North America, and Master John Douglas, a spiritual healer and clairvoyant…”

This is not a fraud case, Anderson said. Instead, the suit claims McCarty inappropriately spent money for personal use while StarShine Academy plunged further into debt. 

When asked if she would pay the funds back, the defendant said the school owed her money.

I am reminded of the case in Pennsylvania where the founder of the state’s first virtual charter school was convicted of not paying taxes on millions of dollars that he embezzled and went to jail for evading taxes. But he never faced criminal charges for embezzlement.

On the other hand, the founder of a charter school in Los Angeles was convicted and sent to prison for 30 months for using her school’s funds for personal expenses.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Carol Burris: Unmasking a Major Charter Scam in Florida

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2019 //
6

Carol Burris wrote this article about the confluence of charter schools and greed in Florida. 

Just when you think you have heard it all, there is yet another story of cupidity associated with “nonprofit charter schools.”

The corruption never ends.

Burris begins:

The original mission of the federal Charter Schools Program of the U.S. Department of Education was to help new charter schools get on their feet by providing start-up help. The program began small during the Clinton administration when Congress awarded it $6 million to give to states and a handful of schools that directly applied.

The program, known as CSP, is now a behemoth with a budget approaching a half billion. Congress, bending in part to pressure by the charter lobby, added additional programs and funding over the years. Special funding streams now exist for a variety of charter-related services including two different CSP funding streams (one federal, another state) to support the building and renovation of charter schools.

There are some who now argue that part of the charter movement, amply funded by the federal government, has become a web of interconnected vested interests for whom real estate is the central focus.

The story of one of its recent grantees, a nonprofit organization known as Building Hope, provides a case in point.

It turns out to be very lucrative to build hope.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Florida, Fraud, Privatization

Will Huntsberry: A “Nonprofit” Charter Chain in California Reaps Huge Windfalls from Its Entwined Business Deals

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2019 //
4

Will Huntsberry is the investigative reporter who untangled the $50-$80 million scam that led to the indictment of eleven people associated with a virtual charter chain in California (“Inside the Charter School Empire Prosecutors Say Scammed California for $80 Million”). 

In his latest investigation, he details the complicated business dealings that are enriching the owners of a “nonprofit” chain of 60 charter schools across the state.

John Helgeson, a charter school executive, has a great deal for a public servant.

In 2007, he helped found Charter School Capital, a for-profit Oregon company that loans money to charter schools and buys school properties. In May 2015, he also started making $300,000 a year as an executive vice president at Learn4Life, a nonprofit network of more than 60 charter schools that serves roughly 45,000 students in California.

Charter School Capital lends money to Learn4Life schools and pockets the interest. While working at Learn4Life – which is funded almost entirely by California taxpayers – Helgeson maintained an ownership stake in Charter School Capital. In doing so, Helgeson discovered a way to collect not just one, but two paychecks from California’s cash-strapped public school system.

Learn4Life, which operates nine San Diego locations, serves a unique group of students. Many are at-risk and have dropped or failed out of traditional high schools. The schools are publicly funded and often located in strip-mall storefronts. Students usually come in to meet with a teacher once or twice a week and complete work packets.

Since 2014, Charter School Capital has loaned more than $6 million to two Learn4Life schools in San Diego alone. A charter school borrowing money from a for-profit lender is normal enough. To have a key employee who profits from both is not.

Just two months after Helgeson came on board at Learn4Life, the company increased its business with Charter School Capital. Charter School Capital purchased the 100,000 square-foot corporate headquarters of Learn4Life in July 2015 – making Charter School Capital the landlord of Learn4Life. Now Charter School Capital wasn’t just profiting on its loans to Learn4Life. It was also profiting on a lease. And so was Helgeson.

“It sounds like a classic conflict of interest, where someone is serving two masters,” said Jessica Levinson, former president of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission and a professor at Loyola Law School.

To learn more about these storefront charters where students meet a teacher once a week, read Carol Burris’s devastating report Charters and Consequences. 

She wrote:

Of the San Diego charter schools, over one-third promote independent learning, which means the student rarely,
if ever, has to interact face to face with a teacher or fellow students. One of the largest independent learning charters, The Charter High School of San Diego, had 756 students due to graduate in 2015. Only 32% actually made it. The Diego Valley Charter School, part of the mysterious Learn4Life chain, tells prospective students that they “are only required to be at their resource center for one appointment per week (from 1-3 hours), so it’s not like having a daily commute!” The Diego Valley cohort graduation rate in 2015 was 10.8%, with a dropout rate of 45%. The San Diego School District’sgraduation rate was 89%.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

North Carolina: Governor Cooper (D) Vetoes Expansion of Failing Virtual Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2019 //
4

 

Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed legislation to allow the state’s two low-performing virtual charters to expand enrollment. 

Republican legislators complained that Cooper was interfering with the family’s right to choose a failing school.

State lawmakers passed a bill in July lifting the enrollment cap on the state’s two virtual charter schools so that they could grow by 20% a year. Cooper announced Monday that he had rejected Senate Bill 392, citing the schools’ poor academic performance.

“Current law already allows the State Board of Education to lift the enrollment cap on virtual charter schools,” Cooper, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Both schools have been low performing, raising concern about the effectiveness of this pilot. Decisions on adding more students should remain with the Board so it can measure progress and make decisions that will provide the best education for students.”

In the 2018 election, Republicans lost their veto-proof majority.
Than you, Governor Cooper!
Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article233258417.html#storylink=cpy
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, North Carolina, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Denounces Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2019 //
36

African education leaders spoke out against privatization of their schools, which means Western corporations and taking control of their future. Privatization, they know, is the new colonialism. You can assume that a few well-chosen local leaders have been hired to argue on behalf of privatization.
Abidjan Principles recognised in resolution on privatisation of education and health by African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 
We are writing today to welcome the new landmark resolution by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights published yesterday that addresses the role of private actors in education and health.The resolution on ‘States’ obligation to regulate private actors involved in the provision of health and education services’ reaffirms that African States are ‘the duty bearers for the protection and fulfilment of economic, social and cultural rights, in particular the rights to health and education without discrimination, for which quality public services are essential’. It also expresses concerns at the current trend amongst bilateral donors and international institutions of putting ‘pressure on States Parties to privatize or facilitate access to private actors in their health and education sectors’ in disregard of these obligations.

In this context, the African Commission calls on States to ‘take appropriate policy, institutional and legislative measures to ensure respect, protection, promotion and realization of economic, social and cultural rights, in particular the right to health and education’ by adopting ‘legislative and policy frameworks regulating private actors in social service delivery’ and ensuring ‘that their involvement is in conformity with regional and international human rights standards’.

The resolution refers to and sets standards that are in line with the recently adopted Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education. The Commission notably calls on States to ‘consider carefully the risks for the realization of economic, social and cultural rights of public-private partnerships and ensure that any potential arrangements for public-private partnerships are in accordance with their substantive, procedural and operational human rights obligations.’

Salima Namusobya, the Executive Director of the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER), stated: ‘We have seen the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights hindered by the uncontrolled and unregulated development of private actors in social services delivery, such as health and education. Governments’ increasing reliance on private schools and clinics is facilitated by declining State investment in these essential public services and a blind belief in market solutions. The African Commission’s resolution is an important step towards ensuring greater accountability for States to deliver quality public services, as they are legally bound to do under national and international law.’

Research conducted globally and across the African continent in recent years has documented how the failure of States to adequately invest in public services, pro-market ideology and inadequate regulation of the private sector are leading to increasingly detrimental impacts on human rights: growing discrimination and segregation owing to unaffordable fees, lack of transparency and accountability, inequity, misuse of resources, and corporate control over services which are essential for the development of open and fair societies.

Human rights researchers, scholars, activists and bodies have provided a strong framework in the last years to analyse and respond to this phenomenon. In February 2019, over 50 eminent experts from around the world adopted in Côte d’Ivoire the Abidjan Principles on the right to education which unpack States’ existing human rights obligations in this context. In the field of health, in April 2019, ISER launched an analysis of private involvement in health using the human rights framework.

Sylvain Aubry, a Legal and Research Advisor at the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR), commented: ‘With this resolution, the African Commission is sending a powerful message to the world. It reaffirms the inalienable human rights requirements to provide quality public services and to regulate private actors, and the obligation of States to meet their human rights standards, such as the detailed guidelines provided in the Abidjan Principles. Human rights scholars, activists and communities across the continent have repeatedly said that a market-approach to social services is not compatible with human rights standards. We hope that African leaders will put the resolution in practice, and that it will lead the way for other regional and UN human rights mechanisms to follow suit.’

“I think the resolution is a welcome development and a bold step on the part of the African Commission given the weak or lack of regulation of the activities of private actors in many African countries. This resolution becomes an important standard that can be used to prevent or minimize the negative impacts of the activities of private actors in the enjoyment of socioeconomic rights. Given the impact of the activities on non state actors on access to water, it is crucial that future guidance from the African Commission on private actors addresses more than health or education.” Ebenezer Durojaye, Dullah Omar Institute.

The Initiative for Social and Economic Rights, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Dullah Omar Institute, and the Right to Education Initiative welcome this commitment of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to the realisation of economic, social and cultural rights and hopes that this will be followed by continuing work of the institution on these issues. The resolution as well as the interpretative guidance provided by the Abidjan Principles constitute a milestone in building and enforcing regulatory frameworks for private actors in social services and will strengthen government’s’ efforts to regulate private actors.

Documents:

Contacts:

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, International, Privatization

Peter Greene: Charter Schools and the Elephant in the Room

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2019 //
70

Peter Greene points out in this post that legislatures have a nasty habit of overlooking the central question about charter schools: their funding.

They pretend that they can run two publicly funded school systems without any additional cost.

They pretend that the funding for charters is not subtracted from the funding for public schools.

Public schools are getting hammered by the loss of public tax dollars that have been diverted from public school finances into charter and choice school accounts. Charters, having forgotten the era when they bragged that they could do more with less, complain that they are underfunded compared to public schools.

The problem here, as with several other choice-related issues, is in a false premise of modern school choice movement. That false premise is the assertion that we can fund multiple school districts for the same money we used to use to fund one single public system.

This is transparent baloney. When was the last time any school district said, “We are really strapped for funds. We had better open some new schools right away!” Never. Because everyone understands that operating multiple facilities with multiple staffs and multiple administrations and multiple overhead expenses– all that costs more than putting your operation under one roof.

But the choice pitch has always been some version of, “Your community can have twelve different schools with twelve different flavors of education in twelve different buildings with twelve different staffs– and it won’t cost you a nickel more than what you’re paying now!” This is carnival barker talk, the same kind of huckster pitch as “Why buy that used Kia? I’ll sell you a brand new Mercedes for the same price!”

Adding charters and choice increases educational costs in a community. Sometimes we’ve hid that by bringing in money from outside sources, like PTA bake sales to buy a public school office equipment, or pricey benefit dinners for charters, or increasing state and federal subsidies to help charters stay afloat.

But mostly school choice is the daylight savings time of education– if we just shuffle this money around in new and different ways, somehow there will be more of it.

This trick never works. And we talk all too rarely about why it never will.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Privatization

Detroit: Top Students At Charter School Face Punishment for Critical Graduation Speeches

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2019 //
10

 

At graduation, the top students at Universal Academy in Detroit spoke critically of the school, and now their diplomas arebeing withheld. 

The school might have been proud of their graduates for showing independence and critical thinking, but no.

A piece of certified mail arrived for Tuhfa Kasem this week. Kasem hoped the envelope contained her long-awaited high school diploma.

What she found instead seemed to her like a threat.

Kasem, one of the top students at Universal Academy, surprised school administrators by delivering a graduation speech in May that criticized the school. 

Nearly two months after her speech went viral, an official from Hamadeh Educational Services, the company that manages the school, wrote to Kasem and Zainab Altalaqani, who delivered a similar speech, that they had committed acts “of dishonesty and deceit.” The letters ask the students to meet with administrators, noting that they “have every right to bring an attorney…”

The students say they’re being targeted for putting a spotlight on problems at their school, which sits on the western edge of Detroit. In their speeches they argued that the school employs too many long-term substitutes, and raised concerns that students face punishment or retaliation if they speak up.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Students

Bernie Sanders Speaks to UTLA leadership Conference about His Agenda

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2019 //
37

Bernie Sanders recently was invited by the United Teachers of Los Angeles to speak to its Leadership Conference.

I was invited to make a tape introducing him. I did but you won’t see it or hear it. Technical problems. Just wait. You will hear Bernie loud and clear. He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Testing

Tom Ultican: Five Decades of Failed “MarketWorld”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2019 //
10

Tom Ultican has written many posts about the failure of privatizing public education. In this one, he takes the long view and concludes that what we see today is the culmination of fifty years of attempts to turn education into a business. 

He starts from two recent books: Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains and Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All.

These are good lens through which to understand the rightwing plutocratic attack on the public sector.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization
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