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Bill Phillis: The Gulen Charters in Ohio

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
18

Fethullah Gulen is in the news. General Michael Flynn had a deal with Turkey to kidnap and return him to Turkey. It is in the news daily.

But journalists describe Gulen as a simple Muslim cleric in exile. They never mention his $500 million a year empire of charter schools. Is he protected by the CIA? Does anyone care that a Turkish imam now controls nearly 200 “public” schools? Do his Turkish teachers teach civics? Do they understand the U.S. Constitution?

Do journalists ever google his name?

Just wondering.

Bill Phillis is a retired deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio and an expert on school finance.

He is a champion of public schools. He belongs on the honor roll of this blog for his tireless efforts to ward off privatization and support public schools.

In this post, he reports on the current status of the Gulen Charter Schools, the schools associated with a Muslim cleric who lives in seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. His organization has established some 200 charter schools, which are organized in chains with different names. They usually deny being Gulen schools but can be recognized by the number of Turkish board members and Turkish teachers.

Bill Phillis writes:

Imam Fethullah Gulen’s charter school footprint in Ohio

By the numbers:
· 17 charters (down from 19)
· 6,500 enrollment
· $50,000,000 annual revenue
· 833 H-1B visa applications 2001-2016
· 38 persons serving on 85 board positions
· 84% of the board members are of Turkish descent

Buckeye Community Hope Foundation sponsors nine of the 17 Gulen charters. The ESC of Lake Erie West sponsors the rest. The charters are located in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Lorain, Toledo and Youngstown.

Gulenists started two charters in 2000 and added charters as follow:
· 6 in 2005
· 2 in 2007
· 1 in 2008
· 2 in 2009
· 2 in 2010
· 2 in 2011

In 2002, Concept Schools was formed to manage Gulen charters. In 2003, Breeze Inc. was established to serve as a landlord for Ohio Gulen charters. Breeze, since 2005, has collected rent in the amount of three times the purchase price of the property one school uses.

Does this footprint concern any state official, charter school sponsor? The Gulen operation has taken advantage of Ohio’s severely flawed charter law.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, Honor Roll, Privatization

Texas: Superintendent Says, “We Need to Fund Our Public Schools. Stop Diverting Money to Charters!”

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
11

For some reason, Texas is now being besieged by charter operators, who see good pickings there and who want to act fast before another blue wave washes away the supporters of school choice, as the November blue wave washed away supporters of vouchers. The Texas legislature cut deeply into school funding after the 2008 recession and never restored what it cut. The legislature just doesn’t seem to care about funding public school, only charter and (someday) vouchers, even though 90% of the state’s children are in public schools. Someone should ask the Legislature about what they have in mind for the generation now in school. Do they want them to be productive citizens? Do they want them to be creators, innovators, doctors, scientists, artists, and engineers? Or do they expect those millions of children to be unskilled laborers?

Lorena Garcia is a superintendent in a small district in the Rio Grande Valley. She tells it like it is. She has the courage to stand up to the charter billionaires.

Lorena Garcia, assistant superintendent for human resources and support services at Mission CISD, sparked a lively debate over the level of support state lawmakers are providing charter schools.

Garcia brought up the subject of charters in a Q&A about public school finance at a luncheon held at the Cimarron Club in Mission.

“There does not seem to be much support for public education by the legislature. In addition to that there is a lot of talk about support for vouchers and private schools,” Garcia said, after hearing a presentation on public school finance.

“The accountability that these charter entities have is a lot lower than the high standards that public schools have to achieve. So, that is going to cut into that pie of funding that is available to public schools.”

Chandra Kring Villanueva, program director for economic opportunity at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, was one of the speakers at the luncheon. She welcomed Garcia’s comments.

“Charter schools and how they are funded is a huge concern for us because it really is inefficient to be running two parallel education systems,” Villanueva said.

“One of the things that we are seeing is that the growth in recaptured funding is almost the exact amount as we are spending for the charter system. So, a lot of us education advocates are really monitoring how the things are trending together. Recapture and charter are tied in a lot of different ways.”

Recaptured money is funding that a public school returns to the State of Texas. Those that have to do this, as part of the so-called Robin Hood equalized funding system, are deemed property-rich.

“Recapture is based on your wealth per student. So, if you are losing students to a charter school, it makes your wealth per student grow. That is one of the only reasons why Houston ISD fell into recapture. Because of their extremely high charter population. If those charter students were actually enrolled in Houston ISD, they would have gotten twice as much money from the state as their recapture payment was,” Villanueva said.

“So, there is a lot of concern that the legislature is basically using recapture to fuel the growth of charter schools without having to put any more dollars into it. Which in essence means our property tax dollars are going to these charter schools.”

Villanueva made the case that, in essence, local property tax dollars are going to charter schools. However, she said, local taxpayers are unable to vote for a charter’s board of directors, have no say on where they are located, nor when and where they build their campuses.

“So, there are some huge concerns around how charters are funded and the impact on schools.”

Villanueva claimed that when charters are taken out of the equation, the level of state funding for public education drops from 38 percent to 32 percent, noting that charter schools are 100 percent state-funded.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Texas

Oklahoma: Businessman Splits Rural Town by Opening a Charter to Compete with Public School

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
7

I read this story with a growing sense of disgust. A businessman in Oklahoma opened a charter school in a small town to focus on career readiness and job training, functions already offered by the local public school.

This man, with no experience in education, lured 29 students to share his vision and abandon the community public school. He did so over the objections of the local school district.

Within the walls of the Academy of Seminole, eight rented rooms in a community college library, it can be hard to see why the little school has kicked up so much dust in this former oil boomtown, population 7,300. On a recent Friday, businessman and school founder Paul Campbell addressed the students, just 29 freshmen and sophomores, to tell them what it’s like to run a business.
What he dislikes? Making small talk at political events and “firing people.” What he enjoys? “I love doing something that no one thinks can be done. That’s why we’re sitting in this school.”

Campbell said the “thesis” of the school is that “on day one of your ninth grade, literally hour one … we start talking about what you want to do with your life.” Speakers have included a health care CEO, professional dancers and a speech pathologist. Academy students mapped out various careers they might pursue, and spent their first semester doing a research project on their chosen path. That focus on jobs is a direction in which more schools are headed, amid rising concern that young people are graduating unprepared for the workforce, especially in rural towns like this one. Last year Oklahoma joined a growing list of states requiring students to develop a career plan in order to graduate. And, in a sense, Campbell’s can-do, pro-business attitude fits in with the ethos of this working class, Trump-supporting town.

But while Campbell may dislike politicking, he’s had to do a lot of it to get his school off the ground and keep it going in the face of a chorus of concern from local residents. That’s because the Academy of Seminole is a rural charter school; its establishment is part of a small movement to bring this taxpayer-funded version of school choice to more remote corners of the country.

How much money will the local district lose to this charter?Will the public school lose a teacher or two? Will class sizes increase?

Oklahoma was singled out by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities as the state where general per-student funding had fallen more than any other state—by 28.2% from 2008-2018.

Because of low funding, many districts in Oklahoma offer only four days a week of school.

And we are supposed to be impressed that some egotistical businessman in Seminole, Oklahoma, has opened a charter school for 29 students?

Mike Petrilli, writing from the comfort of his think-tank perch in D.C., is delighted about the opening of a charter in a town of less than 8,000 people, where the school budget is tight. “More power to him,” says Mike.

But others say residents are right to worry about the sprouting of charters in their hometowns. Schools often play an integral role in the life of a small community, offering a central meeting place, social services and additional support. If a charter grew popular enough to draw hundreds of kids and capture those students’ share of funding allocated by the state, it could erode not just schools but the fabric of communities. Bryan Mann, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama’s college of education, has studied charter schools in Pennsylvania and noted that, while the research on rural charters is still new, these schools could pose a threat to public education.

“Choice is great, but if having choice is undermining the dominant choice that the majority of families rely on and have relied on for decades or longer, then what good ultimately is that doing?” he said.

The original proposal envisioned that the school would open with 60 students and grow to 500. It opened with 32 and three dropped out. The owner plans to expand to become a Pre-K-12 school. Imagine those three- and four-year-olds, planning their futures as workers!

The funding for the charter school comes from the districts that lost students.

But guess who else paid to open a rural school with 29 students? We did.

The academy has had to make a number of changes since Campbell first pitched his idea. Not only has the school’s approach to career preparation been refined, but Campbell decided to forego the services of the charter operator, whose use was core to his application, instead relying on Hawthorne, the head of school, in part to save costs. While the charter received $600,000 in federal start-up money and $325,000 from the Walton Family Foundation, the school’s viability will depend on additional fundraising.

Betsy DeVos supplied $600,000 in federal funds to create this job-training institution to suck money out of underfunded public schools.

Here’s a reform that would make charter schools viable: no charter should be authorized over the objections of the local school board.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Funding, Oklahoma, Privatization

Peter Greene on Chris Cerf and the Privatizers’ Discomfort with the Word “Reformer”

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2018 //
11

There has always been a problem with using the word “Reformer” to describe those who wanted to impose privatization on public education and strangle the public schools with high-stakes testing and mandates up the kazoo while deregulating the privately managed schools.

Now there is a small but growing number of former reformers who say they are not “reformers.” Robin Lake was one (she ran the Center for Reinventing Public Education for many years). Then along comes Chris Cerf.

Peter Greene analyzes Cerf’s discomfort with the language, mainly because for some reason, the word “reform” now is in bad repute. Whose fault was that? Maybe too many people began to understand that “reform” meant closing public schools and replacing them with unaccountable privately managed charter schools.

Cerf continues to believe all the reformer ideas were swell–charter schools, high-stakes testing, etc.–but misunderstood.

Greene writes:

Look, lots of ed reform figures have taken a moment to examine their choices and programs. Some, like Rick Hess, have pressed for uncomfortable truths all along, and some are just showing up at the party. But if reformsters like Perf think the solution is to insist that their ideas were awesome and they were just thwarted by a vast conspiracy of naughty public ed fans, they are going to stay stuck right where they are, the reformy equivalent of that fifty-year-old paunchy guy on the porch who is still telling anyone who will listen how he should have won that big football game in high school.

You guys screwed up. In some big ways, and some small ways. In avoidable ways, and in ways that are baked into your ideas. In lots of ways related to your amateur status coupled with your unwillingness to listen to trained professionals. You can face all of that, or you can just keep stamping your feet.

I recommend the former. Look, in public ed we confront our failures all the time, often in real time as we watch a lesson plan crash and burn right in front of us. Being able to face failure is a basic survival technique in the classroom. I recommend that Cerf and those like him try it out, because this kind of whiny self-justification with a touch of moral one-upmanship is not abroad look on anyone. I offer this advice in the spirit of the season because, really, if they ignore it, they will only disappear from view that much faster, which would not be the worst thing for those of us who support public ed.

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

New York: SUNY Gives Charters to Faith-Based Schools, Despite State Constitution Ban

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2018 //
28

Hey, Yeshivas and Muslim religious schools. Stop struggling to raise money. Rename yourself and get a charter from the State University of New York Charter Committee. Then the public will pay for your religious activities. True, the state constitution bans public money for religious schools, but so what?

The SUNY charter board (appointed by Governor Cuomo) awarded charters to the Brilla Network, which teaches Catholic virtues and values. They call themselves “virtue-based” charter schoools. They are moving into the vacuum created by the closure of Catholic schools.

Here is the mission statement of Seton Partners:

Here is the charter chain they run. They plan to grow.

SETON EDUCATION PARTNERS is committed to expanding opportunities for underserved children in America to receive an academically excellent and vibrantly Catholic education. As a national non-profit and an instrument of the Church, Seton partners with (arch)dioceses and others across the country to implement innovative and sustainable new models that bridge the best of Catholic education’s rich tradition with new possibilities. Seton was born of the belief that a tremendous opportunity exists to revitalize urban Catholic schools in America and strengthen the education they provide. The challenges are significant, to be sure, but with an entrepreneurial and innovative spirit, much can and should be done, not only to preserve this national treasure but also to build on its foundation for the benefit of thousands of children in America’s most underserved neighborhoods.

Step right up and charter your religious school!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New York, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

A Progress Report from the Network for Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2018 //
4

Please read this year-end report from the Network for Public Education. You will learn about an important addition to our staff and plans for the future.

2018 was a great year for Public Education, despite the fact that the U.S. Secretary of Education—for the first time in history—is a foe of public schools and a religious zealot.

Teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina heroically stood together and demanded fair funding for their schools and their students. They said “Enough is enough!” They changed the national narrative, restoring to public view the fact that 85-90% of American students attend public schools, not charter or religious schools. Most of our public schools are underfunded, and most of our teachers are underpaid. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 29 states were spending less in 2018 than they spent in 2008. “Choice” is NOT a substitute for funding. Choice takes money away from schools that are already underfunded and diverts it to privately managed schools that are unregulated and unaccountable.

In state after state, teachers and parents led the blue wave that elected new governors, broke Republican supermajorities, and flipped the House of Representatives.

In one of the biggest electoral victories for education of 2018, parents and teachers in Arizona beat the Koch brothers and squashed a vast expansion of vouchers. Another was the ouster of Scott Walker in Wisconsin by Tony Evers; the sour grapes Republican legislature just rushed through legislation to strip powers from the new governor, in a blatant rebuff of the voters’ choice.

In California, Tony Thurmond beat Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Instruction, even though the charter billionaires gave Tuck twice as much money as Thurmond, saturating airwaves across the state. Duncan, of course, endorsed Tuck. The charter billionaires placed their money on the wrong horse in the governor’s race, betting on former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who came in third.

Friends, everyone senses it. Despite their vast resources, the privatizers are losing. They know it. Some say “Don’t call me a Reformer.” Others, like Arne Duncan, insist loudly that “Reform is not dead,” a sure sign that he knows it’s dying. All they can do now is lash out, double down, and destroy whatever has escaped their grasp.

It’s not about the kids. It never was. It’s about their egos and/or their bank accounts.

We now know that “Reform” means Privatization, and maybe it’s time to call them what they are: Privatizers.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Joy, Justice, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Resistance

Carol Burris: Five Reasons Why Charter Schools Can Never Be Reformed

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2018 //
12

Carol Burris explains here why charter schools can never be reformed.

Here is reason number one.

1. Freedom from regulations and oversight through public governance has resulted in persistent and undeniable patterns of waste and fraud.

For the past year, the Network for Public Education, the nonprofit advocacy group of which I am executive director, has been tracking charter school scandals, posting news accounts here. Frankly, we have been shocked by the frequency and seriousness of scandals that are the result of greed, lack of oversight or incompetence. The independent California-based watchdog group, In the Public Interest, estimated alleged and confirmed fraud in California’s charter sector has topped $149 million, a figure it describes as “only the tip of the iceberg.”

Not even Massachusetts, which allegedly has the toughest supervision of the sector in the nation, is free of scandals. When public dollars freely flow without independent oversight, it is all too easy for dollars to find their way into employee pockets and bank accounts, for friends and relatives to get “sweetheart deals” and for school leaders to receive astronomical salaries that would be unheard of in public schools.

Although new regulations may decrease some abuse, private boards are insufficient to provide governance of the billions of taxpayer dollars that flow through the charter sector. Every serious legislative attempt to rein in abuse meets opposition from the charter lobby, which makes strategic donations to legislators to avoid accountability.

Read the article to learn the other four reasons.

I would add here that if freedom from regulation and oversight is the key to better schools, we should do it for ALL schools. But on its face, that’s a dumb idea, because the state needs to know how its money was spent. Except for charter qschools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization

North Carolina: General Assembly Allows School to Drop Out of Its “Innovative School District”

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2018 //
3

New Orleans set a new model for privatization by creating the Recovery School District, which turned almost every public school in the city into a charter school. Tennessee copied the model in part by creating the Achievement School District, which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools, almost all in Memphis, and putting them into the ASD to be turned into charters. The ASD made bold promises but flopped. Of course, North Carolina had to copy the idea, so beloved in red states, so it created an Innovative School District. The legislation was funded by an Oregon tycoon, who surprisingly won the bid to run the new district. Sadly, no one wanted to join the ISD. Finally the state managed to corral one school into giving up its status as a public school, and the ISD was launched, with one school, a principal and a superintendent.

Then the state added another school. But the district, Wayne County, fought back, probably through its member of the General Assembly, and it has dropped out.

Stuart Egan tells the story of the escape of Carver Heights Elementary here.

Categories New Orleans, North Carolina, Privatization, Tennessee

Danielle Holly: Billionaires are Undermining Democracy By Their “Investments” in Education

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2018 //
24

Danielle Holly writes in the NonProfit Quarterly that billionaires who put their philanthropic dollars into education are benefiting themselves, not children. How do they benefit? Their donations put them in control of what is supposed to be a democratic institution. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and dozens of other “philanthropists” have decided on the basis of their whims that schools need the change that their money buys or imposes.

Perhaps Holly would not be so blunt, but that is what her article says.

Two philosophical challenges have arisen with the nature of these investments. The first, which NPQ has discussed at length, is that it limits democratic control over the nation’s public education system. In effect, education philanthropy puts education program design in a few hands who are, by definition, outsiders, and often less expert and less informed than those who are doing the work. In the case of CZI, which was established as a limited liability corporation instead of a philanthropic foundation, there are also related issues of transparency.

“Philanthropy is the least democratic institution on earth,” says Professor David Nasaw, a historian who has researched Carnegie’s philanthropic focus on education. “It’s rich men deciding what to do.”

She puts Andrew Carnegie’s gift of free public libraries on the same plane as the gifts of Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, but I disagree. Carnegie did not tell any library he funded what books to buy nor did he tell patrons what books to read. Carnegie’s gift of public libraries were good charity that did not detract from democracy. By contrast, our billionaires today have invested heavily in privatization of public schools, which is a direct attack on democracy. They buy compliance with large gifts. When they can’t buy compliance, they buy local and state school board election. That should be illegal. They should be prosecuted for attacking democracy. Their in-the-daylight efforts to buy control of state and local school boards should be seen as akin to the Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 elections. Both illegitimate.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Philanthropy, Privatization

Caleb Rossiter Reviews Arne Duncan’s Book About “Lies” and the Liars Who Tell Them

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2018 //
36

Caleb Rossiter taught in both the charter schools and public schools of Washington, D.C.

In this post, he reviews Arne Duncan’s recent book about his seven years as Secretary of Education.

He came away from the experience convinced that everyone lies.

Rossiter wonders what he learned.

“”Duncan says he first encountered school lies 30 years ago, when during college he tutored at his mother’s after-school program in a poor black neighborhood in Southside Chicago. Duncan, who is white, also lived on the Southside, near his father’s job as a professor at the elite University of Chicago. His tutee was a black high school basketball star who assumed that his “B” average guaranteed a college scholarship. Duncan soon realized that the boy’s pathetic academic level meant he had no hope of even getting into college.

“The memoir makes it clear that schools are still at it, hiding from poor parents their children’s low effort, achievement, and readiness for college or work, which will keep them trapped in the underclass. That’s a depressing conclusion coming from someone who presided over a generation of accountability policies as head of the Chicago schools and then as President Obama’s secretary of education.”

Apparently, he sees nothing wrong about the high-stakes Testing and accountability regime that he promoted and has no regrets. Reflection is not his thing. He remains all in for the principles behind No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing
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