Archives for category: Privatization
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Leonie Haimson: Why Eva Moskowitz’s Former Lawyer Should Not Be Allowed to Open Her Own Charter School

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2017 //
6

Leonie Haimson, hardworking CEO of Class Size Matters and New York City’s foremost parent advocate, has written a letter to the SUNY charter committee explaining why Eva Moskowitz’s former chief attorney for the Success Academy charter chain, should NOT be allowed to start her own charter school.

Open the link to read the citations and the letter written by the parent of a student with special needs whose file was made public by Success Academy in retaliation for her appearance on John Merrow’s program about the abusive practices of Success Academy.

To the SUNY Charter committee and Board:

I urge you to reject the proposed authorization of the Zeta charter school, for many of the reasons cited by the Tory Frye of the D6 Community Education Council,[1] but also because Emily Kim, the proposed founder, was the chief attorney for the Success Academy chain while the network proceeded to repeatedly violate state and federal laws and deprive students of their civil rights.

More specifically:

· In October 2015, Success Academy retaliated against a parent of a special needs child who had spoken on a PBS show about his repeated illegal suspensions by Success, by posting her child’s disciplinary file online and sending the link to reporters nationwide. This action was a flagrant violation of his federal privacy rights according to FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. [2]

· Only after the parent, Fatima Geidi, filed a complaint with the US Department of Education, and several months ensued did Success Academy finally take down his file.[3]

· On January 20, 2016, parents of 13 current and former students of Success Academy filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education, accusing the network of discriminating against students with disabilities by denying them their mandated services, repeatedly suspending them without providing alternative instruction, and in some cases pushing them out. This complaint was joined NYC Public Advocate Letitia James; Councilman Daniel Dromm, the chair of the NYC Council Education Committee; Legal Services NYC; the Legal Aid Society; MFY Legal Services; the Partnership for Children’s Rights; and the New York Legal Assistance Group.[4]

· Subsequently, the federal Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation into Success Academy’s discriminatory practices, the results of which have not yet been released.[5]

· SUNY itself was reported to have launched its own investigation into Success Academy’s push-out policies, and more specifically the infamous “Got to Go” list. [6]

· In April 2016, parents at Success Academy Fort Greene launched a new federal lawsuit, alleging “illegal, discriminatory” campaign against children with special needs , including sending their children to emergency rooms without cause, illegally suspending them, and threatening to call the Administration for Children’s Services if they refused to pick their child up early from school These parents are represented by Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and Advocates for Justice.[7]

· In addition, the application for this new charter school should be rejected since Ms. Kim is planning to co-locate her school in a district public school building, which would prevent the already-overcrowded schools in the district from having sufficient space to reduce class size, as previously agreed upon by the city in its original Contracts for Excellence plan. [8]

· In July 2017, a legal complaint was filed against DOE with the NY State Education Department for failing to comply with the its state-approved Contracts for Excellence class size reduction plan. [9] This complaint was prepared by the Education Law Center on behalf of Class Size Matters, the Public Advocate, the Alliance for Quality Education and nine NYC public school parents.[10]

Until the results of the investigations by the federal Office of Civil Rights and SUNY are released and these complaints and lawsuits are decided, it would be premature and ill-considered to allow Ms. Kim to open her own charter school, given her history of facilitating and defending repeated violations of children’s civil rights.

Below are additional personal observations by Fatima Geidi of Ms. Kim’s behavior, while her child attended Upper West Success Academy.

Yours sincerely,
Leonie Haimson, Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization

Anita Senkowski: Is Your State Superintendent of Education a Weasel? Mine Is.

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2017 //
6

This is a repost, because I forgot to put in the link to the article.

Anita Senkowski is a blogger in northern Michigan who strikes fear in the hearts of frauds and phonies. Her last target, a charter entrepreneur who made off with millions, is in prison.

In this post, she declares the State Superintendent of Public Education in Michigan a weasel. She has a photo of a cute little weasel.

Superintendent Brian Whiston said on a public radio show that school Choice hadn’t worked in Michigan.

“During the segment Whiston drew a hard line in the sand on charter schools — one of Michigan Republicans’ favorite education schemes.

“Asked about the performance thus far of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Whiston said it was too early to make a complete call, but he skewered the idea that “school choice” — i.e. charter schools — were the silver bullet to Michigan’s education woes.

“While I do support choice – and I want to be clear on that – it’s probably taken us backwards overall.”

“School choice is important. I support school choice, but Michigan has proven that school choice isn’t the answer,” he said. “If school choice was the answer, Michigan would be the top performing state because we have more choice than just about any other state.”

After the show, he began backtracking, trying to explain that he didn’t mean what he said, looking over his shoulder at the choice-loving governor and legislature.

Weasel.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Nancy Bailey: DeVos’ “Let’s Get Rid of Public Schools” Tour

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2017 //
21

Nancy Bailey valiantly followed Betsy DeVos’s national tour, from a distance.

Her message everywhere was the same: Public schools suck! Private schools are awesome!

In public schools, children sit in desks arranged in rows. In private schools, well, maybe the same but it doesn’t matter.

In public schools, children hate going to school. In private schools, they are enthusiastic and happy.

This woman is an ideologue. She knows nothing and learns nothing. Whatever she proposes is meant to damage public schools and communities.

Education is a learning profession, and she is not open to learning anything!

We will wait her out, fight her at every turn, and return to the task of improving and strengthening public schools for all children, a concept unknown to her.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Arizona: The Widespread Fiscal Mismanagement of Charters

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2017 //
0

These reports document the widespread financial mismanagement of charter schools in Arizona, compiled by Curt Cardine. These reports are also archived on the Grand Canyon Institute website.

The reports can be read here, here, and here.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization

Arizona: New Study Finds that Three-Quarters of Charters Are Financially Mismanaged

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2017 //
12

Curt Cardine, retired educator, has studied the charter schools of Arizona and discovered that most are financially unsound.

Next year, Arizonans will vote on whether to fund religious and other private schools with taxpayer dollars. How much waste are the taxpayers of Arizona willing to tolerate at the same time?

Cardine writes:

The economic theory behind school choice and vouchers relies on the ‘free’ marketplace and the consumers of educational services to cull winners and losers. Children represent ‘backpacks full of cash’ that follow the child to the school of their parents’ choice.

The data gleaned from 20-plus years of financial reports on charter schools paint a different story. In reality, Arizona families lack sufficient information to make an informed choice about what school their children attend. As Ronald Reagan might have put it, we have trusted without verifying the financial and academic results of that trust.

Since 1994, 424 charter schools have shuttered their doors, a failure rate of 43 percent. Thirty-four percent of all charters that fail do not meet the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools Financial Performance Recommendation. Another 90 charter groups that failed did not meet the Cash Flow Standard. My concerns led to three years of intensive research. This effort was undertaken to statistically verify first-hand observations as a charter and district leader. Special attention was paid to the 2013 through 2016 audits, annual financial reviews and IRS 990s (used by the IRS for nonprofits).

The research findings are documented in a series of three policy reports from the Grand Canyon Institute, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

The reports are ‘Following the Money,’ ‘Red Flags’ and ‘Teachers in the Charter Marketplace.’

Following the Money presents financial data on charter school management salaries. Charter administrative costs on average are twice district management costs. One case showed two administrators earning a total that exceeded $500,000 for managing one small school with less than 300 students. The top earners are often husband and wife teams, relatives or business associates of the charter holder, collectively making more than $200,000 to oversee a few hundred children.

Charters are not required to conduct a competitive bid process like public district schools. This allows many charter holders to earn compensation by doing business with their own for-profit companies. In one case, a charter holder paid his own ‘for profit’ company $12 million in one year for learning-management software. The cost should have been less than 10 percent of that amount, based on what the Mesa Unified School District spends for a similar type of software.

In 2013-14, related-party business practices were worth a half a billion dollars, representing 48 percent of charter school transactions for contracts, leases and rents. As a comparison, public school districts are not allowed to do business with companies owned by the superintendent or school board.

Also, widespread irregularities abound in the financial information that some charter schools provided to different governmental agencies.

The next post contains the background reports. They are also archived here.

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

Lisa Haver: Who Elected These Billionaires to Impose Their Half-Baked Views on Our Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2017 //
23

Lisa Haver is a retired teacher in the Philadelphia public schools and co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

In this article, she asks who gave the billionaires the right to reorganize our public schools, when none has any knowledge or experience in education.

None of them has a clue about how to teach r how to run a school. Yet people are lining up to get their money.

Who will hold them accountable when their ideas fail, as Bill Gates Common Core failed?

She is thinking now of Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. She is thinking of Laurene Powell Jobs. They know nothing about education.

“Over the past 20 years, education policy has increasingly been enacted not to satisfy the needs of the students and their families, but the wants of the wealthy and powerful who are converting public education from a civic enterprise to a marketplace for edu-vendors: the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has paid to expand charters and lobby for the use of Common Core standards in all 50 states; real estate and insurance mogul Eli Broad now leads a group of corporate funders pushing a plan to move half of all K-12 students in Los Angeles into charter schools; the Walton family has initiated a new $1 billion campaign to promote charters nationwide; Trump financier Carl Icahn has established a chain of charters in New York City.

“No one elected these billionaires, and they are accountable to no one. We can’t call our members of Congress to object to their policies. While Americans continue to condemn the power of the very rich to influence elections, we must also fight to stop them from having more influence over the future of our young people than the constituents of democratically elected school boards.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Common Core, Education Reform, Privatization

Is School Choice Good for Kids? A Debate Between an Expert and an Ideologue

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2017 //
16

Samuel Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, is a hardy soul. He agreed to debate Bob Bowdon, film-maker, pundit, and hater of all things public, in a debate sponsored by the libertarian publication Reason. The debate took place in July but it remains relevant.

Sam taught for many years in the New York City public schools, then wrote his academic thesis on the Edison Project, which grew into a book about for-profit education ventures called Education and the Commercial Mindset, published by Harvard University Press. The book is thoughtful, well-documented, and scholarly.

Bob Bowdon is a film-maker who made a name for himself as someone who despises public schools, teachers, and unions. He is a libertarian, and the crowd was with him from the start. Abrams was brave to go before a pro-choice crowd, and he won some of them over to the idea that there is actually something called the common good.

Bowdon, needless to say, is unfamiliar with the research about vouchers, and is unaware of research from Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and D.C. showing that students who take vouchers lose ground as compared to their peers who stay in public schools.

Here is a transcript of the debate.

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

BREAKING NEWS: Eli Broad Lost! WOW! Double WOW!

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2017 //
34

Karen Wolfe, parent activist in Los Angeles, writes about a dramatic turn of events earlier today. Eli Broad wanted to open a STEM school in Los Angeles. Not with his money, of course, but with public money. He also wanted more autonomy for charter schools, so they have even less oversight than they now have. It is highly unusual for a billionaire to ask the Legislature to give him a school. The Los Angeles Times thought it set a bad precedent but they supported it because, well, he does give the Times $800,000 a year (their reporters are untainted by his money, fortunately, but $800,000 is real money). And if the powerful charter industry in California needs anything, it is more oversight, more accountability, more transparency, not less.

And guess what! ELI BROAD LOST!

Karen Wolfe writes:


Victory in California!

On the final day of the legislative session, a massive coalition of teachers & parents, activists & experts, unions & school boards, those Democrats and these Democrats, and Republicans beat big money!

AB 1217, a bill sponsored by Eli Broad, would have established a school in the middle of Los Angeles, and so much more. It would have created a law–and set a statewide precedent–to let charter school operators circumvent local districts, the County Office of Education, and even the State Board of Education. This has never been done in California, where “local control” is fiercely protected. Obliterating that is a top priority of the charter lobby.

But we won!

What an uprising. First, a couple of us button-holed some of our local delegates to the Democratic Party in Los Angeles. Especially on the heels of the recent school board election, they got it! And they got to work. Within two days, the matter was put on the Los Angeles Democratic Party Central Committee agenda as an emergency measure. It passed unanimously–and it put our state legislators on notice. They were not going to sneak this through.

Then we California BATs sent out an Action Alert and worked up and down the state asking public education activists to call their senators. BATS started tweeting. Diane Ravitch posted it, and our state senators were getting calls from activists across the country. They knew they were being watched.

Before one caller even started talking, a senate staffer said, I’ll put you down as opposing. She said, how do you know that? He told her, I can hear a child in the background.

Each day, it stayed off the Senate floor. Were they waiting for the right moment, or did they know support was crumbling?

Then the Network for Public Education sent an eblast to tens of thousands of Californians who care about public education. Los Angeles activist Lauren Steiner took our message to a whole new community of California activists, opposed to privatization in general.

All the while, the teachers unions were working the legislature, and getting more partners to join the fight. School boards, firefighters, the PTA, all against this bill.

Together, we spoke truth to power and MADE them listen. We will not let them sell off our schools in secret, pretending that it is putting “kids first”.

Thank you to everyone who made calls!

Diane Ravitch always says, “We will win, because they are few, and we are many.” Sometimes it is hard to remember that. Today, I believe!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Pennsylvania: How Charter Schools Make Handsome Profits in States Where For-Profits Are Not Allowed

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2017 //
5

Remember that scene in the Dustin Hoffman movie “The Graduate” where a sharp guy whispers to the young Hoffman that the business of the future is “plastics!”

In the charter industry, the profits are not in tuition money. They are in real estate.

Pennsylvania theoretically does not permit for-profit charters. But that doesn’t mean that charters don’t make a handsome profit. It is all about real estate, or leasing the property you own to yourself for a fine fee.

The five-story brick and concrete building overlooking Brighton Road in Perry South features a Propel schools banner over its front door, with signs for the charter network at every approach.

The 99,155-square-foot Propel Northside is owned, though, by School Facilities Development Inc., a nonprofit corporation with a very narrow role: Leasing property to Propel.

SFD’s ownership allows Propel to collect around $322,000 in annual lease reimbursements from the state — money it wouldn’t get if it owned its school buildings. It’s an arrangement that had drawn criticism from the state’s top auditor and is threatened by proposed legislation.

“You’ve created this nonprofit and sort of in a sense, you control it,” said Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a critic of the state’s charter school law. “You’re getting a lease reimbursement for renting to yourself.”

Since 2004, SFD has spent $32.6 million buying a portfolio of seven schools, comprising most of Propel’s 11 locations. With no employees and just a few volunteers and part-time consultants, the nonprofit receives $3 million in annual lease payments from Propel schools, and after debt payments runs annual six-figure surpluses.

From 1965 to 2006, the Pittsburgh Public Schools owned the Brighton Road building, maintained it and used it as Columbus Middle School. That simple arrangement isn’t mirrored in the charter school world, where specialized nonprofits take on various roles and receive millions of dollars in public money.

“Real estate is held in a separate company,” said Propel Executive Director Jeremy Resnick, recounting the advice he’s gotten from attorneys and financiers during Propel’s 15-year history. “This is how it’s being done.”

Jeremy Resnick–founder of the Propel Charter Chain–is the son of the esteemed education researcher Dr. Lauren Resnick of the LRDC at the University of Pittsburgh.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Atlanta: Charter School Founder Facing Dozens of Charges in Connection with Theft of More than $1 Million

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2017 //
5

In Atlanta, Christopher Clemons faces multiple criminal charges in relation to the alleged theft of more than $1 million from the charter school he founded.

The criminal charges against an Atlanta charter school founder have grown to 55 counts of forgery and theft of at least $1.3 million after a Fulton County grand jury indicted him on seven additional charges.

Christopher Clemons, the 38-year-old founder of Latin Academy, now faces charges linked to two other local charter schools he was associated with, according to the new indictment returned Sept. 1.

The first charges came after a reported theft of more than $800,000 from Latin Academy, which later closed.

The new case is linked to thefts of more than $500,000, including money allegedly taken from Latin Grammar School and Latin College Preparatory School.

Combined, the two cases against Clemons allege a theft of roughly $1.3 million.

Mercedes Schneider wrote about Chris Clemons, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from MIT. She delved into his history and his self-described passion to help poor kids. Among other things, he opened a charter school in Denver and two charter schools in New Orleans.

Whether he was creating opportunities for poor kids or for himself is an open question, until the case is resolved.

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