Carol Burris and Leonie Haimson On the Air!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2019 //
3

 

Here is news you can use! Carol Burris and Leonie Haimson now have a regular one-hour radio show on WBAI In New York. The show is called TALK OUT OF SCHOOL, and it will appear weekly. WBAI is part of the progressive Pacifica Network.

In their first show, they discussed student privacy, a subject on which Leonie is a national advocate and expert, and they analyzed current controversies about diversity, selective admissions, and racial integration, a subject where Carol has extensive experience as principal of a detracked high school on Long Island.

Leonie is executive director of Class Size Matters and co-founder of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. Carol is executive director of the Network for Public Education.

Next week, Leonie will interview civil rights attorney Wendy Lecker.

Of this you can be certain, this show will be a place to hear talk that is characterized by experience, common sense, and wisdom.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Class size, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Network for Public Education, Parents, Privatization, Real Education, Students

The Whistle-Blower at MIT Knew That Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Was Tainted

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2019 //
13

The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a fascinating story about a  young woman who worked in the development office at MIT when the institution was seeking Jeffrey Epstein’s money. She knew it was wrong, but she was young, a newcomer, and who would care what she thought.

Development support staff are rarely in the limelight, even within their own organizations. But Signe Swenson has had a whirlwind of a week. The former development associate at the MIT Media Lab helped inform New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow’s exposé about the center’s financial ties with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender.

In previous interviews, Swenson recalled her and her colleagues’ concern that young women who accompanied Epstein on a campus visit and looked like models may have been victims of trafficking. “We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them,” she told NPR. Employees even checked the trash for any pleas for help scribbled on napkins and discarded. Among the lab’s staff, she told Farrow, “All of us women made it a point to be super nice to them.”

Swenson was in her mid-20s at the time and left the lab in 2016. Now director of marketing and operations at an education nonprofit, she spoke with me about what happened when she initially raised concerns to leaders and why she felt like she was one of the only people who could blow the whistle on Epstein’s relationship with the institution. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What follows is a Q and A. Here is one answer:

I expressed that I was aware of Epstein’s conviction and that I thought working with him was a terrible idea. I remember learning that if I chose to take the job, this was not going to be my choice, or necessarily Peter’s [Peter Cohen, director of development and strategy]. I did say that I guess it would be OK as long as I’m never in a room with Epstein. I sort of was drawing a line in that moment, but it’s interesting looking back. Clearly, I wanted the job very badly and did speak up, but it does feel as if I was just tested to see how confidential I could be. This was five years ago, and I was less confident than I should have been about my beliefs of what was unethical.

When it comes to fund-raising, there are no ethical standards in higher education or in the museum or library sectors. When robber barons or pedophiles have millions to cleanse their reputation, the institutions will take their  money.

Categories Funding, Higher Education, Scandals

Texas Charter Schools: Don’t Believe the Boasting and Hype

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2019 //
14

William J. Gumbert has prepared statistical analyses of charter performance in Texas, based on state data.

Charters boast of their “success,” but the reality is far different from their claims. They don’t enroll similar demographics, their attrition rate is staggering, and their “wait lists” are unverified.

Their claims are a marketing tool.

They are not better than public schools.

They undermine and disrupt communities without producing better results.

Yet Texas is plunging headlong into this strategy that creates a dual system but benefits few students.

 

 

Texas Charter Schools – Perception May Not Be Reality

Part 5: The State’s Efforts to “Privatize” Public Education in Local Communities is “Simply Indefensible”

By: William J. Gumbert

If you are a parent residing in an urban or suburban area of Texas, it is likely that you have received promotional materials recruiting your child to enroll at a privately operated, charter school (“charters”). Charters are taxpayer funded, private organizations that the State approves to independently operate schools in community-based school districts. Despite it being your students, schools, tax dollars and communities, the State has unilaterally decided that a “dual education system”, consisting of locally governed, community-based school districts and State approved, privately governed charters, is best for local communities. The State has also conveniently and unilaterally decided to share the public education funding of local communities with privately governed charters.

To conclude this series on Texas charter schools, Part 5 uses the lyrics of Robert Palmer’s hit song “Simply Irresistible” to demonstrate that the State’s politically driven and orchestrated efforts to “privatize” public education in local communities is “Simply Indefensible”. Since the song was a hit in 1988, feel free to click on the YouTube video of the “Donnie and Marie Show” below to remember the vibe.

Screen Shot 2019-09-03 at 10.26.40 PM

“How Can It Be Permissible”:

Without the approval of taxpayers and local communities: State approved charters:

  • ▪ Transfer the control and governance of public schools from local communities to privately-operated charters;
  • ▪ Divert funding from community-based school districts to privately-operated charters. The State has already provided charters with over $22.5 billion of taxpayer funding;
  • ▪ Increase the debt burden of taxpayers as charters are free to incur long-term bond debt without taxpayer approval;
  • ▪ Increase the segregation of students attending public schools in certain communities; and
  • ▪ Reduce the quality of schools in many community-based school districts as 20.4% of all charter campuses are rated as “low performing” (rated equivalent of “D” or “F”) by the State’s 2018 Academic Accountability Ratings.

    “She Compromise My Principle – Yeah, Yeah”:

    Every community has a fundamental responsibility to provide a quality public education that equally serves the unique needs of every student. As public servants, community-based school districts embrace this responsibility as all students are welcome and no student is turned away. If there is not room, community-based school districts hire more teachers and make room. In comparison, the State’s deliberate intervention in local communities allows privately-operated charters to:

    • ▪ Serve a limited number of students and NOT enroll all students;
    • ▪ Recruit the targeted students and families they desire to serve;
    • ▪ Deny enrollment to students with “discipline histories”;
    • ▪ Serve a lower percentage of “students with disabilities”;
    • ▪ Serve a lower percentage of students “at risk” of dropping out; and
    • ▪ Disrupt the education of over 12,800 “economically-disadvantaged” students due to charter closures in the last 5-years.

    “That Kind of Love is Mythical”:

    The promotion of charters is primarily coordinated by charter advocacy organizations that are intended to support and grow the charter school movement. Although not all-inclusive, these organizations train charter administrators, teachers and parents to be advocates, they assist organizations to start new charters, and they coordinate the political strategy to secure favorable support from the Legislature. But it is not publicized that these advocacy organizations are funded by private donors and fueled by privately funded “public policy” organizations that desire to “privatize” public education across Texas.

    To demonstrate parent demand and to garner political support, charter advocacy organizations have notoriously publicized a “wait list” of students. But charters do not publicize the alarming 33.8% attrition rate of students in grades 7-12 that decided to transfer to another Texas public school to start year 2017/18. Charters also do not publicize that the desires of families on “wait lists” are a lower priority than the desire of charters to expand in other regions of the State. By charters expanding in other regions, without expanding current schools to serve students on “wait lists”, charters are choosing to have families “stuck” on the wait list”. In addition, charters strategically attempt to maintain a “wait list” to ensure that their taxpayer funding is preserved as existing students transfer to community-based school districts or another Texas public school in the future.

    In Texas, the promoted (unverified) “wait list” is 141,000 students. However, taking a deeper dive, a more realistic estimate is closer to 75,000 students or an amount that is very similar to the 73,713 disciplinary students that are intentionally denied service by charters. This estimate was derived from certain enrollment statistics in a study funded by the KLE Foundation entitled: “An Analysis of Austin area Charter School Waitlists and Enrollment”. It is important to note that the KLE Foundation is also funding the expansion of charters in Austin.

    “She’s Anything But Typical”:

    In comparison to community-based school districts, charters serve the unique needs of students by:

    • ▪ Employing teachers with lower experience;
    • ▪ Deploying higher class sizes;
    • ▪ Having higher teacher turnover
    • ▪ Spending less on “student instruction”;
    • ▪ Offering fewer co/extra-curricular activities;
    • ▪ Having limited career and technical training; and
    • ▪ Closing 108 charters

    .

    “She’s a Craze You’d Endorse, She’s a Powerful Force”:

  • The charter movement is coordinated by “public policy” and “education reform” organizations that circumvent the voice of local taxpayers by strategically controlling our elected officials at the State and Federal levels. In politics, money is power and the rich and powerful support the charter school movement. As a result, many elected officials are politically motivated to endorse and support the “charter craze”. The following quote from the Texas Charter Schools Association, an advocacy organization to support and expand charters, provides an indication of the movement’s focus on political patronage:

    “Generally speaking, we have a broad enough bipartisan coalition in the House and Senate that largely will prevent anything existential happening to charters” – CEO of TCSA

    “You’re Obliged to Conform, When There’s No Other Course”:

    It is interesting that the Legislature continues to increase the transparency requirements of community-based school districts to enhance the involvement of taxpayers, but at the same time, the State forces charters upon taxpayers by unilaterally controlling the expansion and taxpayer funding of charters. In this regard, taxpayers do not receive public notice of the charters that the State approves to operate in local communities. The State does not notify taxpayers of the public funding it provides to charters and the State has ensured that taxpayers cannot prohibit or limit the bond debt incurred by charters to finance the construction of new charter schools in local communities (charters are granted the ability to incur bond debt without voter approval). Lastly, with charters having “privately appointed boards”, the State has also ensured that taxpayers cannot democratically elect the governing boards of charters and in fact, the State does not even require charters to meet in the communities they serve.

    “She Used to Look Good to Me, But Now I Find Her”:

    The original purpose of charters was to improve the educational opportunities of “economically-disadvantaged” students in urban areas and to develop and share instructional innovations to enhance the education of all students. However, the charter school movement has evolved into an aggressive, strategic and “non-cooperative” movement that is coordinated by “special interests” to “privatize” and “control” the public education system in local communities. Since charters have introduced “private business practices” into public education, the charter movement could be characterized as a “hostile takeover” of public schools and the tax dollars of Texas communities.

    “Simply Indefensible” … “There’s No Tellin Where the Money Went”:

    The charter facts are “irrefutable”;

    Charter expenditures are “inscrutable”;

    Special interests have made charters politically “irresistible”; and

    By the State providing privately governed charters with taxpayer funding, “there’s no tellin where the money went”.

    With the education of children and taxpayer funding at stake, the State’s deliberate and politically-motivated actions to “privatize” public education in local communities is:

    “Simply Indefensible”

    DISCLOSURES: The author is a voluntary advocate for public education and this material solely reflects the opinions of the author. The author has not been compensated in any manner for the preparation of this material. The material is based upon various sources, including but not limited to, the Texas Education Agency, Txschools.org; Texas Academic Performance Reports, tpeir-Texas Education Reports, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, KXAN and other publicly available information. While the author believes these sources to be reliable, the author has not independently verified the information. All readers are encouraged to complete their own review of the charter school movement in Texas, including the material referenced herein and make their own independent conclusions.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Lies, Privatization

Note to Rhode Island Officials: Expanding “Achievement First” Charters Will Not Help Providence Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2019 //
10

Rhode Island Officials—Governor Gina Raimondo and State Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green—are looking at the expansion of the no-excuses Achievement First Charter chain as part of the “solution” to the low-scoring Providence public school district.

Achievement First is a national charter chain known for high test scores, high suspension rates, and high teacher turnover. It was launched in Connecticut, funded in large part by Jonathan Sackler of Purdue Pharma, the opioid king, and significant contributions by hedge fund managers and philanthropists.

Let’s do the math.

Providence public schools enroll nearly 24,000 students. Two-thirds are Hispanic, 9% are white, 79% are low-income. Achievement First reports similar demographics in its two schools in Providence.

With now three schools in the state since opening in the 2013-2014 school year, Achievement First cites that the Rhode Island Department of Education in 2016 gave approval to Achievement First to grow to a high school — and add an additional K-8, giving Achievement First the ability to serve 3112 students — up from the current 1150 students in Providence and Cranston.

AF has 464 students in itselementary school, and 201 in its middle school in Providence. That was last year (2018-19), so the numbers might be higher this year.

So here is the question: If Achievement First expands by adding another elementary school and a high school, if its enrollment grows to serve a total of 3112 in two Rhode Island cities, how exactly does that uplift the Providence school district?

Suppose AF grows from its current enrollment of about 700 in Providence. Suppose it doubles its enrollment to 1,500 in Providence. That’s less that 10% of the students in the city.

What about the other 93% of the students?

What plans do the Governor and the State Commissioner have for them?

How does it transform Providence if a charter chain withdraws the students it wants and the funding for them from the struggling public schools?

To learn more about this charter chain, read this 2017 study from Yale. Thisstudy of Achievement First in Connecticut and New York says that its schools are highly segregated and get remarkably high test scores, but do so with a heavily white teaching staff strictly disciplining Black and Hispanic students, and with unusually high teacher turnover. The study is titled, “Achievement First, Children Second?” and suggests that AF’s strict discipline “may harm student development.”

AF likes to boast that if its schools can achieve great test scores, so can all schools. One way to test the proposition would be to turn an entire district over to AF. One candidate would be Central Falls, Rhode Island, the smallest urban district in Rhode Island, which registered the lowest test scores in the state. There are only 2,657 students in the whole district. Since the state is taking over Central Falls, why not invite Achievement First to demonstrate what it can do with an entire district, every single child…no exclusions, no cherry-picking. This would be a valuable lesson for all of us.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhode Island

The Photographs of Susan Schwartz

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2019 //
37

Regular readers of this blog have often encountered comments by Susan Schwartz. Susan was a celebrated teacher in District 2 in New York City. Now she is retired and has become a very successful photographer. She mentioned recently that her work had been accepted for an exhibit, and another reader asked whether Susan would be willing to share her work here.

I asked her and she responded with this sampling of her superb photographs. 

Enjoy.

Categories Creativity

Shawgi Tell: Are Charter Schools Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2019 //
8

Shawgi Tell, a professor of education at Nazareth College in upstate New York, has a straightforward answer to the question he raises. His answer: No. Charter schools are not public schools.

He writes:

Charter school advocates have always desperately sought to convince themselves and the public that privately-run nonprofit and for-profit charter schools that operate like businesses are actually public and similar in many ways to public schools.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Charter schools are not public schools.

In reality, privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools differ in many profound ways from public schools that have been educating 90 percent of America’s youth for more than a century.

Below is an abbreviated list of the many ways in which privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools differ significantly from public schools.

Charter schools are exempt from dozens, even hundreds, of state and local laws, rules, regulations, policies, and agreements that apply to all public schools.

At least 90% of charter schools have no teacher unions—the opposite of public schools.
Some charter school owners-operators openly and publicly insist that charter schools are private entities.

Unlike public schools, charter schools are not governed by a publicly elected school board, but by a self-selecting, corporate-style board of trustees.

Many charter schools are not subject to audits, at least not in the same way as public schools.

Many charter schools do not uphold open-meeting laws; they dodge many such public requirements.

Many charter schools do not provide the same services as public schools, e.g., transportation, nurses, food, sports, education services, etc.

Thousands of charter schools are directly and/or indirectly owned, operated, or managed by private, for-profit entities.

Many, if not most, charter schools regularly use discriminatory student enrollment practices. Students with disabilities and English Language Learners in particular are usually under-represented in charter schools. So are homeless students and other students…

Charter means contract. Charter schools are contract Performance contracts are at the heart of charter schools. Contract is the quintessential market category. Contracts make commerce possible. Contract law is part of private law, not public law. Charter schools are legally classified as nonprofits or for-profits. Unlike public schools, they are not political subdivisions of the state. In some places, like New York State, charter schools are not considered political subdivisions of the state. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not state agencies.

He offers many more reasons to support the conclusion that charter schools are not public schools.

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

Leonie Haimson: Is New York About to Gut Its Student Privacy Law?

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2019 //
7

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters and co-founder of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy (and a member of the board of the Network for Public Education) writes here about the threat to student privacy in New York.

The New York Board of Regents is currently considering whether to approve a radical weakening of the state student privacy law, which would allow the College Board, the ACT and other companies that contract with schools or districts to administer tests to use the personal student information they collect for marketing purposes — even though the original New York law that was passed in 2014 explicitly barred the sale or commercial use of this data.

Starting in 2014, many states, including New York, approved legislation to strengthen the protection of student privacy, because of a growing realization on the part of parents that their children’s personal data was being shared by schools and districts with a wide variety of private companies and organizations without their knowledge or consent. The U.S. Department of Education had weakened the federal student privacy law known as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) twice over the past decade, rewriting the regulations during the Bush and Obama administrations to allow for nonconsensual disclosures for different purposes.

At that time, few parents knew that federal law had been altered to allow their children’s information from being passed into private hands. Then controversy erupted over the plans of nine states and districts to share personal student data with a comprehensive databank called inBloom, developed with more than $100 million of funding from the Gates Foundation.

InBloom Inc. was designed to collect a wide variety of personal student data and share it with for-profit vendors to accelerate the development and marketing of the education technology industry to facilitate the adoption of online instruction and assessment. As a result of widespread parental activism and concerns, all nine states and districts that had originally intended to participate in the inBloom data-sharing plan pulled out, and 99 new state student privacy laws were passed across the country between 2014 and 2018.

New York was one of the first to pass a new student privacy law. In March 2014, the state legislature approved Education Laws §2-c and §2-d, which among other things, prohibited the state from sharing student data with inBloom or another comprehensive databank, and also regulated the way schools and vendors must secure student data, including imposing a complete ban on the sale of personal student information or its use for marketing purposes….

Yet to the frustration of many parents and privacy advocates, it would be nearly five years before New York State Education Department drafted any regulations to implement its 2014 student privacy law. In October 2018, the Education Department finally released proposed regulations for public comment. In March 2018, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, along with the statewide coalition New York State Allies for Public Education, submitted recommendations on how to strengthen and clarify those regulations, as did more than 240 parents and privacy advocates.

Yet after the initial period of public comment had ended, instead of strengthening the regulations, the state Education Department gutted them, and now proposed allowing student data to be used for commercial purposes as long as there was parental “consent” — a huge loophole that would create the opportunity for districts, schools and vendors to misuse this data in myriad ways.

Do you think it is okay to sell students’ personal data to marketers and vendors?

Categories New York, Privacy, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Maurice Cunningham: The Waltons Create a “National Parents Union”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2019 //
11

 

Maurice Cunningham is a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, who has a remarkable passion for tracking Dark Money.

In this post, he warns that the Walton Family has funded an AstroTurf group called “the National Parents Union,” which hopes to organize parents to demand privately-managed charter schools and to fight teachers’ unions.

Cunningham is very familiar with the Walton tactics of putting up front groups to pursue their goals. Along with other billionaires, DFER, and the now-defunct Families for Excellent Schools, they funded a referendum in Massachusetts in 2016, aimed at lifting the state cap on charter schools. Cunningham’s blogs, posted at public radio station WGBH’s website, exposed the billionaires behind that effort, and the referendum was overwhelmingly defeated.

The new “NPU” is an outgrowth of the Walton efforts in Massachusetts.

Can this one fool parents into demanding privatization of their public schools? Not likely.

 

Categories Education Reform

Bill Phillis: Will the Supreme Court Wipe Out the Ban on Public Funding of Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2019 //
18

Bill Phillis of the Adequacy and Equity Coalition of Ohio fears that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, to which Trump added two religious zealots, is on the verge of eliminating the separation of church and state. This would be a huge victory for Betsy DeVos, ALEC, and the anti-government crusaders of the Right. Some states—such as Ohio, Indiana, and Florida— have already decided to ignore their state constitutions, to fund religious schools with vouchers.

The irony is that vouchers are a lose-lose proposition. The public schools—attended by nearly 90% of all pupils—lose finding, lay off teachers, cut programs. The children take away a voucher worth $5,000-$7,000 and get a worse education than their public school peers.

Bill Phillis writes:

The U.S. Supreme Court is moving toward the concept of forcing states to fund private religious schools on the same basis as public schools
 
The so-called Blaine Amendments in the constitutions of 39 states prohibit the states from funding private religious schools. Pages 235 through 238 of the Ninth Edition of American Public School Law by Kern Alexander and M. David Alexander provide a succinct and thoughtful review of the background and implication of President Grant’s proposed amendment introduced by U.S. House Speaker James G. Blaine after the Civil War.
 
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been heard to say that the constitutional provisions prohibiting the states from funding private religious schools are rooted in bigotry. She may have picked up on Justice Clarence Thomas’ assertions in Mitchell v Helms that if states don’t provide funds to religious schools they are manifesting hostility toward religion. Further Thomas asserted that the state’s constitutional provisions were subtle devices to deprive Catholic schools of public money; thus a manifestation of anti-Catholic bigotry.
 
The James G. Blaine family was Catholic. A close cousin established the Holy Cross Sisters. Neither he nor President Grant demonstrated any anti-Catholic biases. They were just attempting to unify the country after the Civil War. Grant believed the key to unity was a “common school education.”
 
The Blaine Amendment which merely prohibited public funds from flowing to religious schools, passed the House but failed in the U.S. Senate. Subsequently many states adopted constitutional amendments that accomplished the intent of President Grant’s proposal.
 
These “Blaine” provisions in the state constitutions are in accord with the first sentence in the Bill of Rights, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, …” There is no contradiction between the states’ constitutional provisions and the Bill of Rights; however, of late, the U.S. Supreme Court, contrary to earlier decisions, is advancing a different constitutional philosophy in Agostini (1997), Mitchell (2000), Zelman (2002), Davey (2004), and Trinity Lutheran (2017), all of which permit Congress and states to provide public funds to religious institutions and schools.
 
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Montana case in which the high court in Montana ruled against vouchers on the basis of its constitution’s prohibitions. If the Court rules against Montana, the “Blaine” amendments in the 39 states could be rendered invalid.
 
Montana’s constitutional prohibition of public funding to religious schools and other religious institutions is among the most stringent “no-aid clauses” in the nation. Article X section 6 states:
(1)   The legislature, counties, cities, towns, school districts, and public corporations shall not make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies, or any grant of lands or other property for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect or denomination.
(2)   This section shall not apply to funds from federal sources provided to the state for the express purpose of distribution to non-public education.
Notwithstanding the stringent nature of Montana’s “no aid” provision, a ruling against the Montana decision would affect states that have less stringent constitutional measures.
Categories Education Reform, Montana, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

N.Y. Attorney General: Sackler Family Wired $1 Billion Out of U.S.

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2019 //
11

 

New York State Attorney General Leticia James stated that the Sackler Family was wiring money out of the country to protect their assets from litigation related to the opioid crisis.

 

New York Uncovers $1 Billion in Sackler Family Wire Transfers

In a court filing, the state attorney general’s office says that it has found new account transfers by members of the family that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of opioids.

By Danny Hakim

The New York attorney general’s office said on Friday that it had tracked about $1 billion in wire transfers by the Sackler family, including through Swiss bank accounts, suggesting that the family tried to shield wealth as it faced a raft of litigation over its role in the opioid crisis.

Earlier this week, thousands of municipal governments and nearly two dozen states tentatively reached a settlement with the Sackler family and the company it owns, Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin. It was unclear if the new disclosure would change the thinking of any of the parties that agreed to the settlement.

The attorneys general of a majority of states, including New York and Massachusetts, have already balked at the proposed deal, contending that the Sackler family has siphoned off company profits that should be used to pay for the billions of dollars in damage caused by opioids.

The wire transfers are part of a lawsuit against Purdue and individual Sacklers in New York. Letitia James, now the state’s attorney general, had issued subpoenas last month to 33 financial institutions and investment advisers with ties to the Sacklers in an effort to trace the full measure of the family’s wealth.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools
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