Mark Funkhouser writes here about the educational value of showing what gun violence does.
Publish the pictures.
The media usually censors disturbing images.
We need to be disturbed.
What can you say when the gun violence becomes a regular occurrence? What do you say when the politicians funded by the NRA offer their ritual “thoughts and prayers” while making clear that they have no intention of demanding new gun laws to stop the carnage? No ban on assault weapons. No background checks. No mandatory training. No limits on who can buy a weapon.
This is madness.
The killer posts a hate-filled manifesto. The talking heads on TV pontificate about “motive,” which is plain as daylight.
When does it end? Do you have any answers? One seems obvious. Gun control. Tight restrictions on who can get a gun. A complete ban on assault weapons.
How about an end to hate-mongering? How do we do that? I don’t know.
Any ideas?
This is becoming a dangerous country, where death looms in shopping malls, schools, movie theaters, festivals, anywhere that people gather.
Trump spoke in his inaugural about “American carnage.”
Yes.
Peter Greene enjoyed reading the collection of my essays published by Garn Press.
He is a discerning reader and a no-nonsense critic.
To earn his approval is high praise indeed.
I am immensely flattered by his comments.
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.
Michael Kolhaas is going through his treasure trove of leaked emails and discovered some that are very embarrassing to Nick Melvoin of the Los Angeles Unified School District board.
He says that Melvoin as a member of the board was privy to the LAUSD legal strategy in its perennial struggle with the charter lobby. He says that Melvoin shared this strategy with the charter lobby.
Very ugly.
He begins:
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an episode in January 2018 when the California Charter School Association actually drafted a resolution for then newly elected, then and now bought and paid for, LAUSD board member Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin,1 to present to his colleagues on the school board. It was and is a complicated story, and I promised at the time to lay it on you in increments.2 That first post was about the CCSA-drafted resolution and how they passed it on to Nicky in January 2018.
Today we’re moving along to February 20, 2018. On that date Nick Melvoin, his senior advisor Allison Holdorff Polhill, and his policy director Danielle Tenner met with Cristina de Jesus of Green Dot Private Schools, Emilio Pack of STEM Preparatory Schools, Caprice Young of the creepiest cultiest charter chain, that is Magnolia Charter Schools, and Cassy Horton, Ebony Wheaton, and Jason Rudolph, all the last three from CCSA, all met to discuss the resolution.3
Also at that time, explained below, CCSA was suing LAUSD. And, amazingly, it seems that in this meeting Melvoin passed on a great deal of privileged information about LAUSD’s legal strategy to the charter advocates. He also agreed to intervene with LAUSD’s lawyers to further CCSA’s interests. This is on its face appalling behavior from an elected official, sworn by oath to faithfully execute the duties of his office, a violation of which oath this behavior pretty clearly is.4 As always, the details are complicated.
We know about this meeting from an email sent the next day, February 21, 2018, by the aforementioned Jason Rudolph to his co-conspirators de Jesus, Pack, Young, Horton, and Wheaton. This email is interesting in itself, and it is reproduced below in full. Much, much, muchmuchmuch more interesting, though, is the attachment to the email, consisting of Rudolph’s notes on the previous day’s meeting.5This document is endlessly complex. I expect that the next four or five posts in this series will be on this document.6
Drip, drip, drip. All the secrets spilling out into public view.
Jeff Bryant wrote a must-read overview of the disastrous effort to privatize the public schools in Puerto Rico (the New Orleans of the Caribbean?), and the role of teachers in ousting the government.
He writes:
Puerto Rico’s school teachers have been a constant nemesis to the Rosselló regime, and the island’s largest teachers’ union, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR), united with other labor unions on the island to organize the general strike. Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, which AMPR is an affiliate of, joined in the calls for Rosselló’s resignation.
The teachers’ disagreements with Governor Rosselló started long before the release of the insulting texts.
“People in Puerto Rico felt betrayed by the governor,” says Myrna Ortiz-Castillo in a phone conversation. Ortiz-Castillo is a third-grade teacher and serves as finance secretary at the AMPR local in Bayamon. She insists, “He is supposed to be the person who takes care of the people. Instead he took care of his friends.”
One of the “friends” Ortiz-Castillo is referring to is the charter school industry. During his tenure, Rosselló pushed through the first law allowing charter schools on the island, and after the bill passed, he continued to press for opening more charters. Now it seems his ousting, and the legacy of corruption he leaves behind, will likely damage prospects for the charter industry in Puerto Rico for some time.
‘Friends’ of Charters Take Charge
Much of the teachers’ disillusion with Rosselló goes back at least to December 2016 when then Governor-elect Rosselló appointed Julia Keleher to be the Puerto Rico secretary of education.
Keleher, a native of Philadelphia who barely speaks Spanish, was effectively already on the government payroll, as her firm Keleher & Associates had been awarded almost $1 million in contracts to consult on the island’s education system. Her outsized salary—$250,000 to oversee a system where the average teacher pay is only $27,000—also created controversy.
Shortly after taking office, Keleher pushed for a plan to close nearly 200 public schools across the island, which would have led to thousands of teachers losing their jobs. She also pledged to decentralize the school system and delegate school services, terms often used to introduce the idea of charter schools and other forms of public-private education partnerships.
Keleher’s proposals drew immediate pushback from multiple political factions on the island, but barely nine months into her tenure, she got the perfect opportunity to turn her proposals into policies when Hurricane Maria slammed the island. The storm inflicted $142 million in damages to schools, and 40 days after the storm, only 109 of Puerto Rico’s 1,100 schools had reopened.
Keleher repeatedly referred to the catastrophe as an “opportunity.”
A New Orleans-Style Agenda
While Keleher worked the policy channels to introduce charter schools to the island, teachers were in communities delivering aid and comfort.
Ortiz-Castillo recalls being a first-line responder to the widespread destruction. In her phone call to me, she describes traveling to devastated communities as part of the union’s outreach effort to use its extensive membership network to identify where parents and their children were struggling and advise where to direct supplies, food, and drinking water. Many schools became, essentially, relief centers.
Keleher seemed to have other priorities.
As Education Week’s correspondent on the ground in Puerto Rico reported, she was “diving deep into the lessons of loss and opportunity in previous natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005.”
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.
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.
Sometimes you have to use plain words to describe a theftin broad daylight.
Read Kentucky teacher Randy Wieck’s description of the broad-daylight theft of teachers’ pension funds and what this means, not only to teachers, but to school districts across the state.
The Kentucky public pension “deform” abomination signed by Governor Bevin July 24, 2019 – opposed by all Senate Democrats and 9 Republicans in the Kentucky Senate, deforms the pensions – it does not reform them.
The essential knife-thrusts to the heart of the government retiree pension are these:
1) It clips future hires from the plan (and future pay-ins).
2) It allows 118 quasi-governmental agencies (rape crisis centers; health departments, regional universities, etc.) to buy out of the retirement plan with only vague plans to pay off their 30-year pension deb.
The amounts owed are so large it is daft to think the agencies could meet their obligations without declaring bankruptcy and then consequently cutting the benefits of retirees…
By pushing the pension obligations on to individual school districts and thereby increasing the percentage of school-district budgets that must be paid into the pension plan they force the districts to seek cover in bankruptcy.
This will result in significant job losses:
To wit, Louisville, Kentucky, where I am a teacher, recently shut all of its outdoor summer pools; cancelled the most recent police recruit class; and shuttered several libraries to cover increased pension costs. School districts will have to follow suit if this fiscal breach of faith, if this crime – goes unchallenged in the courts, our last resort.
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%.
