Charter School Funding and that Giant Sucking Sound

 Nice piece of commentary here:

. . . . Charter schools have two primary funding sources: one from the taxpayers and the other from investments often executed with little public knowledge of intent or interest. Specifically, investments from billionaires, private foundations, and hedge fund managers reap tax advantages when they donate large sums of money to charter schools. After tax codes were changed in the early 2000s, “banks and equity funds that invest(ed) in charter schools in underserved areas took advantage of a very generous tax credit,” HuffPost reported. “According to one analyst, the credit allows them to double the money they invested in seven years.”

The real estate industry also stands to benefit by promoting charter schools and helping them buy up property, or rent, in inner city communities.

As one example indicates, the Rocky Mountain Prep charter school chain in Denver  received $4.5 million from billionaire MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, in October 2022. Two months later, the KIPP charter school chain received $6 million from the same billionaire. These investments were in addition to the per pupil allocation these schools received from taxpayers in Denver.

When a child enrolls in a charter school, funds move from the public school to the charter school. Taxpayers may not be aware that their dollars are funding a structure that helps a private company or group of investors reap rewards or gain tax incentives. Moreover, the taxpayer may start to see their local neighborhood school struggling because the funds are flowing into the charter school.

Researchers have demonstrated that charter schools operate differently than their public-school counterparts. In their exhaustive study of charter schools, Kevin Welner and Wagma Mommandi describe 13 practices that many charter schools use to control their enrolment. These practices are not always regulated by state laws, and “when charter school enrollment is ‘biased’, it severely undermines our ability to compare funding, growth, or achievement.” . . . .

School Board Member Lays Out Cost of Charter Expansion

Recently the school board of Metro Nashville rejected three new charter applications.  Will Pinkston was one of those thoughtful and responsible school board members who voted with his constituents' interests in mind, rather than with the segregating ideologies of corporate education reform schoolers.

Here is Pinkston's recent op-ed in the Tennessean, which lays out his rationale for supporting public school children over corporate interests:

Recently, outgoing Mayor Karl Dean penned an op-ed in the Tennessean applauding the successes of a student and a charter school, KIPP Nashville.

I share his enthusiasm in congratulating the family and the school.

Now, let's discuss the 76,000 students and 5,500 teachers in Metro Nashville Public School Students (MNPS) who aren't in charter schools, but also deserve our support. MNPS is ranked 54th out of 67 urban school systems in America in per-pupil funding.

Due in part to inadequate state funding, we trail school systems in Atlanta, Charlotte and Louisville, among others.

Meanwhile, multiple studies — including an independent audit commissioned by the mayor and Metro Council — found that the unchecked proliferation of publicly funded, privately run charter schools is having a negative fiscal impact on existing schools at a time when the school system is turning around academically.

The MNPS charter pipeline — the number of charter seats not yet created but scheduled to come into existence under previously approved applications — now stands at 8,157 seats. That doesn't include the 8,112 seats that already exist in Nashville's 27 charter schools.

Put differently: The city's charter sector will double over the next few years, even if the Nashville School Board takes no further action.

And as state and local funding is redirected from MNPS to charters, our under-resourced existing schools will be further strained. Based in part on this negative fiscal impact, and the glut of yet-to-be-filled seats in the pipeline, the school board in August voted to slow down charter growth by denying two new applications from charter operator KIPP.

The operator now is threatening to appeal the decision to the State Board of Education to try to force the schools into existence.

The school board took a fiscally conservative position. With 8,157 seats currently in the charter pipeline — including more than 1,000 yet-to-be-filed seats belonging to KIPP — that's a total future annual cash outlay of $77.5 million.

What KIPP wants to do — expand the pipeline to more than 9,000 seats — would take our future annual cash outlays up to $85.5 million. None of this includes the $73 million in annual cash outlays for charter seats that already exist.

Even if the school board takes no further action, the annual cost of charter schools soon will exceed the combined price tag of the new Nashville Sounds baseball stadium and the new downtown riverfront amphitheater.

The only difference is the stadium and amphitheater are, for the most part, one-time capital expenses. When it comes to these thousands upon thousands of yet-to-be-filled charter seats, the ever-expanding bill will come due every year.

Any reasonable person must conclude that charter growth in Nashville is out of control. Moody's Investors Service, which rates the health of municipal finances, warned that charter schools pose "growing risks" for urban school systems.

Public opinion surveys show Nashville taxpayers are OK with having some charters. But they believe unchecked growth has gone too far and threatens to undermine improvement elsewhere in the school system. And they're right.

Family demand should be a bigger factor in these discussions. Most charters actually have minimal waiting lists. Meanwhile, our pre-kindergarten programs, magnet schools, Montessori schools and other schools and programs have thousands of kids stuck on waiting lists.

If we keep diverting large amounts of new revenue to charters, MNPS will never be able to work down those long waiting lists. And if we continue unchecked charter growth, we're not just undermining existing schools and programs due to the negative fiscal impact — we're denying student demand where it actually exists.

When it comes to students on pre-K waiting lists, students who need early grade reading intervention, English learners who need structured interventions: Charter advocates want us to tell them, "Get in line behind KIPP. You'll get yours, but only after KIPP gets theirs."

Personally, I don't think that's fair. Nashville's students and families deserve a balanced approach to expanding educational opportunities.

Will Pinkston represents South Nashville on the Metro Board of Public Education.

Charter School Segregation Week and the Celebration of Corporate Welfare

Below are some charts you might find useful in understanding how much money is being wasted on corporate efforts to use slave labor by disadvantaged children to fuel segregated and abusive charter school empires that are largely funded by state and federal governments. 

The goal by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools is a half-billion dollars a year from USDOE.  If the new ESEA now being considered becomes law, the numbers below will look like coffee money. 

From the Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch: (click to enlarge)

What many people don't realize about the paternalistic charter industry is that the real payoff is in real estate and the issuing of bonds to fund new capital and capital improvement programs.  In Memphis, for example, charter operators look for buildings worth renovating that can be bought for a song after Chris Barbic, the corporate skinhead in charge of the state office that hands out charter contracts, labels the target school as one for closure.  Shelby County Schools Supt. Dorsey Hopson serves as the local enabling corporate whore, who rubber stamps the Barbic choices.  

Big name charter chains that have abused their way to high test score bottom lines are lined up in Memphis and other cities for a chance to cash in with new contracts to open new chain gang "schools."  Renovation as well as new facilities funding is made possible by issuing tax-sheltered bonds, which has become a new growth industry for Wall Street investors.  

Below are three slides from a slide presentation recently presented online by the Bond Buyer (yes, I signed up for a free introductory membership):

Will Shelby County Commission Oppose Charter Schools?

The Shelby County Commissioners voted recently to oppose the voucher bills that are chasing each other through the TN state legislature this year.  They are concerned, they say, about the $70 million in public ed dollars that would be lost as students attend private schools with their $5,000 per child vouchers.

There has to be another reason for the opposition.  If the Commission was concerned about the financial integrity of the public school system, why have they not already passed a resolution against charter schools?

 After all, Shelby County already has approximately 18,000 students in charter schools now.  At $9,000 per child, that's $162,000,000 per year in public dollars going to privately-managed corporate charter schools.  By next year, we could see that number go over $200 million.  

Which Commissioner's hair is on fire about that hole in funding donut??

TRACK ME!

When corporate education antiquarians reformers talk about the virtues of charter schools, high on their list is charter freedom from bureaucratic red tape and regulations that rule the "government" schools.  Without such restrictions, the story goes, charter schools are free to innovate, adapt to changing needs locally, and improve learning.  Sounds great, right?

What this means in reality is that charter school corporations, both nonprofit and forprofit, are unconstrained in opening schools in any discarded shell of a building, without libraries, gyms, art rooms, clinics, or any of the other humanizing elements we associate with public schools in the suburbs.   They are also without restraint in the way they hire and fire teachers without due process, unregulated in the way they deal with parents or keep their books, and most importantly, they are unregulated in the way they run these urban reform schools based on a 19th Century instructional model and an 18th Century behavioral catechism.

 Children with special education plans (IEPs) are left without special education teachers, and children who cannot read are dumped into classes where all children are treated with the same distant disregard that the lockdown behavioral system requires.

I recently visited one of these chain gangs (location anonymous to protect the person who made my visit possible), where I found these same realities.  What impressed me first was the "library," which was comprised of a single deserted cart, and not a book cart, of paperbacks in the most distant corner of the commons area on the first floor.

I saw classes run by TFA teachers who acted more like detached prison guards than teachers.  The closest they came to students was to sign their discipline forms that offenders carried from class to class. Their most obvious concern was a form of behavior that required total compliance, and in one class a sixth grader who could not read looked on as the over-animated TFAer expostulated on the vagaries of correlative conjunctions.  When a child's attention strayed from the "teacher," she responded with a sharp "TRACK ME!  All students snapped to attention in their seats, leaning forward slightly with hands folded, and staring intently at the teacher as she moved across the front of the room.

So while the students in these schools that no middle class parent would allow their children are doing lots of TRACKING, we find now what we knew all along:  no one, from the U. S, Dept. of Ed on down, is tracking the scammers and corporate welfare kings whose school businesses are draining public school coffers while effectively resegregating African-American children in corporate-run reform schools.  (Remember the $212,000,000 hole that will be created in Memphis during the next five years for the massive charter expansion?)

Yesterday a story emerged on a recent federal audit of the U. S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) run by corporate stooge, Jim Shelton.  In recent years the OII, which is directed by Gates and Broad, has gone all in on charters as the best tool for segregated corporatization of urban schools.  Since 2007, OII has handed over $909,000,000 to state education agencies (SEAs) and others (non-SEAs) to open and run charter schools.  And true to the Wall Street philosophy of free and unrestricted greed, the OII has provided no oversight, no regulation, and almost no guidance for the hundreds of millions OII is shoveling to the corporate welfare kings who are operating these urban penal schools. Click chart to enlarge.

Below is the sobering summary of the OIG report findings, which will be presented in more detail in the coming days.  You may download the report here.

We determined that OII did not effectively oversee and monitor the Charter School Program grantees and did not have an adequate process to ensure SEAs conducted effective oversight and monitoring over subgrantees. Specifically, OII did not have an adequate corrective action plan process in place to ensure grantees were correcting deficiencies noted in annual monitoring reports, did not have a risk-based approach for selecting non-SEA grantees for monitoring, and did not adequately review SEA and non-SEA grantees’ fiscal activities. We also found that OII did not provide the SEAs with adequate guidance on the monitoring activities they were to conduct in order to comply with applicable Federal laws and regulations. In addition, OII did not ensure SEAs developed and implemented adequate monitoring procedures for properly handling a charter school closure. Specifically, OII did not ensure SEAs had procedures to properly account for SEA grant funds spent by closed charter schools and disposition of assets purchased with SEA grant funds in accordance with Federal regulations (p. 9).

Wall Street Banksters Giving Big to Elect Mark Pollard and Other Corporate Charter Advocates

With the caps off contributions, the charterites and the ed industry are going all in to corner the three-quarters of a trillion dollars that Americans spend each year on education.  Notice that Pollard can no longer remember any names from his Park Avenue meetings.  From the NYTimes:

Mark H. Pollard was a little-known candidate for New York State Senate in Brooklyn facing the herculean feat of ousting a 26-year incumbent. But then he got an unexpected telephone call saying that a group of wealthy investors who supported charter schools wanted to meet with him.

So in June, Mr. Pollard, a Democrat, found himself in Manhattan, sipping wine on a Park Avenue patio with people whose names he can no longer recall. Then “the checks started rolling in,” he said, and by July he had received more than $100,000.

“They made my campaign viable,” said Mr. Pollard, a lawyer who supports the charter school movement. The windfall has made him a legitimate contender, allowing him to hire a veteran campaign manager and print thousands of pamphlets. . . .

Cutting Imagine a Check

You've got to be kidding. From the Journal Gazette:

Grant to help pay rent at Imagine

Devon Haynie | The Journal Gazette

The Imagine MASTer Academy on Wells Street has received a unique federal grant the school will use to help pay its rent.

As part of the grant, the school will receive $229,800 each year for five years, Jason Bryant, vice president of Imagine Schools, told the board Wednesday. Bryant said Indiana and California were the only states to receive the federal money, earmarked for charter schools. He said Indiana was given $30 million for the program.

“This is a very unique situation, historically,” said Guy Platter, regional director for Imagine Schools. Platter and Bryant said the board will use the money to pay rent so that it can free up money in the schools’ general fund for staff salaries and other expenses.

[Continued]

Remember: Imagine MASTer Academy was put on probation just a few months ago by their authorizer after the good folks at the Journal Gazette wrote up a three-part series on the various troubles with the school [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3].

Imagine MASTer teachers are paid over $10k less than their Indiana counterparts.

Here's a quick rundown of where the money is really going at Imagine MASTer Academy: $342,757 in "professional services" to Imagine Schools, Inc. (the for-profit arm), $746,144 for occupancy (owned by Entertainment Properties Trust), and according to their most recent 990 tax form (07-08), the school was operating $268,711 in the red. For a little more icing on this cake, the 990 also says the school owed $760,513 for "capital lease obligations" to - you guessed it - Imagine Schools, Inc.