New Report Finds Over $200 Million in Fraud and Abuse at Charter Schools

“The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse” Exposes Costly Consequences of Lacking Charter Schools Accountability, Transparency

** Full report available here: http://bit.ly/1DDlpjM **

A new report by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) and the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) found that financial fraud, waste, and mismanagement by charter schools cost taxpayers more than $200 million in just 15 states—a significant increase from the more than $100 million in charter school financial fraud exposed in a similar report released by CPD last year.

To read the full report, go to: http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Charter-Schools-National-Report_rev2.pdf

“Charter schools act like they have a ‘get out of accountability free’ card,” said Jonathan Stith, director of the Alliance for Educational Justice and a spokesperson for AROS. “$200 million dollars that was supposed to go to schools and classrooms is just gone. And that's likely to be the tip of the iceberg, given the lack of transparency or standards applied to charter schools.”

“We will continue to have a charter school fraud problem until we address the root cause – the broken oversight systems that exist on a federal and state level,” said Kyle Serrette, the Director of Education for CPD. “Certainly not all charter school operators are fraudulent, but our system is not good at differentiating the sheep from the wolves in sheep’s clothing. That’s a problem, given the fact that taxpayers around the country are collectively spending over $20 billion a year on charter schools. Charter school parents, children, and taxpayers deserve better.”

Examples of charter fraud and mismanagement covered in the report include:

Washington, DC: The DC Public Charter School Board unanimously revoked the charter of Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School—which enrolled 1,600 students across three campuses and an online academy—after the school’s founder, Kent Amos, was accused of diverting funds from the school for his personal profit. Despite evidence that Amos—who is currently being sued by the DC Attorney General—diverted more than $14 million from the school in the last 10 years, the DC Public Charter School Board pointed to their limited ability to oversee for-profit management companies, which are often intertwined with non-profit charter schools and face no requirements to disclose salaries or other pertinent information that could prevent rampant fraud.

Michigan: In April 2014, Steven Ingersoll, founder of Grand Traverse Academy, was convicted of federal fraud and tax evasion. He did not report $2 million of taxable income in 2009 and 2010. The school’s audit revealed a $2.3-million prepayment to Ingersoll’s school management company. Ingersoll then used half of a $.8 million loan for school construction to pay down some of his debt to the school. After the founder’s ouster, his daughter-in-law continued to handle the finances of the school.

Ohio: In January 2015, the state auditor released a report of the results of unannounced visits by inspectors to 30 charter schools. In nearly half of the schools, the school-provided headcount was significantly higher than the auditors’ headcount. Schools are funded based on headcount, so these inflated figures amount to taxpayer dollars siphoned away from students. Among the seven schools with the most extreme variances between reported head count and the auditors’ headcount, almost 900 students were missing, at a cost of roughly $5.7 million. Auditors identified eight other schools with troubling, but less significant variances.

Additionally, in June 2014, a grand jury indicted the superintendent and 2 board members of Arise! Academy in Dayton of soliciting and accepting bribes in exchange for awarding a “lucrative” consulting contract to a North Carolina-based company. The contract was worth $420,919 and the charter personnel received kickbacks in the form of cash, travel, and payments to a separate business.

California: In July 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District performed a forensic audit of Magnolia Public Schools. They found that the charter-school chain used education dollars to pay for six non- employees’ immigration costs and could not justify $3 million in expenses over four years to outsource curriculum development, professional training, and human resources services that the school itself reported.

More examples of charter fraud & mismanagement here: http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Charter-Schools-National-Report_rev2.pdf

The report calls for a set of core reforms to end the hemorrhaging of public funds to fraudulent charter schools and also calls on state and federal lawmakers to act now to put systems in place to prevent fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement.

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The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) is a national coalition representing more than 7 million Americans who attend and work in public schools, and live in the communities most impacted by the ESEA.

New Report Finds Over $200 Million in Fraud and Abuse at Charter Schools by Robert D. Skeels

A Breath of Fresh Air from Denver

Denver will be hosting this year's United Opt Out event in a few weeks. This event was held on the front steps of the Department of Education building in Washington, DC for the past two years.

I am an employed social studies and history teacher now for 6th grade and a lot has changed in two years.

Finding a public school that is not suffering under the current policies is extremely difficult. However, the situation is unsustainable and the voices from all walks of life and society are getting louder. People are breaking free from the chains of NCLB and the cages of Common Core run by profiteers instead of educators. Everyone is tired of policies dictated by those who have never taught or spent time as a teacher in a classroom

Education activists continue meeting, learning, teaching and sharing ideas and strategies to end this madness once and for all and get rid of the test and punish accountability monster. An entire generation has been subjected to this public education nightmare that has destroyed schools and communities, teaching careers, families and the teaching profession itself. How about a few more civics classes and nutrition classes instead of more tests?

Some basic common sense would also be a lot less expensive than the cost of the next six weeks of testing ELL students, children of recent immigrants here in New Jersey who will be subjected to three weeks of testing and another three weeks of testing when they return from Spring break. Do we need all those hours of testing to figure out how these kids are doing?

Teachers desperate to hold on to jobs and benefits just follow orders or quit if they can. Principals and administrators are also feeling the heat and are either leaving, retiring or beginning to stand up and speak out. Is this a good use of funds when budgets are tight and money is scarce? Nothing like the bare reality of poverty and scarcity to wake people up to what is really important.

From the Denver Post: Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy in Lakewood and the author of "Energy Victory" (Prometheus, March 2009).

In short what we've managed to learn is that the children of doctors and lawyers do better on standardized tests than the children of day laborers and welfare recipients. This raises an interesting question: Why are we funding this program?

At a time when school funds are scarce, why are we wasting tens of millions of dollars per year statewide, and close to 20 percent of classroom time, on a testing program, only to find out nothing that we didn't know before? Does anyone actually believe that Evergreen students do better than Jefferson students because of the superior quality of the staff? If we switched school staffs, but kept the students in place, would the high scores move with the staffs or stay with the students? So, do we punish the teachers at the lower ranked schools because they are willing to take on the tougher jobs?

Bloomberg's Lies Must Now Be Settled on the Backs of Children

In 2006 the New York State Department of Education, in collaboration with Bloomberg's edu-goons in the City, decided amongst themselves to make it easier for New York children to pass the state test.  While this news was kept from the public, what did get publicized was Prince Mike's sudden decision the same year to end "social promotion."  The following year in 2007 New York City (and state) test scores soared, and, of course, the No Excuses CEO schoolmen had another piece of "evidence" to support the charter/privatization agenda and their pedagogical credo of "Punish Them and They Will Respond."

From Diane Ravitch's book, a must read for every teacher and parent on Earth:

Why did the number of students at level 1 [the lowest scorers] plummet?  Becase the state lowered the bar and made it easier for students to reach level 2.  On the sixth-grade reading test in 2006,students needed to earn 41 percent of the points to attain level 2; by 2009 students in that grade needed only 17.9 percent.  In seventh-grade math, students needed to earn 36.2 percent of the points on the test to advance to level 2 in 2006, but by 2009, they needed to earn only 22 percent.  The standards to advance from level 1 to level 2 dropped so low that many students could get enough correct answers to pass to level 2 by randomly guessing (p. 79).

Scores continued to soar through 2009, when Bloomberg squeaked out a re-anointment from the voters and the State as Prince of Schools for another term.  It couldn't have been done, however, without the help of fellow partners in crime, Gates and Broad (Ravitch, 2010, p. 80).

So now that Bloomberg's rule has been assured for years to come, it is time for the chickens to come home to roost, as they must, in preparation for the test score evaluation scheme that is being developed to kill off the teaching profession in Gotham and throughout the State (RTTT, anyone?).  After all, the need for the last charade is over, even as a new charade is about to begin.

Meanwhile, will anyone hold the Mayor accountable for the fact that at PS 179 in the Bronx the percentage of 3rd graders proficient in Math went from 91% to 21% in one year?  Will anyone be accountable for the hundreds of thousands of children's educational plans that were devised with nothing but phony data to use?

Don't count on it, for the Prince and his covey of yes men in Albany have already made an appeal to Duncan to keep the hundreds of suddenly-failing schools off the federal rhymes-with-hit list.  And with Gates and Broad giving Duncan his orders, who possibly to say no to such a request?

A clip from the Times article:

Applying new, tougher standards, state education officials said Wednesday that more than half of public school students in New York City failed their English exams this year, and 54 percent of them passed in math.

The results were in stark contrast to successes that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had heralded in recent years. When he ran for re-election in 2009, he boasted of state test scores that showed two-thirds of city students were passing English and 82 percent were passing math.

But state education officials said that performance was misleading because those scores were inflated by tests that had become easier to pass. The scores released on Wednesday were the first attempt to establish what the officials considered a more trustworthy measure of students’ abilities.

Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said she had encouraged teachers and parents to greet the news “not with disappointment and not with anger.”

“Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently,” she said. “These results will finally provide real, unimpeachable evidence to be used for accountability.” . . . .

Unimpeachable, indeed--Merryl Tisch should be retired to her principality, and parents and teachers should march on City Hall and camp out there until Bloomberg and Klein are impeached and the whole house-of-cards corporate education system is replaced with democratically-elected board members.