That’s Right Nate

I have to admit, despite being a socialist, a communist, and a fascist sometimes President Obama comes up with a great idea.   Such an idea is Charter Schools week which will be observed this year between May 2nd and May 8th this year.   There will be no such day for ordinary public school students, but you know what they say about membership having its privileges.   I have been a big advocate of charter schools for some time now.  As President Obama said, “a world class education is our best avenue to prosperity.”

From Dennis Bakke at Imagine Schools to Green Dot’s Steve Barr to Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, these edu-preneurs have managed to use their charter schools to put them well on the road to prosperity.   Without pesky unions and local oversight, charters offer the savvy investor myriad opportunities to make a quick buck.  Why else would so many hedge fund managers and movers and shakers like Goldman-Sachs be so involved in the charter school movement.

While ordinary public schools will not be getting their own week, there will be several other important education weeks this Spring:

Dehumanizing Wealthy Schools Week – From Veronica Mars to Glee to the films of John Hughes, these schools provide us with one of our greatest resources — teen angst.   Sometimes when fitting in is impossible, you’ve just got to break all the rules. May 11-May 17

Tough Urban School with Only One Competent Adult – Whether it’s Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver, or Freedom Writers you better find that one adult.  While other teachers show up drunk and sleep through class, there is that one adult who cares and will tutor students in his/her own until 1AM.  May 18-24

Rural/Suburban School with a Cool Outsider – The White House will celebrate those schools where everything seemed boring until that one stranger moved in.   Maybe that stranger is the Fonz or maybe he just wants to dance in a town that’s forgotten how to party, but one thing’s for sure school will never be the same.  May 25- June 1.

Dennis Bakke is on top of the education world.   As the CEO of Imagine Schools, he oversees the fastest growing brand name in the education business with over 36,000 students at 74 schools in 12 states and the District of Columbia.   He is rightfully heralded as one of the leaders of the education reform movement.   The Washington Post lauded Mr. Bakke and his wife Eileen for winning a lawsuit to force Maryland to increase their funding for charter schools by over 60%.   Jason Botel, who directs KIPP charter schools in Baltimore, is one educator who knows what the Bakkes have accomplished. “Their funding of advocacy efforts has helped make sure that . . . charter schools like ours can provide a great education for children in Maryland,” he said.

Bakke has done quite well for himself and for other charter operators.  In fact, last year he donated $20,000 to Republican politicians in his own name.   He’s a member of The Family, a Christian organization that was recently in the news following several sex scandals.  What does Bakke owe his success too?  He sums up his philosophy in two words, “have fun”, which is a philosophy that has served Bakke well over the years.   In fact,  he wrote a book on it called “Joy at Work” which was a very successful publication.   The Bakkes say parents are attracted to their schools in part because of the emphasis on character. “We talk to the kids from Day One,” Eileen Bakke said. “What does it mean to be responsible? What does it mean to have integrity?”

One trick that Imagine Education has used was just revealed in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch in the form of a leaked email from Bakke to his top executives at Imagine Schools.  The email explains several tricks for picking the executive boards of Imagine Charter Schools carefully to avoid board members who feel, “ownership of the school. Many honestly believe it is their school and that the school will not go well without them steering the school toward “excellence”. They believe they are the “governing” Board even if that adjective to describe the board has never been used by an Imagine School person.”

The board members probably get this idea from local laws that usually require local residents govern the charter school.  There is an excellent article in the November 1st Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that shows how the entire charter process was manipulated by Bakke and Imagination Schools in opening up 4 chart schools in Fort Wayne Indiana.  The paper concluded that the advisory board makes no decisions and gives no advice, “Not the $87,510 a year to operate school buses. Not $114,871 to run a lunch program. Not which teachers are hired or whether to hold summer school, or even whether to borrow more than $1 million for operations.”

So how much money is Imagination Schools making on the for profit education game?  In Indiana the local contract required the schools there to give the parent company 12 cents on every tax  dollar they took in.   This seems to be a fairly standard contract for the company.   If they have 36,000 students and states are giving them on average about $6,000 per student simple math comes out to about $26 million tax free.   That’s good, but let’s face it you can barely pay the salary of one power hitting third baseman for that.    Fortunately, you can’t beat real estate for generating profits.

The Dallas News explained how Imagine’s real estate works.   The real estate arm of Imagine Schools is called Schoolhouse Finance:

In Nevada, the state awarded 100 Academy of Excellence in North Las Vegas a charter, and the school hired Imagine to run its educational services. Schoolhouse Finance, the Imagine subsidiary, paid for the school’s property and building construction. Schoolhouse Finance then leased the property to the charter school for $1.4 million a year.

Next, Schoolhouse Finance sold the $8 million property to a real estate investment trust, Kansas City, Mo.,-based Entertainment Properties Trust. The trust then leased the property back to Schoolhouse Finance at a lower rate than the charter school pays.

Money remaining after Schoolhouse Finance pays its lease to the trust goes to Imagine Schools Inc. This tiered lease system has led to 10 percent returns on investment for owners and investors in the two companies.

A principal in Indiana and another one in Las Vegas were fired after complaining to Imagine about rent that cost them approximately 40% of their operating budget.   Most charters pay 10-15% of their operating budget for rent if they don’t own the property outright.  This leaves the schools with very little money for things like books and teachers.    From May of 2008 until November of this year, Imagine went from 51 to 74 schools.   Yet, this year the teachers at the Imagine Charter School in Weston, FA were hit with pay cuts of up to 22 percent.

OK, I had to do another serious education story and yeah, it’s kind of dry with all the money talk.   Sometimes, outrage does overtake my desire for satire.   The point here is that in the world of for profit education, expanding is everything.   Whether you’re talking about KIPP, UNO, or any of the other charter school groups with multiple schools you have to follow the money.   Tax dollars that should be going to the children of this country, in too many cases are going to companies like this.   Is this really reform?  Is opening up more schools like this really a race to the top?

Today, Arne Duncan came to Chicago for a summit on youth violence with Mayor Daley.   I’m not actually, sure what made it a summit as community leaders were shut out from the event at Chicago’s posh Four Seasons Hotel, but Arne Duncan was able to proudly proclaim that the school reform he helped to implement was not part of the issue.

I am reminded of the great scene in Casablanca where Claude Raines as Major Renault announces he is shocked and appalled to find gambling going on at Rick’s place just as he’s being handed his gambling winnings.   It was with the same condescending arrogance that Duncan was able to declare himself innocent on all charges, but the spike in Chicago’s violence among teenagers since the beginning of Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 can’t be denied.  Through every step of the process of closing down the other schools around Fenger, parents warned Duncan that violence would happen if charters were allowed to open which would force the neighborhood kids to cross multiple gang territories.

It didn’t just happen at Fenger either.   All throughout Chicago, parents and community leaders have come out to warn about the dangers of this sort of school reform and at each school and each community they were ignored.   Daley then compounded matters this year by replacing the faculty and administration at Fenger in a wholesale house cleaning in the name of education reform.   Even the lunch ladies and janitorial staff were replaced.   The adults who had relationships with the students and could help keep tensions from boiling over were put out on the street.  The amazing thing about Renaissance 2010 isn’t that there has been a spike in violence, but that the spike hasn’t been even bigger.

The Obama administration’s big new Race to the Top education initiative, rewards states for opening more charter schools. Innovative charters have a place, but much of the charter movement has not been innovative nor successful.  Instead, public education has been privatized and the result is a two tiered system.  Whether they are allowed to or not, charters do not educate the most difficult students.  Those students wind up in the public schools.   As a country, we need to make sure that we do not have two educations systems–one for the privileged and one for everybody else.  Our country should be better than that.

As today is the the first day of school for many children in this country, I thought I’d address the charter school movement.  It is an area that I feel very strongly about and one that I hope we can all agree upon.   The support that these schools get from both the left and the right makes me believe that like the landmark No Child Left Behind legislation, this is something we can all get behind.  Education in this country is in a very sorry state.  If we are going to be able to compete with the top education countries in the world like Finland despite having higher childhood poverty than any industrialized country, but Mexico and an extremely high child mortality rate, we need to get our lazy teachers to do something. Charter Schools get public money, but are freed from the strict controls placed on public schools.  In this way they are like the brave folks of Blackwater or as they are now called Xe.

Charter Schools began for four noble reasons:

1. To replace the ineffective public education system with a profit-based system.
2. To give wealthy, involved, and politically connected parents a chance to separate their children from the less desirable children in their community.
3. To create an island of educational utopia because fixing the public schools would be way too much work.
4. To crush teacher’s unions.

Charter Schools have not been very successful in raising student achievement on standardized tests, but aren’t schools supposed to be about more than test scores?  KIPP for instance has managed to open 82 schools in 19 states in a relatively short amount of time.   The profit motive is a great incentive  to keep expanding.   The public schools don’t have this kind of incentive.

Teachers unions are crippling education.   Let’s face it.   Where else can you make 30K a year or more for watching a couple dozen adolescents for 6 or 7 hours, still get a 20 minute lunch, and take your work home with you instead of staying in a depressing cubicle until you’re finished.   Worst of all, like cops and firemen teachers have ridiculous due process rights that require a school district to prove that they’re incompetent in order to fire them.   In a charter school, they can fire you that day if your shoes and belt don’t match.  That’s the way corporate America is and that’s the way our schools should be.  Public schools also require teachers that work for them to be licensed and certified.   Charter schools are freed from this bureaucratic monopoly of the education process.

Chicago is currently in the middle of an educational renaissance.   In fact, the program Chicago has established is called Renaissance 2010.  I hope that former Chicago Superintendent Arne Duncan will bring this program national.   Every year, the city opens up 10-20 new charter schools and closes some public schools.  Conceivably, this educational miracle will be completed by next year and I can’t wait.   The Heritage Foundation and some other conservative think tanks have no trouble being for charter schools and being against a public option for health care because they don’t want to see public and private insurance competing.   On the other hand, I think the two issues are one and the same.   Public schools don’t work for the same reason public health care wouldn’t work.   More charters mean more profits and more profits mean more learning.