College Students' Answers to These Basic Questions Will Shock You — Yeah, They're Pretty Stupid

These "students" know more about celebrities than they do about basic history and politics.  This is why Wall Street wants to start so many charter schools - To make Americans even stupider.—Ronald David Jackson

White Privileged 'History' With Some Supremacy Thrown In: Slaves Called 'Immigrant Workers' in History Textbook

You would expect this type of nonsense in a history book published by the Tea Party or the Koch Brothers — But a major publisher like McGraw-Hill?  This is what happens when supremacists maintain control of textbook publishing.

According to McGraw-Hill, these were mere "immigrant workers." 
And we're supposed to believe this was a mere "oversight."
Maybe they should have read my textbook

By Melonyce McAfee
Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill will rewrite a section in one of its books after a Houston-area mother complained that it whitewashes the role of slavery in bringing Africans to America.

Roni Dean-Burren took to Facebook last week to vent her frustration over the wording of a passage in her son's "World Geography" textbook that calls African slaves "workers" and "immigrants."

"The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers ... notice the nuanced language there. Workers implies wages ... yes?" she wrote.

Dean-Burren's post gathered a lot of attention; a subsequent video sparked spirited feedback and had drawn 1.4 million page views on Facebook as of Sunday.

McGraw-Hill heard the outcry, reviewed the section and concluded that the wording doesn't live up to the publisher's standards.

"We believe we can do better," McGraw-Hill posted on its Facebook page Friday. "To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor."

The edits will appear in the online version of the book immediately and will be included in the book's next printing.

"This is change people!!! This is why your voices matter!!!" Dean-Burren posted on Facebook.

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Charter Schools Are Failing — The Evidence is Mounting: Here's the Latest Findings

Charters are underperforming, many charter systems are mired in fraud, and charters won't tell us what they're doing

Photo by Steven Depolo.

By PAUL BUCHHEIT
In early 2015 Stanford University's updated CREDO Report concluded that "urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers."

This single claim of success has a lot of people believing that charter schools really work. But there are good reasons to be skeptical. First of all, CREDO is funded and managed by reform advocates. It's part of the Hoover Institution, a conservative and pro-business think tank funded in part by the Walton Foundation, and in partnership with Pearson, a leading developer of standardized testing materials. CREDO director Margaret Raymond is pro-charter and a free-market advocate.

The 2015 CREDO study received much of its input, according to a Louisiana source, from the New Orleans Recovery School District and charter promoter New Schools for New Orleans, who together had "embarked on a bold, five-year journey to standardize, validate and export the New Orleans charter restart model...addressing the problem of failing schools by restarting them with schools operated by charter operators."

Regarding national findings, a review of the CREDO study by the National Education Policy Center questioned CREDO's statistical methods: for example, the study excluded public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus "introducing a bias against the best urban public schools."

Charters Are Underperforming

The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by other recent studies, one of them by CREDO itself, which found that in comparison to traditional public schools "students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics." Another recent CREDO study of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher scores in reading but lower scores in math.

In a study of Chicago's public schools, the University of Minnesota Law School determined that "Sadly the charter schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker."

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High Stakes Testing Goes Mega — With Predictable End Result: Billion Dollar Exam Scam in India — Dozens of Potential Witnesses Dead

In this Wednesday, March 18, 2015 file photo, Indians climb the wall of a building to help students appearing
in an examination in Hajipur, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Education authorities in eastern India say
600 high school students have been expelled after they were found to have cheated on pressure-packed 10th
grade examinations.

By Rama Lakshmi
Nobody knows exactly when or why the witnesses and small-time crooks caught up in one of India’s biggest corruption scandals began dying under mysterious circumstances. But in the past two years, that’s what’s happened to more than two dozen people implicated in a $1 billion test-rigging scheme.

RELATED STORY: Chicago Teachers Union Breaks With Common Core -- High-Stakes Standardized Testing Doesn't Deliver Equity -  It Reinforces Inequity

Even by standards in India, where corruption is routine, the scale of the scam in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is mind-boggling. Police say that since 2007, tens of thousands of students and job aspirants have paid hefty bribes to middlemen, bureaucrats and politicians to rig test results for medical schools and government jobs.

So far, 1,930 people have been arrested and more than 500 are on the run. Hundreds of medical students are in prison — along with several bureaucrats and the state’s education minister. Even the governor has been implicated.

RELATED STORY: Does Today Show Know Michelle Rhee's Record? -- The Corporate Education Lobbyist Was At the Center of a Cheating Scandal

RELATED STORY: "Everything You've Been Told About the 'Common Core' Curriculum is a Lie": Federal, State and Local Education Specialists Had Little Input — Its An Initiative Funded by Bill Gates to Create Compliant, Dumbed Down Citizens — Video

Police have had their hands full racing to meet a July deadline in the criminal probe. And now they are faced with the deaths of more witnesses and suspects. In the past week, police said, one of those accused died after having chest pains in prison, another drowned in a village pond and a third died of a liver infection.

On Saturday, television reporter Akshay Singh died while investigating a suspect’s death. Singh sipped tea during an interview and began coughing and foaming at the mouth, according to media reports. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors said he had suffered a heart attack. Police said the initial examination did not reveal anything “suspicious.”

(5/7/15) Candle light vigil demanding justice for late journalist Akshay Singh held in Varanasi pic.twitter.com/lSdKjTgbC7

— ANI (@ANI_news) July 6, 2015

The state’s government, run by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has said that “no conspiracy was found” in the recent deaths. But others involved in the case fear otherwise. The state’s chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, said on Sunday that his mind is in “agony and pain” and promised that all the deaths will be investigated.

“The police say they keep coming up against a wall in their investigation every time someone is found dead,” said Chandresh Bhushan, chairman of the special investigation team that was appointed by the state court to monitor the police probe. “We ask them, ‘Why are so many dying in road accidents in this case? Does this have any link to the scam?’ There is no evidence of a link yet, but we cannot overrule it, either.”
Cheating on school and college tests is commonplace in India. A few months ago, photographs of parents hanging precariously from school windows to throw cheat sheets to their children caused nationwide outrage.

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The Great Charter School Rip-Off: Report Shows They're Awful — And Folks Are Finally Catching On

Charter schools are supposed to "prove their worth" periodically by demonstrating the achievement of their students — or get shut down when their charters come up for renewal.  But while public schools are being closed all across the country for perceived failures, many failing charter schools have remained unaccountable and open.

By Jeff Bryant
Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”

A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance.

RELATED STORY: The ‘Separate-but-Equal’ Charter School Scam

But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.

In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.

But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.

Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for millions of students, their families, and their communities. And what political leaders ought to be doing – rather than spouting unfounded platitudes, as Clinton did, about “what works” – is putting the brakes on a deal gone bad, ensuring those most affected by charter school rollouts are brought to the bargaining table, and completely renegotiating the terms for governing these schools.

Charter Schools As Takeover Operations

The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.

After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions.”

In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.

Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of students in the New Orleans all-charter system is obtainable only by “jukin the stats” or, as the NPR reporter put it, through “a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice.” As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek a year ago, “the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.”

Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. So school districts that have not had the “benefit,” according to Arne Duncan, of a natural disaster like Katrina, are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.

School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).


The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.

The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.

The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.

None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s bets for our kids.”

[...]

What Happened To Charter School Accountability?

Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more “accountable” to the public are turning out to be anything but.

As an article for The Nation recently observed, “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque.”

The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.”

Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources.

In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.”

This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label.

If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what’s required, Noguera concluded is “greater transparency and collaboration with public schools.”

Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.

This report, “Public Accountability for Charter Schools,” published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, “recommends changes to state charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to the communities served,” according to the organization’s press release.

According to the report, these recommendations are the product of “a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders” from Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and other cities, who have “first-hand experience and years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to assess impact.”

These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.

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It’s Time to Take the Curriculum Back From Dead White Men

Leopold II (right) and Cecil Rhodes were responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans,
yet they are often treated as "heroes" in books and school curriculum.

By Sarah Pett
Dead white men rule the roost at South African and British universities. They preside over open spaces and lecture halls. They clog up reading lists and dominate the syllabus, particularly in subjects like philosophy and English literature.
In eight years of university teaching in the United Kingdom and South Africa, I have had to cover works by Malory, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Eliot, Sophocles, Ovid, Homer, Beckett, Joyce, Hopkins, Heaney, Anouilh and … more Shakespeare. In all that time, I’ve been required to teach literary texts by just three women, also dead and white: Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen.

Why isn't my professor black? UCL panel discussion.

Outside of the courses I have designed myself, only one person of colour – Naguib Mahfouz – has featured in my required teaching. Academics can suggest additional texts and offer optional modules but not all students will delve deeper in their own time or explore authors not included on the required reading list.

In South Africa and the UK, students who want diverse, transformative education are growing increasingly restive. Their first target was not an author or theorist, but an entirely different sort of dead white man.

Toppling Rhodes from his plinth

For 81 years, a statue honouring British mining magnate, politician and committed colonialist Cecil John Rhodes occupied a perch on the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) campus. But on March 9 this year the statue’s silent contemplation was interrupted when 30-year-old student Chumani Maxwele threw a bucket of human faeces over the statue and sparked a movement, #RhodesMustFall.

Rhodes openly derided black people and foreshadowed the formal introduction of apartheid as far back as 1894, when he told the Parliament of Cape Town:

I hold that the natives should be apart from white men, and not mixed up with them … We fail utterly when we put natives on an equality with ourselves.

UCT students, staff and alumni argued that a man like Rhodes did not deserve a monument at one of Africa’s top universities. The statue, they insisted, was a physical reminder of just how little the institution had changed from the days when it only served white students.

Their complaints struck a national chord. One month after Maxwele’s pungent protest, Cecil John Rhodes was evicted from UCT.

Students in the UK are also questioning the lack of diversity in higher education. They are asking: “why isn’t my professor black?” and “why is my curriculum white?”. These are not new questions. Calls for transformation are as much a hallmark of higher education as it is a resistance to change.

But in the era of social media, student activists are armed with more efficient and powerful tools than ever before. The message to universities, carried on platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter, is clear: engage with these issues – or get left behind.

After the fall

The Rhodes monument seems an apt metaphor for the looming presence of certain authors, texts and narratives in the humanities and social sciences. The problem is that they are not as easily dislodged as statues. If we want to build on what movements like #RhodesMustFall have achieved and really decolonise universities, it’s time for dead white men to stop controlling things.

Altering the curriculum is a necessary part of this change. That doesn’t mean Shakespeare should pack his bags and leave universities once and for all. It simply requires a different way of teaching – and here’s how it can be done.

1. Academics and their students must engage with English being a language born of and sustained by migration and cross-cultural contact both in Britain and overseas. This narrative must be a central part of the curriculum, from the very beginning of the literary studies degree.
2. We must acknowledge the power structures that have allowed some people to contribute to the canon while keeping others out. These structures have also preserved certain texts while ignoring others. We must also explain the role universities have played in this selection process.

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Charter School Industry Strong-Arms Public Officials: $3.3 Billion Spent — Who Knew Charter Schools Were So Profitable?

By Jonas Persson
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has pledged to tighten controls of its quarter-billion-dollar-a-year charter schools program—a program repeatedly criticized by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for waste and inadequate financial controls, as CMD has helped document in this special report series.

Just last year, ED required that states applying for grants in 2015 submit a plan on how they are going to hold charter schools and their authorizers accountable. This provision made its way to a bipartisan bill, introduced in April this year by Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), which requires that states explain how authorizers are held accountable when applying for funding. But as long as their applications are primarily evaluated based on how little control they have over the charter schools, paying lip service to accountability is unlikely to stem the flow of millions going into corporate coffers with no public disclosure.

The tally of charter school fraud, aided and abetted by the "flexibility" promoted by ED, stands at $200 million in 15 states alone—a figure that is likely just the "tip of the iceberg," as the Center for Public Democracy pointed out in a 2015 report. And worryingly, the new "accountability" provision is likely to prove just as toothless as prior pledges to the same effect.

In fact, state applications, as CMD has shown, have literally received the highest possible marks for a putative commitment to holding charters accountable despite the fact that they had no authority whatsoever to monitor charter schools spending.

This Orwellian formula in which no accountability translates to full accountability (and the highest score possible) can be chalked up to the fact that ED recruits its reviewers from within the charter school industry—an industry that has been fighting tooth and nail to dismantle even the semblancce of safeguards.

State oversight, charter school advocates argued in dozens of public comments to the new 2014 rules, is anathema to the idea of charter schools. But they failed to mention that this "idea," which is taken straight out of the ALEC playbook, lends itself to fraud and waste.

Charter Schools Use Their Growing Power to Push Back on Controls

Here is a snapshot that reveals how charter school associations, authorizers, and state departments of education divisions captured by pro-charter advocates have reacted to federal efforts to seek more accountability:

• The California Department of Education: “We strongly recommend that Selection Criteria (g) [i.e. “Oversight of Authorized Public Chartering Agencies”] be removed from the requirements or given a very low value in the scoring process. This criterion assumes that authorized public chartering agencies are providing inadequate or ineffective oversight and that SEAs have the statutory authority to monitor, evaluate, and hold accountable the public chartering agencies.”
• The National Association of Charter School Authorizers argued that states with “high-quality” authorizers should not be required to exercise any oversight of these: “Quality authorizer oversight in this context may be limited to transparent reporting by the authorizers on their practices and the quality of their portfolios … with little direct involvement from the state in the authorizers’ work.”
• Ohio Department of Education: “Ohio’s policy is grounded in the principle of autonomy [and] independence of action.” “Ohio strongly recommends that authorizer diversity, including the authorizer’s ability to apply its judgment and discretion to contracting decisions be regarding as a strength, not a deficiency.” The system relies on “authorizers holding themselves accountable.”
• The Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers assured the OII that state authorizers authorize themselves through a self-imposed accreditation system. “This system improves accountability and authorizing practices while allowing authorizers to retain autonomy to make independent decisions.”
• The Illinois State Board of Education argued that authorizer accountability should be downplayed; instead the focus should be on a “diverse” team of players, including authorizers and for-profit management companies.
• National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: The organization recommends “Revisions to authorizer oversight selection criteria that may impede the development of new, innovative charter school models.”
• D.C. Public Charter School Board: “We ask that the NPP be modified to allow PCSB to continue its successful practices, and, more broadly, to provide authorizers flexibility in their approach to addressing important equity and fiscal issues. Moreover, we believe that adding school-specific objectives in these areas may infringe on charter school autonomy as well as create unnecessary reporting burdens on the schools.”
• Charter Schools Development Center: “First, the proposed priorities favor a very strong SEA role in driving both (1) statewide charter school strategy and (2) authorizer quality and oversight. This approach does not align to many states’ laws or context, including California’s, where the state charter statutes were purposefully drafted to minimize the SEA’s role in the charter school sector.” “[W]e suggest deleting this third priority in its entirety.”
   

Other Examples of How the Charter Industry Tries to Strong-Arm State Officials that Dare to Hold Them Accountable

CMD’s open records requests to states have resulted in some illuminating exchanges illustrating how charters and their authorizers are flexing their muscle with state authorities in an effort to wrest even more power from the hands of politically accountable officials.
For example:

• Utah:  Last year, Bryce Adams, Senior Director of State Relations at the Connections Academy chain of online charter schools, exerted pressure on Utah school officials. When the state tightened its regulations by prohibiting schools from outsourcing their student records to third parties, Adams submitted a corporate line-by-line rewrite of the law. He also issued a warning: if the law is not changed, “student achievement” will suffer. From 2012 to 2014, Utah Connections Academy received $643,792 in federal funds, according to state receipts reports.
  

How much public money underwrote the Academy’s lobbying—or that of other charter operators—to prevent regulation of how public money is spent is unknown.

• New York State: When the payment for a CSP grant for a new charter school in upstate New York was delayed last year amid serious concerns that a school subcontractor owed more than $25,000 in unpaid wages, the head of the school, Finn Academy, reached out to the State Education Department by phone, and became—in the words of an official—“abusive.”
  A supervisor had to tell her staff to “work via email only with HER.” As if this were not enough, the Director of School Applications at the State University of New York’s Charter School Institute, the school authorizer, emailed the Department “with a potentially annoying question.” He wanted to get the ball rolling and the money to be paid out with no delay.
  Finn Academy is still set to open its doors in August 2015, although the head of that charter has given assurances that the subcontractor in question will not be used.
  
  
• Colorado: In 2013, Children’s Kiva Montessori in Cortez, CO, was awarded a $189,000 start-up grant under the federal CSP program. In October 2014, a former business manager at the school sounded the alarm in an email to the Colorado Department of Education:  “I’d like to pass-on some thoughts on what criteria you want to consider when evaluating future charter school applications: Does anyone directing the school actually have some knowledge about federal and state employment laws?” he wrote. He then listed some of the violations he had encountered:

They had no means to actually process and pay a payroll. The CCSP Grant that had been approved is a reimbursement grant and they only had $1,000 +/- in the bank.
They had not applied-for a Colorado Tax ID.
They had not applied-for a Colorado Unemployment Insurance Account.
They did not have a PERA Account.
They did not have an Employers Liability (Workers Comp) Insurance Policy.

The Grant Manager with the Colorado Department of Education replied that this “is not typical or appropriate,” and went on to send an email to the Colorado League of Charter Schools as “potential feedback … to consider for your quality criteria document.“

The program manager with the Colorado League of Charter Schools wrote back, demanding that she “rescind the statement … ‘you are right that the arrangement you outlined below is not typical or appropriate.’”

She went on to say that the business manager was let go for mismanagement, and that he was the one in charge of implementing the processes he complained of.

She later added: “some of this may not be out of the ordinary, especially depending on the exact wording that covers these areas contractually. Charters are always so interesting!”

Conclusion

Charters are more than “interesting.” The anti-regulatory environment surrounding their operations and the lack of real consequences for a stunning array of unaccountable spending of public tax dollars are astonishing and must be reformed.

CMD's review of audits and open records material reveals a deep fault line between, on the one hand, the pious pledges by lawmakers and the U.S. Department of Education that charter schools and their authorizers be held accountable, and, on the other hand, the reality on the ground.

The charter schools program was not designed with accountability and transparency in mind. Quite the contrary. It was created to provide incentives for states to create a separate system of schools that are exempt from state oversight, and do not answer to locally elected school boards. States are judged based on how much "flexibility" charter achools and authorizers are enjoy. It is true that they must also pay lip service to "accountability," but this rubric is rubber stamped by reviewers recruited from within the charter school industry. And once a state has been awarded tens on millions, it is then monitored for compliance by a company with close ties to the charter industry.

Patchwork provisions did not change things in the past; they are unlikely to do so now. Until the charter schools program receives a complete ovehaul, a moratorium on charter funding—rather than a 48 percent increase—is warranted.

This is the fifth installment in a CMD special report on waste and lack of accountability in the quarter-million-a-year federal chart schools program Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. This serialized version expands on the original report as new findings have come to light.

Reprinted with permission from PRWatch.

Civil Disobedience Used by Colorado Students Against School Board That Sought To Censor Lessons On Civil Disobedience

Students from Columbine High School protest proposed changes to AP History curriculum last week.
(Photo: John Lebya/@presto89/Twitter)

By Deirdre Fulton
Protesting the conservative school board's efforts to censor their history curriculum, more than a dozen students were escorted out of a Jefferson County Board of Education meeting in Colorado on Thursday night after disrupting proceedings by reading from their history textbooks and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

The students employed one of the very tactics that school board member Julie Williams was seeking to downplay through a proposed curriculum review committee: civil disobedience. In late September, Williams' proposal—to establish a committee to ensure that the district's history texts promoted positive aspects of the United States and avoided encouragement of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—prompted mass student walk-outs and teacher 'sick-outs.'

Many of the students involved in Thursday evening's action were organizers of the September protests.

According to Chicago Public Radio, "the disruptions started when board members refused to let students speak, after they didn’t speak in the order they were called. A few minutes later, one student after another stood up in the public meeting, reciting historic acts of civil disobedience from history textbooks."

The report continues:

When asked to leave the room, students at the podium left or were escorted out peacefully. After another group of students read aloud from history books and were escorted out, about a dozen students stood up in the packed meeting to read the Pledge of Allegiance. They then filed out.

Along with the students were “legal consultants,” law students taking descriptive notes of the scene. That didn’t please one security guard who lobbed several insults at the law students.

Standing in a circle outside the education building, a set of sprinklers suddenly came on. When the students moved out of the way, those sprinklers came on. The pattern repeated until all the sprinklers were on but the students didn’t leave. A security officer came out and informed the group that they were trespassing.

Student organizer Ashlyn Maher, a member of the recently formed JeffCo Student Network for Change, didn't get a chance to speak at Thursday's meeting. She posted her speech on Facebook.

"Our problem is that you, the board majority, passed a redundant, and highly opposed curriculum review committee because you have other motives," Maher said. "You want to limit what we learn so you can push your own political opinion. Our problem is that the nation you want to build consists of people who cannot think critically. We as students want to develop our minds. Critical thinking is our ticket to the future. Do not limit what we learn...Do not try to fool us...Do not pretend that patriotism is turning a blind eye and a passive mind to the changing world around us."

Chalkbeat Colorado reports that "as part of their demonstration, the students said they had four demands: a public apology from the school board’s conservative majority for referring to students as 'union pawns;' a reversal of an earlier decision to amend content review policies; proof from the board that they listen and act on community input instead of what students called an 'ideological' agenda; and more resources for classroom instruction."

Watch security guards take books away from the students in the video of the action below:

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

Charter-School Chain In North Carolina Says Administrator Salaries Are A 'Trade Secret' — The State Disagrees

Second graders work through problems at the Columbus Charter School, in Whiteville,
N.C. The school is part of the charter schooI chain investigated by ProPubIica last
month. (Travis Dove for ProPublica)

By Marian Wang, ProPublica
The North Carolina State Board of Education has issued a warning to a charter-school chain for failing to comply with an agency order to disclose the salaries of school administrators. The schools have been put on "financial probationary status," which could lead to sanctions if their board does not comply within 10 business days.

This is the same charter-school chain, Charter Day School, Inc., that ProPublica wrote about last month. As we reported, the four charter schools channel millions in public education dollars each year to for-profit companies owned by the schools' founder, businessman Baker Mitchell. One of the for-profit companies, Roger Bacon Academy, is paid to run all the day-to-day operations of the schools. As we wrote:

Roger Bacon Academy functions as the schools' administrative arm, taking the lead in hiring and firing school staff.

It handles most of the bookkeeping. The treasurer of the nonprofit that controls the four schools is also t he chief financial officer of Mitchell's management company. The two organizations even share a bank account.

Mitchell's management company was chosen by the schools' nonprofit board, which Mitchell was on at the time — an arrangement that is illegal in many other states.

Charter schools, which are privately run but government-funded, often outsource back-office functions to private companies. At issue between North Carolina and Mitchell's charter-school chain is the extent to which regulators can demand to know what happens to public dollars once they move into the coffers of a private company.

State officials say they have the right to ask for information related to the schools' activities and programs – and that includes salaries of any employees assigned to work at them. Other charter schools in North Carolina have complied and turned over this information. Mitchell's schools are the only ones that have not.

In an earlier response to regulators, the schools' board chairman, John Ferrante, stated that the schools are "contractually bound to preserve [the management company's] trade secrets." He also said that the nonprofit does not actually have the salary information for management company employees.

In a letter sent by the management company to Ferrante, Mitchell's company said it would turn over the salary information so long as regulators sign an agreement to recognize the information as confidential and exempt it from public disclosure.

Through Ferrante, Mitchell declined to comment on regulators' latest demand for salary information.

On his blog and in earlier interviews with ProPublica, Baker Mitchell has maintained that private companies operating charter schools should not have to be transparent about their financials or publicly disclose what they pay their employees.

If you have information about charter schools and their profits or oversight — or any other tips — email us at charters@propublica.org.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

The Corporate Takeover of Pennsylvania Schools: Cabal of Right-Wing Millionaires are the Power Players Behind the Operation

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett: An example of the
kind of garbage big corporations are funding into
office. (Photo from Center for Media & Democracy
Report)

By Center for Media and Democracy
Since he was elected into office in the Republican wave of 2010, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has pursued an agenda straight out of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s playbook.

Corbett led the effort to adopt one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation (a measure later halted by the courts); signed new “Stand Your Ground” legislation based on the ALEC/NRA model; supported ALEC bills to undermine the federal Affordable Care Act; and backed ALEC-inspired legislation geared toward making it harder for consumers to seek justice in Pennsylvania courts. Like ALEC, Corbett has consistently opposed minimum wage increases and attacked unions, this year with a verbatim ALEC “Pay
-
check Protection” bill. Now he is attempting to privatize the state’s pension plan, another ALEC priority that would gamble the saved retirement of teachers and other public employees on Wall Street. But it is Corbett’s corporatist schools agenda that is haunting him today. Corbett cut $1.1 billion from education in his 2011 budget, and since taking office he has attempted to starve the state as well, signing legislation that cut taxes on businesses by about $1.2 billion, reports the Washington Post

Corbett and his allies in the state legislature have dished up bill after bill from the ALEC library to create new voucher schools, further subsidize charter and cyber schools, demonize teachers, and weaken unions. Hardest hit have been the children, especially in cities like Philadelphia. One-third of the cuts in the 2011-2012 budget fell on the Philadelphia school district, resulting in the closure of 23 schools, the firing of over 3,000 staff, and a big jump in class sizes.

READ THE FULL REPORT

Reprinted with permission from PRWatch.

Minority Teens Under Siege in Public Schools: Discriminatory Disciplinary Practices Are Rampant

A sweeping lawsuit filed in Kern County, Calif., late last week alleges that African-American and Latino high school students suffer discrimination from disciplinary practices that remove them at disproportionate rates from regular school and place them in inferior alternative settings.

By Susan Ferriss
The Center for Public Integrity in 2011 reported that Kern County, in the Golden State’s Central Valley, had the highest rate of student expulsion in California, not just on a per capita basis, but actually numerically higher than populous Los Angeles County.

In 2013, the Center and KQED radio reported that Kern County kids, among them Hispanic children of farmworkers, were removed from regular school for minor reasons and placed in alternative schools so far from home — as much as 40 miles away — that many kids dropped out or were told to perform independent study at home.

Hundreds of expelled kids, including English-as-second-language learners, were placed on independent study while officially enrolled full-time on alternative campuses, records showed. Because Kern resident Mario Ramirez was unable to get his daughter to a distant alternative school, he sent the 14-year-old to Mexico just to get her in a classroom for a few months during a year-long expulsion.

The lawsuit filed Thursday names Ramirez and other kids and parents featured in Center stories as plaintiffs; the suit alleges that in spite of parents’ meetings in recent months with the local school board to urge changes, officials “have failed to take any effective action to require that Kern High School District develop and implement discipline and school assignment plans that ameliorate the rampant racial and ethnic disparities in the district.”

Black and Latino students “routinely assigned” to independent study receive “only minimal interaction with school personnel and other students,” according to the suit, and fall behind academically.

The suit was filed in Kern County Superior Court in the Kern city of Bakersfield, which is north of Los Angeles in an area of oil drilling and some of the world’s most productive agribusiness fields.

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Charter School Power Broker Turns Public Education Into Private Profits

Concept Charter Schools Student Art Exhibit opening. (Photo US Dept of Education)

By Marian Wang, ProPublica

Versions of this story were co-published with The Daily Beast and the Raleigh News & Observer.

In late February, the North Carolina chapter of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — a group co-founded by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers — embarked on what it billed as a statewide tour of charter schools, a cornerstone of the group's education agenda. The first — and it turns out, only — stop was Douglass Academy, a new charter school in downtown Wilmington.

Douglass Academy was an unusual choice. A few weeks before, the school had been warned by the state about low enrollment. It had just 35 students, roughly half the state's minimum. And a month earlier, a local newspaper had reported that federal regulators were investigating the school's operations.

But the school has other attributes that may have appealed to the Koch group. The school's founder, a politically active North Carolina businessman named Baker Mitchell, shares the Kochs' free-market ideals. His model for success embraces decreased government regulation, increased privatization and, if all goes well, healthy corporate profits.

In that regard, Mitchell, 74, appears to be thriving. Every year, millions of public education dollars flow through Mitchell's chain of four nonprofit charter schools to for-profit companies he controls.

The schools buy or lease nearly everything from companies owned by Mitchell. Their desks. Their computers. The training they provide to teachers. Most of the land and buildings. Unlike with traditional school districts, at Mitchell's charter schools there's no competitive bidding. No evidence of haggling over rent or contracts.

The schools have all hired the same for-profit management company to run their day-to-day operations. The company, Roger Bacon Academy, is owned by Mitchell. It functions as the schools' administrative arm, taking the lead in hiring and firing school staff. It handles most of the bookkeeping. The treasurer of the nonprofit that controls the four schools is also the chief financial officer of Mitchell's management company. The two organizations even share a bank account.

Mitchell's management company was chosen by the schools' nonprofit board, which Mitchell was on at the time — an arrangement that is illegal in many other states.

Charters are privately run but government-funded schools that are supposed to be open to all. Policymakers and many parents have embraced charters as an alternative to poorly performing and underfunded traditional public schools. As charters have grown in popularity, an industry of management companies like Mitchell's has sprung up to assist them.

Many of these companies are becoming political players in their states, working to shape the still-emerging set of rules charters must play by. A few, including Mitchell's company, have aligned themselves with influential conservative groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and the Koch-supported American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

This new reality — in which businesses can run chains of public schools — has spurred questions about the role of profit in public education and whether more safeguards are needed to prevent corruption. The U.S. Department of Education has declared the relationships between charter schools and their management companies, both for-profit and nonprofit, a "current and emerging risk" for misuse of federal dollars. It is conducting a wide-ranging look at such relationships. In the last year alone, the FBI sent out subpoenas as part of an investigation into a Connecticut-based charter-management company and raided schools that are part of a New Mexico chain and a large network of charter schools spanning Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

Two of Mitchell's former employees told ProPublica they have been interviewed by federal investigators. Mitchell says he does not know if his schools are part of any inquiry and has not been contacted by any investigators.

To Mitchell, his schools are simply an example of the triumph of the free market. "People here think it's unholy if you make a profit" from schools, he said in July, while attending a country-club luncheon to celebrate the legacy of free-market sage Milton Friedman.

It's impossible to know how much Mitchell is taking home in profits from his companies. He's fought to keep most of the financial details secret. Still, audited financial statements show that over six years, companies owned by Mitchell took in close to $20 million in revenue from his first two schools. Those records go through the middle of 2013. Mitchell has since opened two more schools.

Many in the charter-school industry say that charter schools are more accountable than traditional public schools because, as Mitchell is fond of saying, "parents can shut us down overnight. They stop bringing their kids here? We don't get any money."

Moreover, Mitchell said, students at his two more established schools have produced higher test scores at lower costs than those in traditional public schools: "Maybe Baker Mitchell gets a huge profit. Maybe he doesn't get any profit. Who cares?"

But many charter supporters question that perspective. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a group that promotes best practices for overseeing charter schools, says schools should be independent from their contractors. Mitchell's dual roles as both a charter-school board member and a vendor, for instance, were a blatant violation of those standards.

"This kind of conflict of interest is what I would consider shocking," said Parker Baxter, a program director for the group.

"This isn't as if one of the board members happens to own a chalk company where they buy chalk from, and he recused himself from buying chalk," he said. "This is the entire management and operation of the school."

Mitchell was pushed by North Carolina regulators to step down from his schools' board last fall, a move he derides as unnecessary. "It's so silly," he told ProPublica. "Undue influence, blah blah blah."

But concerns about his influence continued even after he stepped down. One board member resigned in frustration over the role of Mitchell's company. Two others also quit around the same time. Mitchell still serves as secretary for the board, taking notes and doing the meeting minutes. Asked about frustrations among board members over his involvement, Mitchell said, "Everybody's free to their own opinion."

When charter schools were first established in the early 1990s, supporters sought flexibility and freedom from the bureaucratic rules they believed hamstrung traditional schools. Charter schools have leeway over their calendar, curriculum, and who they hire and fire. In most states, they do not have to follow many of the processes meant to prevent corruption and misspending of public dollars, such as putting contracts out for competitive bidding.

Mitchell moved to North Carolina in 1997, a year after the state passed a law allowing charter schools. He said he dreamed of starting a school after selling his computer business in Houston in 1989. He had planned on a private school, but when he moved to North Carolina and read about charters, he said he figured that was his chance. He applied to open his first school in 1999, laying out his plans to teach what his company website describes as a "classical curriculum espousing the values of traditional western civilization." He opened Charter Day School the following year.

Settled into the southeastern part of the state, Mitchell quickly connected with the state's big political players, including conservative kingmaker Art Pope. By 2002, he was sitting alongside Pope on the board of the John Locke Foundation. The foundation is part of the State Policy Network, a Koch-supported group of think tanks whose agenda includes steering public funds away from traditional schools and toward charters, vouchers and tax credits for homeschoolers.

From the beginning, concerns about excessive profits and Mitchell's conflicts of interest dogged the new school. In 2001, the Internal Revenue Service rejected the group's application for tax-exempt status, noting Mitchell's dual roles as both a board member and head of a company doing business with the board. The IRS also noted the bank account shared by the schools' nonprofit and Mitchell's for-profit company, and that the school was leasing space from another company owned by Mitchell.

"Mr. Mitchell thus controls both your management company and your lessor," the IRS wrote in a denial letter. "He has dual loyalties to you and his private, for-profit companies. This is a clear conflict of interest for him."

The school's board — with Mitchell as a member — protested. It went back and forth with the IRS and eventually made some concessions. For example, it set a limit on the management company's fees and required board members to recuse themselves from votes in which they had financial interests. It also sent along a letter from an independent real-estate professional who evaluated the school's lease and offered assurances that it was at market rate. (The real-estate professional, as it happens, worked at the same firm as the board chair's husband.)

Many of the things flagged by the IRS were left unchanged. Mitchell and an employee of his remained on the board. The joint bank account and the leasing arrangement also stayed the same. But having reached something of a compromise, the IRS approved the school as a tax-exempt nonprofit in March 2002.

Mitchell's second school, Columbus Charter School, opened in 2007, in rural Columbus County. That school and Mitchell's first, Charter Day School, have won recognition several years in a row for their performance on state tests.

But comparing the performance of these two schools to their traditional-school counterparts is complicated by the fact that they have comparatively low percentages of needy students, who tend to score lower on standardized tests. For instance, 37 percent of test-takers at Columbus Charter School earlier this year were "economically disadvantaged," compared to the county's 74 percent. The two schools do not provide busing or participate in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program — services that are considered key to ensuring broad access.

Mitchell says his third school, Douglass Academy – whose diversity was celebrated by a visit from the Koch group – is the only one that provides transportation and food for students. Its target population is children in several Wilmington housing projects. Students at the school, which opened in 2013, haven't yet taken state tests so there's no data to show how they're faring.

Mitchell's schools are also distinguished from public schools by their different tone. Staff and students pledge to avoid errors that arise from "the comfort of popular opinion and custom," "compromise" and "over-reliance on rational argument." Students must vow "to be obedient and loyal to those in authority, in my family, in my school, and in my community and country, So long as I shall live."

The schools also use a rigid instructional approach in which teachers stick to a script and drill students repeatedly through call and response. Latin is taught as early as elementary school.

Mitchell's company has managed the schools' staffs with similar rigor. A strong sense of hierarchy took root as the schools expanded. When a new corporate office was built to house the management company, teachers jokingly began calling it the "White House."

From the "White House," Mitchell and other top administrators could watch teachers in their classrooms via surveillance cameras installed in every classroom, in every school. During a tour of school grounds with this reporter, Mitchell and the school's IT director discussed surveillance software called iSpy. "We need to call it something else," Mitchell offered with a chuckle. "Call it iHelp or something." Mitchell said the cameras give administrators the ability to observe teachers in action and offer them tips and coaching.

As Mitchell was looking to expand his enterprise in the mid-2000s, he ran into a roadblock. North Carolina, like many states, had been cautious when it first allowed charter schools and had placed a cap on their growth.

By the time Mitchell applied in 2007 to open a charter school in Duplin County, the state was nearing that cap — and his plans fell through when the State Board of Education, deciding among three charter applicants, chose the other two schools to fill the spots remaining that year.

Mitchell wanted to get rid of the cap. Restrictions were being lifted or eliminated in many states, thanks to lobbying from the charter sector and to federal incentives set up by the Obama administration, which awarded states money based in part on their openness to charter schools. Mitchell and others favoring charters pushed for North Carolina lawmakers to follow suit.

In 2011, they got what he wanted.

Republicans took control of the state legislature and swiftly eliminated the cap on charter schools. Mitchell was also given a coveted position on the state's new Charter School Advisory Council, an influential committee tasked with reviewing charter applications and making recommendations to the State Board of Education.

It was a turning point for Mitchell. Over the next two years, he got the go-ahead to open two more schools. With both, he appeared to benefit from unusual exceptions or political intervention.

One of them was Douglass Academy, Mitchell's school for needier students in downtown Wilmington. Under state law, charter schools must have at least 65 students enrolled, but Douglass Academy was well below that. Mitchell's colleagues on the advisory council gave him a temporary waiver that allowed the school to avoid closure while it tried to boost enrollment.

"I would say it was unusual," Joel Medley, head of the state's Office of Charter Schools, said of the temporary waiver. According to Medley, the only other charter schools in the state that received such waivers got them on a permanent basis because of geographic isolation or because they had set out to serve special student populations deemed ill-suited to large-school settings. Neither condition was true of Douglass Academy, whose leadership blamed the enrollment troubles on difficulties securing a facility. The school has since cleared the state's minimum, though enrollment is still far below the school's own projections.

Mitchell's fourth school, South Brunswick Charter School, also lucked out. In 2013, the school's application failed an initial screening and was put in a stack of applications excluded from further consideration. But then the president of the state Senate, Sen. Phil Berger — the same Republican lawmaker who appointed Mitchell to the Charter School Advisory Council — intervened on behalf of frustrated applicants. The whole stack was re-evaluated — a "one-time decision," said a memo from the advisory council, due to "extraneous circumstances." Berger did not respond to a request for comment.

Even upon re-evaluation, a subcommittee of the council voiced unease about aspects of South Brunswick's application, including "concern that two of seven board members are active employees" of its management company.

But Mitchell's fourth school was nevertheless approved, with the stipulation that members of the management company, including Mitchell, step down from the board. South Brunswick Charter School opened its doors this summer at a temporary site. A permanent spot is in the works — on land purchased by another one of Mitchell's for-profit companies with plans to lease it back to the school.

Mitchell's influence has also reverberated beyond his four schools.

In 2013, the state legislature passed a sweeping charter school bill pushed by Mitchell that loosened oversight and regulation. The law relaxed requirements on how many of each charter school's teachers had to be certified, giving schools more flexibility and potential savings on labor costs. It also included a perk — a tax exemption — for landlords who, like Mitchell, rent property to charter schools.

Parts of the bill echo legislation pushed forward in other states. ALEC, for example, has promoted legislation across the country to make it easier for non-teachers to start teaching, sidestepping what it sees as cumbersome licensing requirements. Parts of the North Carolina bill have the same wording as ALEC model legislation.

Mitchell was intimately involved in seeing the bill through as chair of a pro-charter lobbying group, the NC Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Asked about the tax break and whether he had pushed for provisions that would directly benefit him, Mitchell told ProPublica, "There was another group that pushed that through. I didn't have anything to do with it."

But a lobbyist for Mitchell's group, Debbie Clary, said, "It was our bill. I was the only lobbyist working on it." Clary added: "The person most engaged was Baker [Mitchell]."

Mitchell's group also posted a note on Facebook after the bill was signed, calling the new law the culmination of two years of work by the Alliance. "The Alliance was able to gain an exemption from county or city property tax, no matter who owns the property, if it is used exclusively for a Charter School," the note read.

Mitchell has close ties with Sen. Jerry Tillman, the lawmaker who sponsored the bill. "We're good friends," Mitchell said. "We talk." Records show that Mitchell wrote Tillman's campaign a $4,000 check a month after the bill was signed — the maximum that state law at the time allowed an individual to give directly to a candidate each year. Tillman did not respond to requests for comment.

Mitchell and the Alliance didn't get everything they wanted.

Over the years Mitchell had pressed lawmakers to move charter schools largely out from under the authority of the State Board of Education. Mitchell said he views the state board as a force restricting the free market through overregulation and protecting "the monopoly of the government-run schools."

Parents at Mitchell's schools were urged to press their elected officials to remove charter schools from the purview of the State Board of Education: "Your legislators need to hear from you and know of your support for an independent Office of Charter Schools," said a school newsletter. "Let them know you do not want the State Board of Education controlling charter schools."

The 2013 bill introduced by Tillman spelled out much of what Mitchell wanted. It proposed the formation of a Charter School Advisory Board that would make all the major decisions about approving new schools and renewing or revoking existing charters without having to answer to the State Board of Education.

But the state's other main pro-charter group deemed the proposal too extreme and came out strongly against it. An amended bill eventually passed that created a new board without all the power Mitchell and the Alliance had sought. And while Mitchell was appointed to the board, he resigned earlier this year while under pressure over conflicts of interest. He told ProPublica he stepped down because it became a lot of work.

Mitchell has also expressed frustration with a state law passed this summer that requires charter schools to comply with public records laws. Still, the new law does not apply to charter management companies such as Mitchell's.

The board of Mitchell's charter schools has repeatedly tangled with local news outlets that have made public records requests seeking salaries and other financial details from the schools. Last month the StarNews of Wilmington filed a lawsuit against the schools' nonprofit board, alleging that it has violated the state public records law. (The board chair for Charter Day School, Inc., John Ferrante, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Mitchell himself has taken a hard line against disclosures of financial information concerning his for-profit companies. For private corporations, he wrote on his blog in July, "the need for transparency is superfluous" and is simply a mechanism for the media to "intrude and spin their agenda."

In North Carolina and many other states, the battle over charters is no longer about whether to have them. Instead, it's largely between those who believe in regulating them and creating mechanisms for public accountability and those, like Mitchell, who believe that's the job of the free market.

"That's the fight in North Carolina," said Damon Circosta, executive director of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, which sees charter schools as a way to improve public education. "That free-market ideology has taken hold with this newer legislature."

Large national for-profit charter management companies have joined regional powers like Mitchell to lead the charge. They've found allies in local lawmakers. Tillman, the co-chair of North Carolina's Senate education committee, for instance, recently berated state regulators because he was upset more schools were not being approved.

North Carolina is at a crossroads when it comes to charters, said Eric Guckian, the top education adviser to Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican.

Two kinds of people get in the charter-school business, said Guckian: "Group one, they're looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. Group two, they're looking to run high-quality schools. My bias is toward the latter. That's not to say I have anything against entrepreneurship, but I don't think that's a reason for getting into the education space."

Gov. McCrory has tried to step in where the legislature has not. At his urging, the State Board of Education has gone beyond what the law requires and is requiring schools to submit salary information for employees of charter-management companies — numbers that Mitchell believes should be private.

"There's no statutory basis for it," Mitchell said of the new requirements. His schools' board submitted basic budget documents in response to the agency's order, but it withheld information on management-company finances, stating that the board "does not possess individual salaries paid by any private corporation that furnishes services." Asked what he'll do if the agency objects, Mitchell said, "We'll see what they say and deal with it when it comes."

He views these new requirements as a sign that North Carolina is moving in the wrong direction, toward an overregulation of charter schools. "I see the banks of the river narrowing," he said. "In a few more years, there will just be a very narrow channel to navigate in. A lot of the freedoms will be regulated out."

Heather Vogell contributed to this story.

_______________
If you have information about charter schools and their profits or oversight — or any other tips — email us at charters@propublica.org.

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Reprinted with permission from ProPublica