Merrow's book shines a light on Deborah Kenny's charter schools

Deborah Kenny

Former NPR and PBS journalist, John Merrow's book, Addicted to Reform, reveals how corporate reformers and greedy charter school hustlers, exploit the language of school reform to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.

The best-known of these, of course, is New York's Eva Moskowitz, who pays herself $567K/year to manage Harlem's Success Academies with 11,000 students. When she lost out to Betsy DeVos in the race to become Trump's Secretary of Education, I referred to her as "charter schools biggest hustler", but apparently I was wrong.

Merrow says that Moskowitz pales in comparison to Deborah Kenny, the founder of Harlem
Village Academies who pays herself with public tax money on a par with Moskowitz to run her charter which enrolls only 1,400 students. Compare that to New York City's public schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, who presides over the largest school system in the nation, with 1.1 million students and is paid $345K per year.

Like Eva Moskowitz's Success Academies, this network loses a lot of students, but, unlike Success Academies, the students who stay perform poorly...This same charter network has famously high turnover rates among teachers. In the most recent report, 38 percent of teachers departed—nearly four out of every ten teachers. In another school, 31 percent left. One thing that students in high-poverty schools need is continuity, which they apparently do not get in this network. Oh, by the way, the CEO who makes all that money also has her own car and driver. 

 Somehow, writes Merrow,  I suspect she’s happy to have Eva Moskowitz taking all the flack in the media about harsh discipline and high turnover rates, because that means her network’s performance is not being scrutinized.  It clearly should be.

Did Moskowitz cut a deal with Trump?

Last month, charter schools' biggest hustler, Eva Moskowitz, who pulls down a half-million/year as the operator of N.Y. Success Academies, was in the running for Trump's Sec. of Ed post. She didn't get the job. Trump gave it to fellow plutocrat and religious zealot Betsy DeVos instead.

The Trump transition team may have been frightened off by the spate of negative press about her schools' discipline practices and internal workings and the ongoing federal investigation conducted by the Office of Civil Rights, as well as mounting criticism from local elected officials. It is unclear whether Moskowitz could have even been confirmed as a cabinet official of an agency that is investigating her schools.

But that didn't stop Moskowitz, a Clinton supporter, from swearing loyalty to Trump and his plan for market-driven public schools.

Moscowitz bought space here for $68M.

Then, no sooner had she plopped down $68M in school money for the purchase of ground-floor classroom space in a glitzy Midtown tower, when the auditors caught up with her.

Today she is under fire for financial mismanagement and allegedly ripping off the taxpayers and even her own Success Academy schools for millions of dollars, including thousands that were supposed to have been spent on services that were never delivered to students with special needs.

The Observer reports: 

An audit  by city Comptroller Scott Stringer discovered rampant inaccuracies in the financial reports of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter school chain—including internal assessments that created the appearance of lower administrative costs, bills to the city for special education services the company could not prove it ever provided and duplicative payments that the chain’s management arm collected from its schools.

 The audit found that in fiscal year 2015, Success Academy schools paid the Success Academy Network an extra $624,342 for services that the Network should have provided in exchange for its $18.3 million management fee. Those services include staff training and professional development, printing, copying and student assessments.

All this has me wondering if this was the real purpose of the Moskowitz's flirtation with Trump. Was she running to him for cover, offering fealty and rendering unto Caesar in exchange for protection? Was she looking at a possible job in the Trump administration as an escape route from the arms of city prosecutors?

We'll soon find out if her gambit worked.

Cross-posted at Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk blog.

The real force behind D.C. school 'reform'

She's the wife of a media mogul, a friend of the Washington Post’s Graham family. She’s a philanthropist, adviser to public officials, and conduit to private foundations and investors in what has become her life’s work. In D.C., likely no private citizen is more involved in public education than Katherine Bradley.

City Paper's Jeffrey Anderson has written a feature story on D.C. socialite Bradley, calling her a "force multiplier" when it comes to the district's corporate-style school reform.

To me, she sounds a lot like D.C.'s version of New York's charter maven Eva Moskowitz who uses her clout to build her personal charter school empire and assail public schools and teacher unions.

Bradley’s primary advocacy vehicle is CityBridge Foundation, a nonprofit that distributed nearly $25 million in grants, scholarships, and donations from 2004 to 2013—mostly to charter schools and groups like Teach for America, which received $2.5 million according to tax filings.

Writes Anderson:

Like Bradley herself, the foundation is at the center of a constellation of private interests that are promoting charter schools in D.C. and around the country. The organization partners with TFA, Friends of Choice in Urban Education, and Charter Board Partners, and counts among its “Thought Partners” the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Two of the most politically challenging education initiatives in recent years have been public school closures and the effort to secure chartering authority for Supt. Kaya Henderson (Michelle Rhee's former deputy).

Rhee’s departure in 2011 did not faze Bradley. She embraced Rhee’s protege Kaya Henderson and co-chaired the education committee of the transition team for Fenty’s successor, Vincent Gray, who embraced Henderson as well. Bradley’s alliance with Graham, a fellow philanthropist and low-key civic force, provided a sounding board in the Post, which has heavily endorsed gains in math, reading, and science through charter schools such as KIPP D.C. Graham and Bradley sit on the KIPP board. 

GREAT QUOTE... Former Wilson High School teacher and activist Erich Martel says such coziness among philanthropists, the private sector, and public officials reminds him of Plato’s “Cave,” an allegory in which captives view shadows on a wall as reality, because it’s all they see. For your average parent, Martel says, in an interview last year for this story, it’s often impossible to tell how change comes about: “How does one determine who influences whom? It’s the same people talking to each other.”

Camp Philos at the Vineyard. My invite must have gotten lost in the mail.

Walton/Broad took their whole crew to Martha's Vineyard over the weekend to bone-up on marketing tactics for charter/privatization brand. How nice for them. What about me? I like the Vineyard.

Topics included: Doubling Down on Success or Losing It All: What’s At Stake in 2016;

How We Win: Strategies and Tactics to Combat an Organized and Vocal Opposition; 

What’s Next in the Edu Political Funding World?; and How to Tell the Pro-Reform Story Successfully.

The Philos "reform" crowd, mostly Clinton Democrats I'm told, includes the likes of -- Rahm Emanuel, Howard Fuller, Peter Cunningham, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Senator Mary Landrieu, Eva Moskowitz, Charles Barone (DFER), Ben Austin (Parent Revolution), and so on.

Last year, Edushyster tried to go, but they wouldn't let her in. She obviously didn't have the proper security clearance. 

We hear a bunch of Chi electeds went to Martha's Vineyard this past wknd with @DFER_News. Check out their camp.... https://t.co/U3BmJxZcnO

— Raise Your Hand (@ILRaiseYourHand) October 20, 2015

Short-selling hedge-fund billionaire throws millions more at Moskowitz charters

Charter hustler Moskowitz & her billionaire hedge-funder Paulson

Clout-heavy Eva Moskowitz runs N.Y.'s Success Academy which is already one of the richest charter school networks in the city. Tax documents show the non-profit took in a whopping $34.6 million for the financial year ending June 2013.

Now John Paulson, the infamous scam-artist, hedge-fund billionaire from Queens, is throwing $8.5 million more her way. Moskowitz pays herself more than an half-million a year to run her network of charters.

Paulson's connection with privatization of public schools began with the notorious Boston Consulting Group in 1980. But he made his real fortune during the global financial collapse (which he helped cause, according to these economists), by betting against subprime mortgages using derivatives. His shady deals, including involvement in the Abacus scandal resulted in Goldman Sachs paying a $550 million penalty, the largest ever paid by a Wall Street firm.

This from Deep Capture:

It is not clear which banks ultimately participated in Paulson’s scam, but Fiderer quotes Bear Stearns trader Scott Eichel as saying that his bank refused. “It didn’t pass the ethics standards;” Eichel said, “it was a reputation issue and it didn’t pass our moral compass. We didn’t think we could sell deals that someone was shorting on the other side.” Bear Stearns’ moral compass was usually pointed towards the darker regions, but perhaps this is why Paulson subsequently became one of the more eager short sellers of Bear Stearns’ stock.

Paulson and Moskowitz make a great pair. Don't they?

How Cuomo engineered de Blasio's defeat on charters with help from Wall St.

Cuomo at staged rally: “You are not alone. We will save charter schools.”

Javier Hernandez and Susanne Craig, writing in the New York Times, tell an eerie tale about how Gov. Cuomo backed by powerful Wall Streeters and hedge-funders was able to defeat Mayor de Blasio's effort to hold back the charter operators' assault on public schools. 

The Governor, who has always been in Wall Street's pocket, even had chief charter hustler Eva Moskowitz stage a protest of charter school supporters for the media in Albany, one at which he "spontaneously" appeared, telling the crowd that he would be their savior. Moskowitz runs a group of charters and pays herself nearly a half-million/year salary.

According to Hernandez and Craig:

As the governor worked to solidify support in Albany, his efforts were amplified by an aggressive public relations and lobbying effort financed by a group of charter school backers from the worlds of hedge funds and Wall Street, some of whom have also poured substantial sums into Mr. Cuomo’s campaign (he is up for re-election this fall). The push included a campaign-style advertising blitz that cost more than $5 million and attacked Mr. de Blasio for denying space to three charter schools. 

 A lot was riding on the debate for Mr. Cuomo. A number of his largest financial backers, some of the biggest names on Wall Street, also happened to be staunch supporters of charter schools. According to campaign finance records, Mr. Cuomo’s re-election campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, Bruce Kovner and Daniel Nir.

Right-wing billionaire Ken Langone organized Republicans for Cuomo earlier this year knowing that a real Republican had no chance of defeating him. He's donated lots of money to Cuomo's war chest in exchange for the governor's support for charter schools, and issue near and dear to Langone's heart.

Langone: "I talk to him about charters. He gets it."

Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot who sits on a prominent charter school board, gave $50,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign last year. He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools.

“Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,” Mr. Langone said in an interview. “He gets it.” 

Noticeably missing from de Blasio's rearguard were AFT and UFT leaders Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew. Without the teacher unions at his back, and in order to salvage his expanded Pre-K program,  the mayor obviously was forced to make a tactical retreat on charters.

My takeaways from this early defeat in de Blasio's battle to redefine New York politics:

1. The election of a progressive mayor means little if the grass-roots movement that elected him returns to the barracks when the election is over. 
2. So-called mayoral control of the schools is a myth. What we saw in N.Y. last week was an exercise in corporate control of the schools. So long as the Wall  Streeters and hedge-funders own the governor and most other state politicians, the cities and their schools will be largely at their mercy. 
3. Mayor de Blasio must pick and choose his battles carefully in accordance with how many troops he has behind him. His election shows that he has the support of the city's poor and working families. But to maintain that support he has to rely on them and organize them to win victories for them. 
4. While BdB enjoys support from most rank-and-file teachers and other unionists, AFT and UFT leaders or unreliable allies at best. 

Moscowitz' gang won't pay rent. Drop $3.6M on TV ads attacking BdB

Instead of paying their share of rent for co-occupying N.Y.C. public school buildings, Eva Moscowitz and her hedge-fund friends, have spent $3.6 million over the past 3 weeks, for TV ads attacking Mayor de Blasio.

According to the Daily News:

Families for Excellent Schools — founded by a deep-pocketed group of current and former financiers — has run a series of ads, including a heart-wrenching spot blaming de Blasio for taking away the “hopes and dreams” of 194 students by blocking Success Academy Harlem Central’s co-location plan. De Blasio earlier this month blocked three Success charter schools from co-locations in public school buildings while allowing five others to go ahead.

De Blasio signs paid sick leave bill into law.

“They have parents believing there’s no way they’re going to find space for these 194 students,” said Zakiyah Ansari, advocacy director for the labor-backed lobbying group Alliance for Quality Education. “Do they tell them they’re spending $3.6 million on these ads in less than a month? Put that into the building that you say you can’t find.”

In the mean time, the mayor is moving ahead with his plan to offer prekindergarten to all 4-year-olds in New York City. He also signed the Paid Sick Leave Bill into law. Combined with previous legislation, more than a half-million New Yorkers will now be able to take up to five sick days without fear of losing their job.

Charter hustlers launch ad campaign attack on de Blasio

Eva Moskowitz leading the attack.

New York's deep-pocketed charter school hustlers and privateers have launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign against Mayor de Blasio. They are also using the ads to make wild, unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of charters over community-based public schools. No mention, of course, of massive suspension and expulsion rates or any other charter negatives.

They claim de Blasio is "kicking them out" of THEIR school buildings. Translation -- the mayor is asking the privateers to pay rent for the building space they themselves expropriated from public schools during the Bloomberg/Klein regime. BdB wants to divert the city's rent subsidy for charters towards the expansion of early childhood education and universal Pre-K for all city families (Oh, the horror!).

The privateers are playing the victims, threatening to sic their team of stickpin lawyers on the school system to tie things up in the courts. As expected, crying the loudest and making the gravest threats is New York's chief charter hustler Eva Moscowitz who runs the so-called Success Academy charter chain. Socialite and Bloomberg pal Moscowitz, who pays herself a hefty $500,000/year salary, says she's "stunned" by the mayor's rent-collecting policies. I guess I'm stunned that she's stunned. De Blasio is doing exactly what he said he would do when he ran for mayor. Remember he won in a landslide over Moscowitz' candidate.

Huffington post reports:

During his campaign, De Blasio called for a moratorium on co-location, although he recently lifted that moratorium in favor of a community-based approval process for allocating space to charter schools. De Blasio also questioned whether charters shouldn't be charged rent. His rhetorical target in arguing for these changes was Moskowitz: At a June forum, he said, "There is no way in hell that Eva Moskowitz should get free rent, okay?"

I don't often have cause to say this anywhere, but --Okay, Mr. Mayor.

Why doesn't Moskowitz pay rent?

From deutsch29, Mercedes Schneider's EduBlog:

Since 2006, Eva Moskowitz has been running a small charter empire that has at least $50 million in government per-pupil funding, at least $30.9 million in total, end-of-year assets, and the support of hedge fund millionaires. Why is it, then, that her Success Academies have never paid a dime in rent for the public school space occupied by her charter schools?

Recently-elected New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to put an end to the rent-free usage of public school space by charter schools.

Moskowitz’s response? Read the rest here

'Vulture-Fund Billionaire' Paul Singer is big charter backer

Mother Jones overturns a rock and shines a light on neo-con "vulture-fund billionaire" Paul Singer, who has become congressional Republicans' most powerful fundraiser. He's been described as a "fundraising terrorist" for his persistence in twisting arms, a skill that has helped drive a major strategic shift among Big Finance donors, who favored Obama in 2008 but now overwhelmingly back the GOP. Recently, Singer has given sizable sums to the billionaire Koch brothers' dark-money projects as well as to the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that has helped tea partiers oust several mainstream Republicans.

Investigative Journalist Greg Palast uncovered debt manipulation by Singer, who he deems "Vulture Singer." Palast writes that Singer's "modus operandi" is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo are given as examples). Singer then waits for the US and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations' debts; as well as offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. At this point Singer grabs at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Palast writes that trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage. Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. Singer demanded $400 million dollars from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. Palast writes that if Singer doesn't get his 4,000% profit, he can effectively starve the nation. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition. -- Source Watch

But not mentioned in the MJ piece or by Palast, is Singer's backing of public school privatization schemes, union busting, and privately-operated charter schools, including Eva Moskowitz' Success Academy Charter Network. Singer is also on the board of the right-wing Manhattan Institute which works to undermine and privatize public education. He was one of the big backers of Jeb Bush's, Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform, which featured the likes of corporate school "reformers" like Joel Klein, John Podesta, Condoleeza Rice, and Arne Duncan.

In April, the AFT included included Singer and three other billionaires on its “watch list” of money managers that support groups hostile to traditional public pensions. The groups include Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst. --Bloomberg

The great TFA/charter scam -- Drive-by Teachers

A TFAer in Birmingham, AL.

Today's NYT carries a piece,  "At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice" by Mokoto Rich. The notion that young, inexperienced short-timers, many with only 5 weeks of TFA training, should form the backbone of the nation's teaching core, has become one of the lynch pins of corporate-style school reform.

The drive-by teacher strategy is being pushed heavily by the power philanthropists in the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations. It actually is based on the Wal-Mart model where about 70% of its poorly-paid workforce turns over within a year. This is what the reformers mean by 21st Century jobs.

At Success Academy Charter Schools, a chain run by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman, the average is about four years in the classroom. KIPP, one of the country’s best known and largest charter operators, with 141 schools in 20 states, also keeps teachers in classrooms for an average of about four years. 

Short careers by choice, translates into teachers being reduced to low-wage information-age delivery clerks while most "learning" is done by students sitting in front of a computer screen. The benefits to the charter operators include the elimination of pensions, tenure, salary increases, and union protection. This means more money going into the pockets of the charter operators. Moskowitz for example, pulls down about $400,000/yr.

Rich says the notion of a foreshortened teaching career was largely introduced by Teach for America, which places high-achieving college graduates into low-income schools for two years. Today, Teach for America places about a third of its recruits in charter schools.

“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”

But studies have shown that on average, teacher turnover diminishes student achievement, writes Rich. Advocates who argue that teaching should become more like medicine or law say that while programs like Teach for America fill a need in the short term, educational leaders should be focused on improving training and working environments so that teachers will invest in long careers.

Reformers claim that this is all a generational thing where today's young teachers are "restless" and don't like to stay in one job too long. One young teacher, "who is already thinking beyond the classroom",  is quoted, saying, “I feel like our generation is always moving onto the next thing, and always moving onto something bigger and better.”

I wonder, especially, with a shrinking job market and devastated middle class, what a real teacher would feel is "bigger and better" than teaching children?

Geoffrey Canada declares war on teacher unions

Rhee & Canada lead the war on teacher unions.

“Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war,” Mr. Canada said. “And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.” -- Geoffrey Canada        

Canada's war declaration comes at the end of a Times story announcing the formation of a well-financed and politically connected alliance aimed at nothing less than smashing teacher unions. The new Officers in the anti-teacher army include (as you might expect) Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. Klein left his post as NYC schools chancellor to pimp for international criminal and tabloid publishing giant Rupert Murdoch. Rhee is building her own billion-dollar lobbying company, Children First, and advising Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott on his own union-busting initiatives. The new group, called StudentsFirstNY, is an arm of Rhee's lobbying group, Children First. Others include, Micah Lasher, who is leaving his job next week as the director of state legislative affairs for Mayor Bloomberg, Eva Moskowitz, the former councilwoman who now runs a chain of  charter schools, former Mayor Koch; and Canada.

The group's strategy is to pour money in pour money into the upcoming political campaigns of anti-union politicians and particularly the next N.Y. mayoral election. It follows the lead of Gates Foundation-backed Stand For Children who used a similar campaign strategy to elect Illinois pols favorable to the passage of the anti-union Senate Bill 7. Also recall that the same tactic was used in D.C. when corporate reformers and muscle foundations backed Fenty (and Rhee) in a losing mayoral campaign which resulted in Rhee getting the boot. 

******

The war on unions and progressive organizations also uses dirty tricks right out of the Nixon Watergate playbook. This disciple of the late Andrew Breitbart, and a staffer for Republican Congressman Thad McCotter of Michigan, thought he was being clever when he tried unsuccessfully to fake it as a union organizer.

For several years, young conservatives have made a cottage industry of going undercover and trying to goad people working at perceived liberal institutions — like Acorn, NPR and Planned Parenthood — into saying something stupid. Trained by well-financed foundations, these dirty tricksters pose as pimps, sex traffickers and Muslim activists and record conversations surreptitiously. Then they release videos that have often been heavily edited.

But all it took was for him to open his mouth for listeners to see he was just another right-wing douchebag.