A tangled web we weave. The British are coming maybe the Libyans too.

According to the “Financial Times” a publication owned by Pearson,The Sovereign fund of Libya initially took a 3.27 per cent stake in Pearson. 3.27% is a significant stake in what is the largest educational publishing company in the world. Pearson is a $9 Billion giant that dominates textbooks, testing, teacher evaluation, IT platforms for schools, and may have the largest investment in lobbying of any publishing company operating in the United States. Pearson is also a major supplier to states who have adopted the Common Core Standard. So why does it matter that Libya may have had or still has a stake in Pearson?

According to a February 2012 study by Citizens for National Security about Muslim Biased textbooks in Florida, four are published by Pearson. Act for America conducted a 2011 study of Muslim-biased textbooks in America and concluded that Pearson published 13 titles where significant Muslim Bias was uncovered. At the time of the stake, Qaddafi was leader in Libya, and promoted his radical brand of Islam. The Arab world, and the Muslim Brotherhood have shown great interest in using education in the United States to indoctrinate American students about Islam. This publication reviewed Pearson’s 2013 World History, a high school level textbook, as an example of strident Islamic Bias. According to Stanley Kurtz in the National Review the Saudis have made strong gains in penetrating American schools:

Pearson is a leading proponent of the common core standards.  They own Connections Education which run the Connections Academies and Nexus Academies.

Another example of profits over students, what a profitable scam

Note the incestuous management team.  My prediction, another failed school but profits for the Charter company.  Not if, but when the failure will occur.  Do they really expect more students based on their track record?  Do they care? Self preservation is a powerful motivator.

 

New school board seeking lower lease payments, more money for kids

COLUMBUS — A scrappy new school board overseeing the Imagine Columbus Primary Academy wants to re-negotiate the school’s lease.
And what a lease it is: The Imagine academy pays an Imagine subsidiary $700,000 per year to rent a school with just 155 students. The rent consumes more than half of the struggling school’s annual budget, leaving little for classroom instruction.
And when a plumbing problem sent sewage flowing though classrooms on the first day of school, the tenant—not the landlord—was responsible for the repair.
Board Chair Melonia Bennett said she knows the five-year lease is valid. “But I’m kind of hoping that if we point out some of the issues – like the school might not be viable in five years because of how high our costs are – that at least the parties would be willing to discuss the issue.’’
Bennett made her comments at last week’s school board meeting where she convinced her fellow board members to form a subcommittee charged with trying to lower the rental payments and free up more money for teachers and kids.

• Hidden Video Available Online Here
• Copy of the Imagination Budget Online Here

As expected, Imagine representatives who attended the meeting appeared hostile to the idea, repeatedly advising the school to bring in more money by enrolling more students.
ProgressOhio Executive Director Brian Rothenberg, whose organization secretly videotaped the meeting, showed part of the tape at a Columbus news conference Tuesday and said he hopes it inspires other charter school boards to fight back, too.
“It’s clear that Gov. Kasich and the lawmakers won’t fix the system so I am calling on charter school board members to fight from within,” he said. “Shine a spot light on these abusive financial arrangements. Work to get money in the classrooms where it matters the most.”
Board members made the same point, arguing that the school’s low test scores could be raised with more interventions and more experienced teachers but low salaries lead to high teacher turnover. The school received an F on the latest state report card.
The Imagine academy is a charter school paid for with public money and operated by Imagine Schools Inc., a Virginia-based company.
In a 2010 report on Imagine Schools, the think tank, Policy Matters Ohio, found it has a poor record of performance in Ohio and a business model that includes elaborate real estate transactions, high management fees, overlapping business relationships, low spending on classroom instruction, and tight control of school finances and board relationships.
Four years later, the same troubling pattern is evident at the Columbus academy, Rothenberg said.
Until last year, the school’s building off of Morse Road housed another Imagine school but it was forced to close after a nine-year run of poor academic results. So Imagine opened a new elementary school with a new principal in the same building under a new name.
The school can hold 500 students but competition from other schools and low test scores has today’s enrollment about 155.
In addition to paying $700,000 to lease the building, the school pays Imagine about $10,000 per month in “indirect costs” it pays to Imagine for sponsor services, according to its balance statement. The money is to pay for lawyers and salaries for corporate and regional staff such as Jennifer Keller, director of Imagine’s Ohio regional team.
Keller is the sister of Amy Butte, Imagine Executive Vice President for Ohio and Indiana. Amy’s husband, Chris, is business manager of the Ohio Regional Team.
Keller attended the board meeting and defended the $700,000 per year lease.
“Until we start to get our enrollment up the lease is going to be a substantial cost. So we have to figure out, 1: How do we increase enrollment.” The more students the school has the more state money it collects – and the more it must pay in those “indirect’’ fees to Imagine.
Despite high turnover from teachers and staff and a principal who joined the school last February, there has been some consistency: Keller and Amy Butte served as the regional leaders for several leaders, including years when Imagine operated the school that eventually was forced to close.
Also attending the board meeting, and defending the lease, was Imagine attorney Amy Borman.

Ohio Department of Education released the results for Charter Schools.

Ohio’s public school districts significantly outperformed charter schools

Of the 3,274 school buildings that received a Performance Index Score (a composite of standardized test performance), 228 of the 281 charter schools ranked in the bottom 25%. To explain that another way, 81% of Ohio’s rated charter schools that fell in the bottom quarter. And finally, one more way: 4 out of 5 charter schools had a rating based on student performance that was in the bottom 1/4 of all of Ohio’s schools. [Point of clarity - these rankings do not include "dropout recovery schools"]

262 charter schools (93%) ranked in the bottom 50%. 9 out of 10 charter schools fell in the bottom half.

Regarding the much-ballyhooed Third Grade Reading Guarantee, the “Holy Grail” of education reform for Ohio’s boys and girls, 81% of Ohio’s 3rd graders scored proficient or above on the 3rd grade OAA. This number is down by 0.4% from last year, meaning that approximately 500 fewer 3rd graders scored proficient than last year. [Perhaps if teachers had been able to spend more time teaching and less time testing...]

Complete article here:

http://www.plunderbund.com/2014/09/13/ohios-public-schools-outperform-charters-again/

League of Women Voters (NM) takes a look at E schools

http://www.lwvglc.org/documents/lwvglc_paper_for_profit_virtual_charter_schools.pdf

Not recommended in New Mexico.  Good analysis.

Charter School Oversight in Florida

Look what is happening in Florida.

Follow the money!

http://interactive.sun-sentinel.com/charter-schools-unsupervised/investigation.html

"Management companies, hired by two-thirds of South Florida’s charter schools, further complicate the school districts’ ability to monitor spending and discern who controls the purse strings, the newspaper found. These companies provide services ranging from targeted assignments to wholesale management of schools, and have received anywhere from 10 to 97 percent of a school’s budget, records show.
“They’re public schools in the front door; they’re for-profit closed entities in the back door,” said Kathleen Oropeza, who co-founded FundEducationNow.org, an education advocacy group based in Orlando. “There’s no transparency; the public has no ability to see where the profits are, how the money is spent.”

Great investigation

What could Ohio learn?

New successful charter school ;-)

Progressive Charter School Doesn’t Have Students

News in Brief• education• News• ISSUE 49•26• Jul 1, 2013

 

ATLANTA—One year into its founding as the purported “bold next step in education reform,” administrators on Monday sang the praises of Forest Gates Academy, a progressive new charter school that practices an innovative philosophy of not admitting any students. “We’ve done something here at Forest Gates that is truly special, combining modern, cutting-edge pedagogical methods with a refreshingly non-pupil-centric approach,” said academy president Diane Blanchard, who claimed that the experimental school boasts state-of-the-art facilities, a diverse and challenging syllabus, absolutely zero students, a world-class library, and the highest faculty-student ratio in the nation. “Thanks to our groundbreaking methods, we’ve established a structured yet free-thinking environment where the student is taken out of the equation entirely, and in fact is not allowed on school property. And the results, we think, speak for themselves.” According to its budgetary records, Forest Gates has so far received approximately $80 million in public funding from the state of Georgia.

Good stuff from The Onion

More news

Part of a letter to the editor published in the Dayton Daily News

87% is shameful.  $1 billion should be criminal

In fact, multiple charter school scandals across the state are causing Ohio citizens to wake up and ask why one billion taxpayer dollars per year are pouring into a ‘failed choice’ for almost 100,000 of Ohio’s children. Currently, 87% of Ohio’s charter school students are attending a charter school with a D or F rating. Recently, Ohio has been branded as the “Wild, Wild West of Charters” and called a charter school “free for all” by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers due to an astounding lack of accountability and transparency by the Ohio Legislature.

Turning a profit’ has turned into an empty promise for our kids.

Maureen Reedy
Columbus, Ohio

I predict Ohio politicians will be creating as much distance as they can from these low performing schools.