Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas
By STEPHANIE SAUL
Published: June 6, 2011
Enlarge This ImageTDM Contracting was only a month old when it won its first job, an $8.2 million contract to build the Harmony School of Innovation, a publicly financed charter school that opened last fall in San Antonio.
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Levent Sakar tested a homemade hovercraft in his physics class at Harmony Science Academy High School. The larger point of the project was developing excitement about science for his students, he said.
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Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Soner Tarim, Harmony's superintendent, said the schools are separate from the Gulen movement, a Turkish religious group.
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It was one of six big charter school contracts TDM and another upstart company have shared since January 2009, a total of $50 million in construction business. Other companies scrambling for work in a poor economy wondered: How had they qualified for such big jobs so fast?
The secret lay in the meteoric rise and financial clout of the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by a group of professors and businessmen from Turkey. Operating under the name