A smorgasbord of a Mike Madigan/Gulen charter school scandal!
It took today’s expose of the Gulen charter school network by the Sun-Times’ Dan Mihalopoulos (yes, the one I resent!) to pull me away from my Christmas baking and cooking. There was just such a banquet of choice items to share….PURE has been reporting for a while on the secretive Turkish cult behind the largest network of charter schools in the nation. We first learned about Gulen charter schools from Parents Across America founding member Sharon Higgins, who maintains the most comprehensive web site on the schools and other enterprises run by the Turkish emigre to the US Fethullah Gulen, a recluse now living in southern Pennsylvania.
Gulen runs the Concept charter school chain in Chicago, which includes its Rogers Park school, Chicago Math and Science Academy (CMSA), and two newer schools in McKinley Park and Austin. CPS refused to approve those two schools but its decision was overruled by the Illinois State Charter School Commission run by former head of CPS’s office of New Schools (or whatever it was called then), Jeannie Nowaczewski.
The Sun-Times story includes the following tidbits:
- As the first, and so far only, charter operator to benefit from the decisions of the 2-year-old state agency, Concept is getting 33 percent more funding per pupil for those two new schools than the city school system gives other charters.
- CPS officials denied Concept, citing concerns over “fluctuations in its academic performance” in recent years and also because CMSA test scores didn’t outperform the average scores of