Ohio Charter School Operators Choose Financial Success Over Ethics
Columbus Dispatch readers were shocked, shocked to learn last week that members of Imagine Columbus Primary School’s charter board, protesting that they had no say in negotiating the terms of an operational contract, resigned “en masse” over a lease imposed by the management company that had the school paying $58,000 per month in rent for space to house 150 students, as well as other issues related to the viability of the school.
The board’s action, which did get some attention from the usually somnolent “Ohio’s Greatest Home Newspaper,” was so dramatic that the Casablanca Prefect of Police might have exclaimed it was time to “round up the usual suspects.”
But Captain Renault and the rest of us don’t have to look too far. In this case, the usual suspect is Imagine Schools, a national for-profit charter school chain founded by Dennis Bakke, a well-known Christian evangelical, and his wife, Eileen.
The Bakkes have found great success with Imagine and its subsidiary, SchoolHouse Finance. But as is the case with many charter school enterprises, success is one thing, and ethics is quite another.
When Ohio politicians find out more about this mass board exodus in the course of their debate on the need for systemic charter school reform, the issue with Imagine that pols and the public must confront is whether this charter school denizen is merely a for-profit national educational enterprise or a national real estate enterprise. Or both.
Or most frightening of all, maybe Imagine is just one of many usual suspects in the netherworld called charterdom or charterworld.
Modeling its predictable behavior when the subject is charter schools, theDispatch couched the issue in careful language: “The lease is with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools Inc., raising questions about a possible conflict of interest.”
Conflict of interest? When the friend of a governor is appointed to a commission to study the feasibility of charter schools and, using his insider knowledge, forms a charter school management company to coincide with the enactment of the legislation, when one of the sponsors of the original charter school legislation works to have it designed so that a political friend and a family member profit from its enactment, and when a private foundation affiliated with a school management company offers free international travel to members of the legislature as a vehicle for influencing favorable charter school legislation, could these be examples of possible conflicts of interest?
Are we shocked, shocked at these examples? Or when the subject is charterworld, can we channel Donald Rumsfeld and say “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also Ohio Charter School Operators Choose Financial Success Over Ethics:
