This week in charter school scandals
I could easily devote every episode to covering charter schools. A simple search will turn up half a dozen scandals on any given week.
Like the story this week out of Arizona, where the multimillionaire CEO of an online charter school gave himself a $1.3 million raise, while giving teachers 1%. Keep in mind that online charters have very little overhead.
Thrive Charter Schools in San Diego are outperformed by every school in the district; has been slated for closure by the board. Yet the founders gave themselves another huge bonus this year.
A charter school operator in Pensacola, Florida, was just sentenced to 20 years in prison for fraud. And a Dorchester, Massachusetts, charter executive is under investigation for questionable spending.
That’s all this week alone.
And then the story that caught my eye. The Miami New Times is reporting that a teacher at Mater Academy, a charter school in Hialeah Gardens, hung a Confederate flag with the motto “Keep It Flying” in his classroom.
The same teacher previously told students that the South was fighting for “states rights” and that the Union “should have lost.” And he’s called students “snowflakes” for expressing their own views.
Any public school teacher would have been disciplined, but Mater Academy principal Jose Nuñez told the Times that it was just part of a history lesson.
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/co...
“A school with 98% minority enrollment according to US News, allowed a conservative history teacher to hang this up. Despite the fact that the Confederacy was the enemy of the US, it's yet ANOTHER example of Mater Academy promoting the right wing political ideology @OfficialJoelF” https://twitter.com/SocaFernando/stat...
Mater is part of Academica, the largest charter school operator in Florida. For over a decade Academica has written big paychecks to several Florida politicians, including the CEO’s brother-in-law, Erik Fresen, who was convicted of tax evasion after chairing the Florida House subcommittee that oversees education.
Because these are the kind of people who run charter schools. Racists, con artists, and crooked politicians. They line their own pockets with money and resources that should be going to the most struggling schools, then claim those schools are failing.
They skim the highest performing children off the top, send the ones who don’t work out back to their homeschools, and still can’t outperform traditional public schools.
They claim that per pupil allocation belongs to students and should follow them wherever they go, like a backpack full of cash.
But schools don’t belong to students or their parents. They belong to the communities that fund them.
Everybody else is just passing through.
This week in charter school scandals - YouTube