The California Charter School Association Purposefully Puts Students In Danger

The California Charter School Association Purposefully Puts Students In Danger

The California Charter School Association Purposefully Puts Students In Danger

“Students are absolutely safer in a Field Act [school building] when an earthquake happens, no question about it.”
- Tom Duffy, Coalition For Adequate School Housing

Whenever legislative bodies attempt to force accountability on the charter school industry, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) cries “#KidsNotPolitics.” However, while claiming to put Kids First, there are CCSA charters that are among the worst-performing schools in the state. One of their member schools was caught violating the state labor code and illegally charging students to attend summer school. Still another engaged in construction practices so flagrant that the results endangered “the health and safety of students”. According to a recent KCBS News report, there are hundreds of charter school facilities that do not have to comply with the Field Act, the law that ensures that school buildings are safe during an earthquake.

As shown in documents uncovered by Michael Kohlhaas dot org, the CCSA feels that one of the “greatest threats” that they face is requiring that their schools “comply with [the] Field Act.”

So much for Kids First.

After 230 schools collapsed during the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the state of California passed the Field Act, “which mandated rigorous oversight of the construction of every public school to ensure they’re safe.” As a result, California schools “are the safest buildings in the world.” Southern CONTINUE READING: The California Charter School Association Purposefully Puts Students In Danger

Why Market Forces Will Not Provide Charter School Accountability

Why Market Forces Will Not Provide Charter School Accountability

Why Market Forces Will Not Provide Charter School Accountability

It has been a rough day at my house. The IRS is auditing me and needs me to send them money now. My computer has a virus. My Microsoft Windows is expired and will shut down soon. And if I don’t re-enter my personal information, my email, Netflix, and bank accounts will all be shut down. The only good news is that I still have a chance to buy great insurance, and I’m still waiting to hear back from that Nigerian prince.

Why do phone and online scammers keep at it, long after the vast majority of folks have heard about the most common scams, and even your mother knows not to say “yes” to a robocaller? Why don’t these scammers think, “Time to change my business model?” Because if scammers get a return on even one hit out of 10,000, that’s more than enough to keep them in business.

Charter school advocates have long argued that one reason that charters don’t need much formal government oversight is that they are subject to a greater accountability, that they must answer to parents who can “vote with their feet.” But the feet of charter parents don’t exert very much pressure.

The vast majority of charter school operators have nothing in common with phone scammers, but the same basic market principle CONTINUE READING: Why Market Forces Will Not Provide Charter School Accountability

Arkansas: Inside the Shadowy World of the School “Choice” Movement, Part 1 | Diane Ravitch's blog

Arkansas: Inside the Shadowy World of the School “Choice” Movement, Part 1 | Diane Ravitch's blog

Arkansas: Inside the Shadowy World of the School “Choice” Movement, Part 1

Cathy Frye is an experienced journalist who switched careers. Three years ago, she was hired to work for the Arkansas Public School Resource Center as communications director. Before she was hired, she was asked if she had any qualms about charter schools, and she said no. When she quit her job in June 2019, she decided to tell what she had learned, and she started to report about her experiences on her blog. 

Here is the lowdown. Eighty-five percent of the rural public school districts in the state belong to the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, but the APSRC is a Walton-funded school choice operation.

When Frye quit, she said she felt a burden lift.

No more working in an environment steeped in secrecy and paranoia. No more placating a male boss who acted more like an abusive stalker ex-boyfriend than an actual leader. No more weird workplace silos that left “team leaders” completely in the dark as to what other departments were doing. No more legislative education committee meetings that reeked of conspiracy, deception and stale men’s suits in dire need of dry-cleaning. 

I think the turning point for me was when, at the beginning of APSRC’s annual membership drive in the spring/summer of 2019, Smith said on three occasions – in my presence – that “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” 

“Them” refers to public school districts – as in APSRC’s current member districts and potential member districts.

I spent decades looking for facts. I believe in transparent CONTINUE READING: Arkansas: Inside the Shadowy World of the School “Choice” Movement, Part 1 | Diane Ravitch's blog

DonorsChoose, Teachers Pay Teachers: How school classrooms get supplies - Vox

DonorsChoose, Teachers Pay Teachers: How school classrooms get supplies - Vox

The true cost of being a teacher
7 teachers tell us what they buy for their classrooms, and how.

When you walk into a public school classroom, what do you see? Posters on the walls, baskets of scissors and glue sticks and pencils, dry erase markers, copied and stapled worksheet packets, shelves and bins of books, decorations commemorating the seasons, sometimes bean bag chairs or floor pillows, definitely some kind of big rug for the younger grades. There’s often furniture and a mini-fridge, there are tissues and Clorox wipes and sometimes a class pet.

Schools don’t typically supply this stuff. Teachers do. 94 percent of US public school teachers spend their own money on school supplies. The amount per year varies; what districts and schools provide (or, better put, don’t provide) varies.

So too do teacher salaries. The National Education Association highlighted a $40,000 discrepancy between what the average teacher makes in New York versus what one makes in Mississippi, where the average salary in 2018 was $44,926; New York’s top salary ranking drops to 17th, however, when adjusted for cost of living. Put simply, teachers are underpaid, and many are leaving education at an alarming pace. The NEA found that one-fifth of new teachers leave education within three years, and in urban areas, the percentage of teachers who leave within five years is close to half. According to the Pew Research Center, one in six teachers work second jobs.

The fact that teachers buy stuff for their classrooms is another way to say that we fail to provide teachers with the resources they need to teach our kids. That lack of resources feels to some educators like insult to injury, not just that they need to spend their own money to do their job, but that their low pay makes it hard to even afford to do their job.

School supplies are just the start of it — let’s talk about further education and professional development, about college application fees, about extra sandwiches, about books, about winter clothes, about eyeglasses, about curriculum (yes: curriculum — many districts forgo textbooks, or supply decades-old textbooks, or provide only the most bare-bones of worksheets, leaving it on teachers to cobble together their own instructional materials).

We talked to seven teachers across the country to learn what they spend their own money on, how they try to save, how they strategize any school allotments, and more. We learned CONTINUE READING: DonorsChoose, Teachers Pay Teachers: How school classrooms get supplies - Vox

Has the Chamber of Commerce Hijacked YOUR Education System? Engineering Students For A Low-Wage, Gig Economy – Wrench in the Gears

Has the Chamber of Commerce Hijacked YOUR Education System? Engineering Students For A Low-Wage, Gig Economy – Wrench in the Gears

Has the Chamber of Commerce Hijacked YOUR Education System? Engineering Students For A Low-Wage, Gig Economy

I remember it well, a casual conversation with a neighbor on the sidewalk. It was a brief exchange, the kind that should’ve been quickly forgotten. At the time I knew nothing of Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary Letter” or the National Center on Education and the Economy. I hadn’t yet started mapping IBM and Digital On-Ramps, and Ideas42, the behavioral science research institute incubated at Harvard. I can’t remember the exact year, though it was probably some time after the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) but before Colorado and Washington State started talking about adopting the Swiss Apprenticeship model.

But it happens sometimes, certain moments stick with you over the years, important, even if you didn’t know exactly why at the time. Over the course of this particular chat, it came up that the board of the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) had begun to weigh-in on what courses would be offered at the school. Evidently classes were expected to align to economic indictors. For example, pre-architecture courses would need to be phased out, because “the numbers” indicated there wouldn’t be enough architecture jobs.

I remember it well, a casual conversation with a neighbor on the sidewalk. It was a brief exchange, the kind that should’ve been quickly forgotten. At the time I knew nothing of Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary Letter” or the National Center on Education and the Economy. I hadn’t yet started mapping IBM and Digital On-Ramps, and Ideas42, the behavioral science research institute incubated at Harvard. I can’t remember the exact year, though it was probably some time after the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) but before Colorado and Washington State started talking about adopting the Swiss Apprenticeship model.

But it happens sometimes, certain moments stick with you over the years, important, even if you didn’t know exactly why at the time. Over the course of this particular chat, it came up that the board of the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) had begun to weigh-in on what courses would be offered at the school. Evidently classes were expected to align to economic indictors. For example, pre-architecture courses would need to be phased out, because “the numbers” indicated there wouldn’t be enough architecture jobs.

Source: Closed Door Event on Business and Education, January 29, 2018, more here

Whose numbers? Not enough architecture jobs? At the time the city even had a charter high school specifically for architecture and design. Philadelphia’s four-year universities, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, and Temple, all offered architecture coursework. So why should students choosing to pursue an Associate’s Degree first be shut out of the field?

In 2012, then mayor, now what works, Moneyball government talking head, Michael Nutter, appointed himself and six allies to the fifteen-person board of CCP. The president would be let go within the year, replaced by Dr. Donald Generals. Generals had formerly worked as an administrator at a questionable, now defunct, for-profit secretarial college in New York. The faculty did not support the appointment.

All of this happened shortly after the city accepted a Smarter Cities Challenge grant from IBM to develop our “human capital” via Gates and MacArthur Foundation-funded badging and career pathway initiatives. Did I mention Lisa Nutter, wife of the mayor now social impact investor, was CONTINUE READING: Has the Chamber of Commerce Hijacked YOUR Education System? Engineering Students For A Low-Wage, Gig Economy – Wrench in the Gears

Texas is bringing the "portfolio model" to its schools | The Texas Tribune

Texas is bringing the "portfolio model" to its schools | The Texas Tribune

Texas is spending millions to bring the "portfolio model" to its schools. The strategy has led to teacher strikes in other states.
The approach is intended to quickly cut down on the number of low-performing schools in the state. So far, Texas has seen mixed results.

Texas is encouraging its school districts to drastically change how they manage their campuses — an effort to quickly cut down the number that are low-performing.

It is spending more than $20 million a year in state and federal dollars on districts and outside consultants working to give individual schools more freedom from state and local regulations, with mixed results: Some schools are performing better in state ratings; others are continuing to struggle.

The controversial national approach is especially unpopular with teacher groups, and has led to strikes in cities like Denver and Los Angeles.

In a traditional school district, an elected school board chooses a superintendent, who runs a central office responsible for budgeting, hiring and curriculum for a set of schools. Under the new approach, leaders at individual campuses have much more power and flexibility to make their own decisions, and are released from some of the constraints of state and local regulations — much like publicly funded, privately managed charter schools are. The elected school board and central office determine which schools open where, but play a much smaller role in managing them.

“The idea is to hold schools accountable but give them more control… so they can influence the policies you’re holding them accountable for,” said Beth Schueler, a University of Virginia professor who has studied similar efforts in Massachusetts.

A system of great schools

Some call this a “portfolio model;” the same way an investor holds a portfolio of stocks, a school district manages a collection of autonomous schools, each offering innovative programs and opportunities that meet parent and student needs. If the schools don’t show returns — by way of higher student test scores and state ratings — the district can bring in nonprofits or charter companies to run them, or just shut them down.

It’s a vision for public education that’s sweeping the country, backed by big-time philanthropists such as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which have all heavily invested in encouraging school districts to adopt the approach. Advocates see the work as a middle path between traditional district governance and a state takeover.

Texas is “trying to re-make how school districts approach the work of school improvement,” said Ashley Jochim, who has been studying Texas’ efforts for the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education, whose founder first coined the phrase “portfolio model” more than 15 years ago. “There are no other states doing this as explicitly or deliberately as Texas that I’m aware of.”

Texas calls its portfolio approach the “System of Great Schools,” a network of school districts that want help changing how they manage their schools. The network includes 14 school districts serving more than 400,000 kids, including rural ones like Longview and urban ones like San Antonio and Fort Worth. They are each matched with outside consultants who have done similar work in other states.

Other school districts can apply for grant money to redesign their schools even if they don't join the network.

Their biggest critics are teachers’ unions and associations, who argue that running a school system like a business results in fewer protections for teachers, accelerated closures of under-resourced schools in low-income neighborhoods, and a heightened focus on standardized tests, all to the detriment of students.

They say taking power away from elected school boards disenfranchises low-income black and Hispanic parents, whose children are overrepresented in the state’s lowest-rated schools. They contend the approach effectively privatizes public education and incentivizes new charter schools, which then compete with traditional public schools for money and students.

“Instead of having a great school system, we’ll have a system of great schools,” said Patty Quinzi, legislative counsel at Texas AFT, a state teachers’ union. “We’re going to pick and choose what kind of schools to keep and charter-ize and close the rest of public schools.”

Debate over charter involvement

The El Paso Independent School District, until recently a member of the System of CONTINUE READING: Texas is bringing the "portfolio model" to its schools | The Texas Tribune

Los Angeles: School Board Committee Rejects Plan to Give Schools a Single Grade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: School Board Committee Rejects Plan to Give Schools a Single Grade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: School Board Committee Rejects Plan to Give Schools a Single Grade

The Resistance won a big victory in Los Angeles.

Thanks to newly elected LAUSD board member Jackie Goldberg, a key committee of the school board rejected a plan to assign a single grade to every school. 

The idea of grading schools with a single letter was first hatched by Jeb Bush, in his relentless push to impose test-based accountability on every public school in Florida and to set up those with the worst grades to be privatized.

Several states have adopted the Jeb Bush plan, and in every case, the letter grade was a reliable proxy for students’ family income. The schools where poor students predominated received the lowest grades and were fair game for the charter industry.

Jackie Goldberg has a long history as a teacher, school board member, and state legislator, and she strongly opposed the plan.

Nick Melvoin, who was elected with the help of millions of dollars contributed by Eli Broad and other friends of the charter lobby, proposed the plan.

The Los Angeles Unified school board’s Curriculum and Instruction Committee approved a resolution introduced by board member Jackie Goldberg that calls for the district to suspend implementation of “any use of stars, scores, or any other rating system” for its schools. 

The committee’s action includes a shift in support by CONTINUE READING: Los Angeles: School Board Committee Rejects Plan to Give Schools a Single Grade | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter School Prepares to Join CTU Strike | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter School Prepares to Join CTU Strike | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter School Prepares to Join CTU Strike

NEWS ADVISORY:
For Immediate Release| ctulocal1.org

CONTACT: Chris Geovanis, 312-329-6250, 312-446-4939 (m), ChrisGeovanis@ctulocal1.org

• 7:00 a.m., Thurs. Oct. 10: Sharkey, charter teachers to announce strike date
  Passages charter school, 1643 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., Chicago

CTU president to join charter teachers as Passages announces strike date

CEO for lone CPS-funded charter earns equal to CPS CEO who oversees 500+ schools, as management undermines special ed, English language supports and sanctuary for immigrant/refugee students.

CHICAGO—After months of fruitless negotiations, CTU bargaining team members at Passages Charter School will announce a strike date at 7:00 a.m. this Thursday, October 10 at the school, located at 1643 W. Bryn Mawr. They’ll be joined by CTU President Jesse Sharkey, as tens of thousands of CTU members in CPS district-run schools brace for a possible strike next week.

Passages’ students speak dozens of languages, and come from across Mexico, Central and South America, Asia and the African continent. Close to 70 percent are low-income. Over half are Black, Latinx or other children of color. Almost four in ten have limited English skills, and the school has one of the highest percentages of refugee students in CPS.

Yet charter holder Asian Human Services, which owns and runs the school, continues to refuse to even bargain over, let alone agree to, sanctuary language to protect the school’s immigrant and refugee students.

“Last year, every union charter school we bargained with agreed to sanctuary language,” said CTU-ACTS Chair Chris Baehrend. “The CTU has even reached a tentative agreement with CPS around sanctuary language in district-run schools. But Asian Human Services, which has a mission of helping refugees and immigrants, refuses to even bargain with us over this critical issue. Many of our students come from immigrant and refugee families. They need these protections—especially in the era of Trump and with the huge carve-outs that remain in Rahm Emanuel’s ‘Welcoming City’ sanctuary ordinance.”

Staffing is also a critical issue. The school’s chronic shortage of teachers and paraprofessionals for English language learners and special education students is approaching a crisis level for students, creating high and destabilizing turn-over and harsh working conditions for remaining educators. Those educators voted unanimously to authorize a strike on September 23.

According to IRS data for the charter holder, Asian Human Services, CEO Craig Maki made $247,725 plus $16,000 in additional compensation for the latest year available. Yet Passages pays teachers at the school 28% less than their colleagues at CPS district-run schools.

# # #

The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, the nearly 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information, please visit the CTU website at www.ctulocal1.org.

Chicago Charter School Prepares to Join CTU Strike | Diane Ravitch's blog

2019 CAASPP Scores Announced - Year 2019 (CA Dept of Education)

2019 CAASPP Scores Announced - Year 2019 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Announces Results of Statewide CAASPP Assessment Tests and Supports Action to Address Disparities

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced today the statewide results of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) summative assessments for English language arts/literacy (ELA) and mathematics. School districts have had access to their own results since May.

For CAASPP, performance continues to improve slightly overall within grades as measured by the Smarter Balanced ELA and mathematics assessments. Statewide results in all tested grades showed that 50.87 percent of students met or exceeded standards in ELA, a .99 percentage point increase from 2018 and a 6.87 percentage point increase from 2015. In mathematics, 39.73 percent of students met or exceeded standards, a 1.08 percentage point increase from 2018 and a 6.73 percentage point increase from 2015.

Thurmond acknowledged the slight score increases but expressed deep concern that improvement is less consistent across the score range in the later grades of 7, 8, and 11, with a persistent percentage of students of color not meeting standards and, in several grades, showing declining scores from last year.

“Disparities between students of color and their white and Asian peers continue from year to year and demonstrate the importance of our priority initiative of closing the achievement gap. Education equity should mean equity for all students and right now, we are not there,” said Thurmond. “All students should have an equal opportunity to succeed academically and enter the workforce prepared with the needed skills to compete in the industries that drive our state forward.”

One plan to address disparities that Thurmond supports is working with data experts to interpret the declining scores and evaluate what is causing the results. Strategies can then be identified for how local educational agencies (LEAs) and educators can improve test scores. “The CDE can work with all educational stakeholders to identify strategies and then explore legislative efforts to support the needs of local districts and provide resources to improve test scores,” Thurmond said.

Performance gaps have narrowed (based on tracking the same cohort over time and different cohorts over time) in ELA in most grades between Hispanic or Latino students and white students, Ever-English Learner students and English Only students, and Reclassified Fluent English Proficient students and English Only students.

The CAASPP Smarter Balanced ELA and mathematics results are the basis for the academic indicator, and the Summative ELPAC contributes to the English Learner Progress indicator of the California School Dashboard. Thurmond reinforced that test results are only one measurement out of many that the state uses to evaluate schools on the California School Dashboard, which allows educators and parents to identify strengths and weaknesses. Schools and districts that are struggling across Dashboard indicators are flagged for state assistance.

This is the fifth year of the computer-based tests, which use California’s challenging academic standards and ask students to write clearly, think critically, and solve complex problems, as they will need to do in college and future careers. During this time period, less than one percent of students did not take part in the assessments due to a parent/guardian exemption, a figure that is far less than in other states.

Smarter Balanced ELA and mathematics tests consist of two parts: a computer adaptive assessment and a performance task. The computer adaptive assessment bases follow-up questions on a student’s answers in real time. If a student answers a question correctly, they get a more difficult question. If they answer incorrectly, they get an easier question.

The performance task challenges students' ability to apply their knowledge and skills to problems in a real-world setting. The two parts measure depth of understanding, writing, research, and problem-solving skills.

Scores on the Smarter Balanced ELA and mathematics fall into one of four achievement levels: standard exceeded, standard met, standard nearly met, and standard not met. The state also computes the average scores of all tested students by grade level, called mean scale scores, which reflect the progress of all students rather than only those who changed achievement levels from one year to the next.

The CAASPP Smarter Balanced and California Alternate Assessments for ELA and mathematics can now be accessed through the CDE Public Reporting website. Explore the enhanced features such as easy-to-read tables and graphs illustrating various aggregate assessment results, improved filters for student groups as well as school type, and statewide performance trend reports to support critical work in identifying and narrowing achievement gaps.

# # # #

Tony Thurmond — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Last Reviewed: Wednesday, October 9, 2019

2019 CAASPP Scores Announced - Year 2019 (CA Dept of Education)

North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover

This is a story so nutty that it would be hilarious if there were no children involved. Instead, it is an outrage.

When the fringe rightwingers of the Tea Party won control of the North Carolina legislature in 2011, they promptly passed laws authorizing charters and vouchers and transferring the funding from the state’s successful N.C. Teaching Fellows Program (which prepared career teachers) to the temps in Teach for America.

Then they looked wistfully to Tennessee and realized that what they were missing was a mechanism for state takeover of low-scoring public schools. Tennessee had its very own “Achievement School District,” funded by $100 million of federal Race to the Top money, and North Carolina wanted to do the same thing. The Tennessee ASD  took control of the state’s lowest-performing schools and pledged to catapult them into the top 20% of schools in the state.

By 2016, it was clear that the ASD was a total failure but that did not deter North Carolina lawmakers. Give them credit for a combination of gullibility and ignorance.

To help the state takeover pass, a very wealthy conservative entrepreneur from Oregon named John Bryan funded a campaign for the state takeover legislation. Bryan handed out about $600,000 to Legislative candidates from 2011 to 2016.

The bill passed, and now North Carolina had its very own Innovative School District. The law said the state would take over up to five low-performing schools in its first CONTINUE READING: North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover | Diane Ravitch's blog

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Seattle Time's Westneat Speaks Out on Advanced Learning/HCC

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Seattle Time's Westneat Speaks Out on Advanced Learning/HCC

Seattle Time's Westneat Speaks Out on Advanced Learning/HCC

From KNKX's Ashley Gross on yesterday's Curriculum&Instruction Board committee meeting discussion on Advanced Learning:

The Seattle school district’s proposal to change how it serves academically advanced students hit a roadblock Tuesday, after two school board directors voiced concerns in a committee meeting and chose not to advance a draft policy district leaders had put forward.

Board director Rick Burke said he was concerned that the district pushed ahead with the proposed change before an advanced learning task force of community members finished its work.

“We want our district to operate in a collaborative space. I’ve heard that from our superintendent. I’ve heard that from our board. I feel that myself,” Burke said. “And I do not believe that we’re in a collaborative space on this particular policy.”

Burke and Scott Pinkham, another board director, said they would not support moving the policy change out of the curriculum and instruction policy committee.

“Looking at what I’ve been hearing from the community, they feel that this still needs more work,” Pinkham said. “The people of color on the committee felt that their ideas weren’t included.

The mystery to me is why the district - of its own accord and direction - decided to take nearly two years for the Advanced Learning Taskforce to do its CONTINUE READING: Seattle Schools Community Forum: Seattle Time's Westneat Speaks Out on Advanced Learning/HCC

Is Inspire Charter Schools the Next A3 Education? | tultican

Is Inspire Charter Schools the Next A3 Education? | tultican

Is Inspire Charter Schools the Next A3 Education?

By Thomas Ultican 10/9/2019

Inspire Charter School mirrors the methods of A3 Education. It employs practices strikingly similar to those that led to May’s 67-count indictment against A3’s leaders. Furthermore, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) took the same unusual step of sharing concerns about Inspire and A3 with California authorities. They are virtual schools that concentrate on obtaining authorization from small school districts. These systems have a similar structure in which a central organization controls the schools that are contracting with it and they transfer funds among multiple organizations making it difficult to monitor their activities. Students at both Inspire and A3 struggle academically.

The First Inspire Charter School Opened in 2014

The Acton-Aqua Dulce Unified School District is infamous for authorizing suspect charter applications while not having the resources to adequately monitor those schools. It has 1085 public school students and 14,734 charter school students. Acton-Aqua Dulce authorized Inspire’s first charter school which was located in Los Angeles County. Strangely, Inspire Charter grew from 151 students in the 2014-15 school year to 4,321 students in the 2018-19 school year and then closed up shop this June 30th.

Founder Nick Nichols needed a program that would service his target audience of home school students.  The Inspire 2016 tax form shows that he purchased CONTINUE READING: Is Inspire Charter Schools the Next A3 Education? | tultican

Big Education Ape: #AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal HOW BAD DO YOU HAVE TO BE: Calls mount for investigation of Inspire charter schools - The San Diego Union-Tribune - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/10/anotherdayanothercharterscandal-how-bad.html