Governor David Paterson said he could delay $2.1 billion in school aid until June. (Legislative Gazette)
Boy Scouts rallied at City Hall to protest the sale of the city’s only Scout campground. (SI Live)
A Brooklyn woman is organizing a prom dress giveaway for city high school students. (Daily News)
Many school districts are agreeing to do more to protect against bullying. (SI Live)
A former Fortune 500 CEO makes the case for common standards. (Wall Street Journal)
Richard Cohen wonders why parents don’t get more blame in bullying cases. (Daily News)
Colorado officials will meet today to decide whether to apply to Race to the Top again. (Denver Post)
A member of Massachusetts’ first Teach for America class praises the experience. (Boston Globe)
The Philadelphia Inquirer supports school turnarounds, but warns against relying too much on charters.
A Boston Globe columnist argues that a lack of money is killing public education.
turn and talk
I feel so sorry for new teachers in the system. We have great people we may never get back. I can’t imagine how we get by with the blow that the state budget will have. I can’t imagine that there will even be summer school.
The story of the year will be what goes if school budgets are cut yet another 7%. I think budgets have been cut significantly in the last year alone.
Indeed Philadelphia ought to be wary about opening more charters until they thoroughly investigate all the ones operating already.
The City Controller says charter schools are being run as “private fiefdoms” with charter operators spending taxpayer money “like it’s nobody’s business.”
From the news stories about the Philly charters, they actually sound more like mobbed up businesses than schools.
You have the charter operator at Harambee Institute of Science and Technology running a nightclub out of the school on weekends, handing out $7.5 million in construction contracts to her husband for work on her schools, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal travel and expenses and listing them as business-related, and claimed to work more than 365 days a year when she put in for compensation.
Then you have the charter school operators of Philadelphia Academy who were caught defrauding the school for close to $1 million dollars and bribed a policewoman with $34,000 to keep quiet. When it became clear investigators were going to arrest everybody involved, one of the charter operators committed suicide. The other pleaded guilty to mail-fraud theft and tax evasion. The police officer, a 25 year vet, was given a year in prison.
The City Controller has found financial irregularities at 13 other charter schools in the Philadelphia that will be detailed in a report to be released in two weeks.
No wonder the Inquirer says the city shouldn’t rely on charter schools for turnarounds.
The only thing they seem to turnaround is the financial circumstances of the crooks running the schools.
It’s a shame Gotham Schools doesn’t think the rampant abuse by Philly charters is a story – I have yet to see you link to any of the crime stories.
But the truth will come out eventually, and as Diane Ravitch has noted, when you hand out all these millions of dollars to people to open charters with little to no oversight or regulation, corruption will become a rampant.
These Philly charter stories (and the ones involving Malcolm Smith here in NYC) are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fraud and charter school operators.
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