Archive | December, 2025

Charter School Flimflam Documented

31 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/31/2025

Charter schooling has a 33-year history. In 1992, the first one opened in Minnesota and it was exactly the kind of school American Federation of Teachers President Al Shankar envisioned when he promoted the idea. It was small, teacher-run within a public district that tested innovative strategies to reach hard-to-teach kids. Almost immediately, that model was highjacked by profiteers. The Network for Public Education (NPE) has published two parts of their planned three-part series. “Charter School Reckoning: Decline” came in July. It details the harm charter schools are doing with their legacy of waste, fraud and abuse.

The late Al Shankar’s wife, Edith, claimed,

“Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent. He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”

The reality is that nearly all attempts to create “well-crafted legislation and public oversight” has been thwarted by the industry. More than 50 national and state-based trade associations have lobbied aggressively against reform and oversight. The latest tax filings from 2023 show that the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) reported over $26.5 million in income and they have $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) reported nearly $13 million in new revenue and more the $17 million in net assets. These charter school advocates are powerful lobbyists working for unlimited charter growth, while fending off oversight and protecting existing charter schools. (Decline Page 2)

Founded in 2003 by Caprice Young and Steve Poizner, the older of the above-mentioned organizations is CCSA. Poizner is a wealthy technology guy from San Jose who as a Republican along with Arnold Schwartzenager was one of the last two Republicans to win statewide election in California. Caprice Young grew up in a foster home in Los Angeles but made her way to Yale. She worked 3 years for LA’s billionaire mayor, Richard Riordan and followed that with serving on the Los Angeles Unified School District board. Since leaving CCSA in 2008 she has been involved with several questionable charter school organization including the Gulan movement’s Magnolia schools.

The foundational years for both CCSA and NAPCS have a surprising number of billionaires and political leaders on their boards. At CCSA the early boards included John Walton (Walmart heir) and later his niece Carrie Penner plus Reed Hastings founder of Netflix. NAPCS, formed in 2004, had on its founding boards Caprice Young (Co-Founder CCSA), Fernando Zuleta (Charter school magnate), Joel Klien (Bloomberg’s education leader), Ted Michelle (New Schools Venture Fund), Whitney Tilson (Co-founder TFA and Democrats for Education Reform) and Margarete Spellings (George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education).

Decline

Released in July, the first NPE report subtitled “Decline” states, “A program originally intended to foster innovation became a vehicle for waste, mismanagement, and fraud.” As a highlight, the paper reports that of the 50 charter schools that have closed in first half of 2025, almost half of them received federal charter school funding as start-ups. That funding totals to $102 million. (Decline Pages 5 and 6)

The history of the federal charter schools’ program (CSP) is a history of failure. Beginning in 1995, CSP’s original funding was $5.4 million for creation of new charter schools. By 2011, CSP funding had rocketed to $226 million and the grift was on.  (Decline Page 6)

Audits confirm that Between 2006 and 2016, 11% of CSP-funded schools never opened. In 2022, the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General found that 51% of schools promised by grantees between 2013 and 2016 never opened or expanded. (Decline Page 7)

As the federal government has increased its priming of the charter school pump, the charter growth rate has declined for both new school openings and enrollment. Between 2020 and 2023 charter school enrollment only increased by 0.1%, from 7.5% to 7.6% of total school enrollment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, the number of charter schools increased by only 11 schools between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. (Decline Page 8)

Even as charter schools are losing their appeal, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, in conformity to Trump’s anti-public education agenda, pushed the CSP funding to a half billion dollars. It appears lying comes easy to billionaires. In defending this indefensible action, McMahon claimed, “We’ve got about a million students on charter school waiting lists.”

This is a very old lie. In a 2014 policy brief titled “Wait, Wait. Don’t Mislead Me“ scholars Kevin Welner and Gary Miron of the National Education Policy Center identified at least nine reasons to be skeptical of such numbers. Among them: the absence of standardized data, duplicate counting, and self-reported, unaudited figures from charter operators themselves. Texas — one of the few states with detailed charter enrollment data — reported in 2025 that its charter schools had 120,826 vacant seats. (Decline Page 10)

In 2023, NPE produced Doomed to Fail: An Analysis of Charter Closures from 1998–2022, which found that 47% of charter school closures were due to insufficient enrollment. Of the 50 charter schools that announced closures in the first half of this year, 27 (54%) cited low enrollment as the primary reason. (Decline Page 10)

Disillusionment

The second part of the three-part series, “Charter School Reckoning: Disillusionment” was released in December.

For-profit charter school management corporation, Leona Group, founded by William Coats, opened in Michigan in 1996 then rapidly expanded to Arizona where most of its 28 schools are today. Jon Hage founded Charter Schools USA soon after Florida passed its charter law, creating a related real estate company, Red Apple Development. Red Apple builds charter schools and collects the rents. The nation’s largest for-profit management company, Academica, opened its first school inside a real estate development owned by the Zulueta brothers, its founders and owners. (Disillusionment Page 4)

The makeup of boards for some of America’s largest charter school companies include many billionaires who would never consider sending their children to one of these schools. For example, KIPP board members include Emma Bloomberg, daughter of billionaire Michael Bloomberg; Reed Hastings, the billionaire founder of Netflix; and Carrie Walton Penner, the billionaire heiress to the Walmart fortune. (Disillusionment Page 5)

When scandals came to light at the Texas Idea charter chain, CEO Tom Torkelson was fired but still rewarded with a $900,000 buyout. His successor, Joann Gama, was soon ousted as well and she walked away with a nearly half a million dollar golden parachute. (Disillusionment Page 6)

In 2023, Eva Moskowitz, who runs New York City’s Success Academy schools, took home $1,018,977 in compensation. With 15,500 students under her management, Moskowitz took in more than twice that of the Chancellor of the city’s public schools with almost a million students. (Disillusionment Page 6)

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported this year that the nation’s largest charter chain, KIPP, disclosed over $52 million in unexplained spending in its 2023 IRS filings. The disclosure was buried in the vague category of “all other expenses.” (Disillusionment Page 6)

This Disillusionment paper asserts, “Corruption and mismanagement in charter schools have cost taxpayers nearly one billion dollars in the past few years alone.” By collecting data from news reports between September 2023 and September 2025, the National Center for Charter School Accountability found $858 million that disappeared due to fraud, theft, profiteering or incompetence. (Disillusionment Page 8)

A related-party transaction is a financial transaction between either individuals or corporations with a preexisting business relationship. Public school boards and managements are strictly prohibited from entering into these transactions and they are monitored. In the charter industries these kinds of business practices are common place and mostly legal. (Disillusionment Page 10)

To cite one example, Charter Schools USA (CSUSA) has a complex web of related nonprofit and for-profit entities, including its affiliated real estate arm. It employs Red Apple Development to manage schools and extract profits. By controlling both school operations and property leases, CSUSA sets lease terms, charges inflated rents, and structures agreements that benefit Red Apple and CSUSA. These practices should be illegal but the charter school lobby has so far fended off most common-sense legal oversight. (Disillusionment Page 11)

Final Words

The conclusion of NPE’s three-part series coming in 2026 is called “Charter School Reckoning: Cost.” I am guessing the costs exposed will include monetary, emotional and educational costs.

My personal opinion is that there are some good charter schools out there but their governance should include democratic control by communities. All charter schools within a public-school district’s boundaries should be governed by that elected school district board. Profiteering, theft of public tax dollars, huge management salaries and self-dealing is costing too much for this failed education experiment to continue under its present structure.

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The EdReports Scam

19 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/19/2025

In order to monetize public education, billionaires started creating both for-profit and non-profit businesses to advance their agenda. ‘The 74’ recently wrote about changes at one of these organizations. EdReports was established in 2014 by Bill Gates associate, Eric Hirsch, and was fully funded in 2018. It masquerades as an independent non-profit that evaluates curriculum materials. It rates these materials based on their fidelity with the common core state standards and the science of reading (SoR).

During the Obama administration, billionaires became frustrated because teachers and friends of public education were destroying their messaging on social media. To counteract the success teachers were having, the super wealthy started creating new on-line media and liberally funding them. Their biggest success has been ‘The 74’ established by former CNN news anchor, Campbell Brown, and Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor, Romy Drucker. Its original funding came from, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, theWalton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies, all of which are owned by multi-billionaires.

Education focused organizations are given legitimacy when ‘The 74’ writes puff pieces about them. A recent example is the October 2nd article, “Eric Hirsch, EdReports’ Founding CEO, to Step Down – The next decade, one expert said, should consider the role of AI in curriculum and making materials more useful.” It is a glowing account of how Eric Hirsch was able to “change the way school districts and parents think about curriculum.” The mention of AI in the sub-title is a timely promotion of the technology industries latest harmful edtech offering.

Eric Hirsch and EdReports

Hirsch earned a bachelor’s degree (1992) in political science and government from Tufts University, a medium sized liberal arts and research school in the greater Boston area. He went onto the University of Colorado in Boulder where he obtained a master’s in political science and government (1997). His first job out of college was in Denver working for the National Conference of State Legislators from 1997-2002.

After 4 years there, he went to work at the Alliance for Quality Teaching in Denver as executive director for a year and a half. He then spent four years in North Carolina as executive director of the Center for Teaching Quality. From there, he went to Santa Cruz, California for seven years working as chief officer, external affairs at the Bill Gates established New Teachers Center (NTC). His total earnings during his last year in Santa Cruz (2013) was reported to be $175,000 (TIN 26-2427526).

In 2014, Hirsch left NTC and traveled to Durham, North Carolina to found EdReports. It is unknown how or if he was paid. During the first four years from 2014-2017 EdReports (TIN 47-1171149) filed non-profit tax form 990N which indicates they had less than $50,000 in revenue which only required a post card tax filing. In 2018, EdReports took in over $15 million in contributions. They had to file an IRS form 990 and Hirsch’s declared income and benefits were reported exceeding $300,000.

EdReports claims it is:

“funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Gates Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.” The 2018 donation of $15 million included giving by Carnegie (TIN 13-1628151) $200,000, Overdeck (TIN 26-4377643) $390,000, Gates (TIN 56-2618866) $1,500,000 and Schusterman (TIN 73-1312965) $5,689,700.

It is very clear that EdReports, based on its funding, is a billionaire sponsored organization.

EdReports rates curricula for their alignment to Common Core and (SoR). In 2021, they gave both Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell’s reading curricula, which were the most widely used reading curricula in America, its lowest ratings.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is another billionaire funded organization selling SoR. Among their 5 action plans they highlight EdRepors in plan four. NCTQ claims it addresses “the use of high-quality curricula aligned to the science of reading.” They advise schools to sign on with EdReports which reviews reading materials and lets client schools know about their alignment with SoR.

The NCTQ report declares that “only nine states require districts to select high-quality reading curriculum materials” (HQIM) and noted that forward-looking states, like Arkansas, partner with EdReports. This is a really strange claim. Arkansas students were 42nd of 52 states in fourth grade reading on the 2024 NAEP testing and their 8th graders were 37th of 52. Nothing wrong with these scores but they do not scream “forward-looking.”

For the billionaires this is all about monetizing education and controlling the source of curriculum. A key driver for this corporate takeover is their creation of “High Quality Instructional Materials” to be certified as such by EdReports. Whenever the words “high quality” are used to promote something in education, it is a good bet that swamp land is being sold.

Amplify is an edtech company controlled by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. On the Amplify website the HQIM rating is described:

“States and districts across the country are focusing on materials that have been rigorously reviewed and deemed high-quality by EdReports.org, the leading third-party curriculum reviewer (or, in Louisiana, by a Tier 1 designation). EdReports defines high-quality instructional materials as materials that are closely aligned to rigorous standards and easy to use.”

A strange attribute of the EdReports saga is they are good at making pretty reports but do not have nearly the expertise many districts have for evaluating curriculum. Besides districts, many university education departments are much more qualified to evaluate curriculum. Here in my hometown, San Diego, we have at least three universities whose education departments fit the bill, but when there is enough money behind a company, reality becomes less significant.

One big problem facing public schools is people like David Steiner of John Hopkins University. He knows better but purposefully misleads people to sell HQIM. For example, in his recent article in ‘The 74’, he wrote:

“In 2022, 26% of eighth-graders performed at or above proficient on the NAEP in math, and 31% in ELA. While NAEP standards are more demanding than those in most states, what this means (conservatively) is that more than half of the students in an average American public-school classroom lack grade-level skills and content knowledge.”

By implying that a proficient score which generally is seen as equivalent to B+ or A- is grade level instead of basic which is about the same as a C, he claims “that more than half of the students in an average American public-school classroom lack grade-level skills and content knowledge.” In addition, he says that is a conservative estimate. The NAEP tests actually show more than 70% of America’s students are at or above basic which is grade level.

Some Final Words

David Steiner was supported into a leadership position in New York by billionaire Merryl Tisch. While at Hunter College, he was instrumental in establishing Relay Graduate School and served on its board of directors.

All of these billionaire lapdogs, support SoR. The reality is there is no science involved with science of reading. It is based on a 1997 document search that did not include any original research and did not include all of the known reading domains.

SoR is mostly about privatizing and controlling curriculum.

Eric Hirsch in addition to leading EdReports (he plans to leave in July 2026) sits on the board of TPI-US. It is a private company selling teacher preparation as well as SoR. Their web site links to Emily Hanford’s 2022 “Sold a Story” here.

This is only a small slice of the billionaire spending to undermine and monetize public education.

We have a big problem in America. Billionaires have shown themselves unable to rationally, democratically and wisely administer their extraordinary assets. We need some form of tax driven redistribution of wealth if America is going to remain a democracy and save its treasured institutions like free universal public education. I suggest the top tax rate be raised to at least 65% and a wealth tax be applied; 5% (over $500 million in assets), 10% (over $1 billion in assets), 15% (over $50 billion in assets) and 20% (over $100 billion in assets). 

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Charter Schools in a Racist Big Easy

8 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/8/2025

New Orleans was the site of the largest slave market in America. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, more than 135,000 slaves were purchased in the Big Easy. This racist legacy has survived up until today in many of its White citizens, business leaders and politicians. The book William Frantz Public School states, “By the 1920s, Orleans Parish School Board members and district administrators vehemently voiced their belief that White supremacy should guide public policy and stated their willingness to employ any means, including the use of force, to maintain inequality between the two races.” (William Frantz Page 4) After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, long-time state senator William Rainach headed a strategy committee that condemned integration as the work of communists and created the all-White Louisiana’s Citizens’ Councils (Overturning Brown page 34). Leading up to hurricane Katrina, many White citizens continued working to maintain the ideal of White supremacy.   

This summer, Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance (ERA) created and published “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons.” This report was published June 2, 2025 by authors Douglas Harris and Jamie Carroll. In an alliance with Network for Public Education (NPE), Kristen Buras PhD, who has been studying New Orleans schools since the hurricane, wrote a paper countering many of the claims made in the ERA paper.

There is reason to believe the two ERA writers are incapable of doing unbiased research in the education realm.

In 2023, Diane Ravitch disclosed that while serving as Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos gave $10 million to establish a research center on school choice. The longtime advocate of school choice was not apt to give the money to academics likely to throw cold water on her life’s work. The grant went to Tulane University in the only American city that has no public schools. Ravitch noted, “The organization she funded is called the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH), led by economist Douglas Harris.”

Jamie Carrol who attended an all-girls high school in Maryland was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher 2008-2010 in New Orleans. She went on to earn a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Texas. Today, she works as a researcher for Betsy DeVos’s REACH.

In her Paper, “The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on “Large Achievement Gains” in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students”, Kristen Buras shares that the amazingly pro-charter school Arnold Foundation has spent lavishly to advance charter schools in New Orleans; in 2012 $15 million for “education reform” in New Orleans, then another $25 million to be managed by the Charter School Growth fund and New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), and 2014-2017 grants to Tulane University and ERA of more than $5 million. Buras comments, “Grants from this consistently pro-charter foundation helped launch and sustain ERA’s work.”  (Buras Page 17) 

Recently, two of America’s most active funders of charter schools awarded nearly $1 Million to REACH: the Walton Foundation and the City Fund (Buras Page 18). The Walton family, who owns Walmart, is the wealthiest family in the world and the largest private funder of charter schools in the US. The City Fund was created by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold. They each put in $100 million to create an organization specifically for spurring the spread of charter schools.

Do Not be Naïve

Even before hurricane Katrina, there were efforts for the state to take over New Orleans’s public schools. Tulane University President Scott Cowen was quite influential in the development of the state of Louisiana’s education policies. In 2003, Cowen was involved in the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD) that was to take control over “failing schools” in New Orleans and reform them. After Katrina, Cowen headed the education committee of Mayor Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission. In early 2006, Cowen’s committee released a report recommending that New Orleans become the nation’s first all-charter school district (Buras Page 18). 

Scott Cowen established Tulane University’s Cowen Institute, a predecessor of ERA. Buras reported on conducting interviews with Cowen’s staff in 2009 noting:

“I asked about the institute’s mission. Like ERA, they characterized their work as neutral. One staff member shared: ‘We don’t advocate for an all-charter system because we don’t feel there’s adequate research [at this point] to indicate that charters will outperform non-charters.’ Instead, the staff portrayed the Cowen Institute as an ‘honest broker’ and ‘objective observer.’ Yet, NSNO, TFA, and other pro-charter school groups were given free office space in the same suite as the Cowen Institute.” (Buras Page 18)

To this day, ERA shares office space on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street with NSNO.

Since its inception, NSNO has been all about building the all-charter school system in New Orleans. A peak at their tax records (EIN: 02-0773717) shows Neerav Kinsland appearing on the board in 2010 and earning $117,000 as chief of strategy. In 2011 he became CEO earning $146,000 and over the next two years he was paid $207,000 and $223,000 as CEO. But that wasn’t good enough. Since then, he has worked for billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings, served on the California Charter School Association board and is now leading the City Fund.

After Katrina, Black teachers decreased from 71% in 2005 to 49% in 2014, then rose to 56% in recent years. They were paid less than white counterparts in the same teaching and administrative positions (Buras Page 13). Experienced Black teachers were replaced by mostly White college graduates from TFA with just 5 weeks of training as an educator.

Students in the Big Easy are forced to take long bus rides often past, within walking distance neighborhood schools, to get their assigned charter school. It is not unusual for them to soon be traumatized by one of New Orleans multiple school closures. Somehow, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.

Ashana Bigard shared in her book “Beyond Resilience Katrina 20” about the racist enrollment process in the all-charter school system. To enroll children, parents must use OneApp. It runs the school choice algorithm but strangely only white children get into the best schools, not even if you’re a Black family in the upper middle class do you get a seat. It is common to see White people move to the city and magically get their children into schools with 100 children on the waiting list. Ashana notes, “They didn’t even know the school existed prior to moving to the city, but racism and classism still existed heavily within the new system.” (Bigard Page 268)

Cheating Charters

The state cheated to create the conditions for developing the all-charter school system. Before Katrina, the cut point for school failure was 60 on a 200-point scale. After Katrina, through Act 35, the state legislature raised the cut point to 87.4, which was just below the state average. This maximized the number of public schools that the RSD could seize. Then, as charter schools were opened, the cut point for failure was lowered back to 60 (Buras Page 19).

The Times-Picayune reported that “data published by the Louisiana Department of Education vastly underreported the number of expulsions in charter schools.” For the 2007-2008 period, state data from a sample of 19 RSD charter schools listed only 4 students as having been expelled. The Lafayette Academy admitted to the Times-Picayune that 14 students were expelled that year; the state reported zero for Lafayette. (Buras Page 16)

In 2011-2012, 34% of schools in New Orleans had an out of school suspension (OSS) rate at or above 20%. Since 2009, charter schools have suspended students at rates sometimes double and triple the state average which was not that great to begin with. (Buras Page 15)

In 2015, SciTech Academy allowed students to take tests for one another, at home or multiple times (Buras Page 21).

Students coded as “transferred out of state” are excluded from the state’s metric. The inordinate use of the out of state code by charters seemed to be masking the true dropout figures which improved their state ratings (Buras Page 21).

At Landry-Walker, 78% of students scored “good” or “excellent” on the biology EOC and 78% on the geometry EOC. Only “good” or “excellent” scores earn points on the state’s metric. Yet, 52 of the 257 students who scored “good” or “excellent” on the EOC exam received a D or F in the class. By 2017, the Louisiana inspector general’s office had uncovered enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing at Landry-Walker that the local district attorney was alerted (Buras Page 21).

In her report, Buras says these are likely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to charter school test cheating. Yet these inflated scores and school ratings are used by ERA to claim good academic results in New Orleans’s charter system. The willingness to ignore the cheating problem is appalling.

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