Horizon Science Academies dba Concept Schools another lawsuit

http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/investigations/lawsuit-alleging-discrimination-called-not-true-by-cleveland-charter-school-operator

Ohio Turkish Schools raided by FBI - Sponsor Buckeye Community Hope still stands by their racism, sexism and poor performance?

Buckeye Community Hope Foundation sponsors the Concept Schools (Horizon Science Academies)
in Ohio the same schools that were raided by the FBI, have sexism, racism and low report cards.
Yet Buckeye doesn't see any reason to pull back support from the schools after urging from
several groups.  Maybe they would miss that government MONEY

Send Peggy Young an email at http://buckeyehope.org/contact/
Tell her how you feel as a tax payer

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Ohio Foundation Faces Pressure to Shutter Charters Under FBI, State Scrutiny

By Arianna Prothero on January 28, 2015                             

Updated
A group of activists are calling for a chain of Ohio charter schools that have been under both FBI and state investigations to be shut down.
February 1 is the deadline for all state sponsors—the entities that authorize and oversee charter schools—to decide whether to renew charter contracts for the independently run but publicly funded schools.
Representatives from the Cleveland Teachers' Union; the Ohio Parent Teachers Association; and Policy Matters Ohio, a research and advocacy organization; are pressuring the Columbus-based Buckeye Community Hope Foundation not to renew nine charter contracts for Concept Schools, a charter management company.
Concept Schools, which runs campuses in Illinois and Indiana as well as Ohio, has been at the center of its fair share of controversy since last summer. Details from a July Cincinnati Enquirer story:

"[Nineteen] Ohio charter schools managed by Chicago-based Concept Schools are under investigation by state officials. Both the Department of Education and Ohio Auditor Dave Yost launched investigations after former teachers and a student at the Horizon Dayton school made complaints to the State Board of Education about alleged sexual misconduct and tampering with test and attendance records."

And the Akron Beacon Journal reported in June that Concept Schools had also been previously investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor for hiring foreign workers:

"Ohio audits found that public money for the schools had been used improperly for visas. Concept received more visas for immigrant workers than Google in 2009, and many of the school's employees are of Turkish descent. Most of the nonprofit schools' board members in Northeast Ohio are male and of Turkish descent."

"I think this represents the first time we've seen a trifecta of bad behavior from a charter school operator," Amy Hanauer of Policy Matters Ohio said during a call with reporters. "Clearly, these ... schools should not be renewed."
Policy Matters, along with its coalition partners, sent a letter to Buckeye Community Hope Foundation saying just that.
"Buckeye Community Hope Foundation does not base its sponsorship decisions on unproven allegations - that would be grossly inappropriate and unfair to countless students who attend the schools managed by Concept Schools," Peggy Young, the director of Buckeye's education division, said in an email. "We implement a comprehensive performance accountability and compliance monitoring system that provides the information necessary to make these rigorous and standards based renewal, and intervention decisions."
This situation in Ohio represents a bigger shift in the state and nationally.
Charter schools have long endured criticism from skeptics who say they misuse taxpayer dollars. But the laws and sponsors, often called authorizers, that govern charter schools are facing more and more scrutiny.
It's a trend that's even welcomed by some in the charter school movement in Ohio and beyond who fear sensational headlines, like those generated by the Concept Schools investigations, will undermine the sector at large.
The Fordham Institute, a Washington-based education reform think tank and advocacy organization, recently commissioned a well-known third party research group, the Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes, to examine the Ohio's charters. (The Fordham Institute's Ohio-based sister-organization, the Fordham Foundation, sponsors some schools in the state.)
CREDO researchers found that Ohio charter school students, on average, learn less in a year than their peers in regular, district schools. Following the release of those results, Ohio governor John Kasich has called for a rewrite of the state's charter law.
"I think it's pretty clear unless you've been living under a rock, Ohio has had its fair share of troubles for a long time," said David Quolke with the Cleveland Teachers' Union on the call with reporters. "Even the stories of the successful charter schools tend to get drowned out by stories of FBI raids and corruption."
This post has been updated to include a statement from Peggy Young and, following a corrected statement from Policy Matters Ohio, to change the number of charter school contract renewals the coalition is seeking to have denied from 11 to nine.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2015/01/foundation_overseeing_charter_schools_under_fbi_scrutiny_faces_pressure.html

Concept Schools Quest Academy must cut ties with Concept

 

By Pam Adams of the Journal Star
Posted Jan. 22, 2015 @ 10:15 pm

PEORIA — The board of Quest Charter Academy will cut ties with Concept Schools, the not-for-profit charter-school management company that has run Peoria’s public charter school since it opened in 2010.

Board members disclosed the decision during a regular board meeting Thursday in which they also announced they’ve reached a tentative agreement with Peoria School District 150 to extend the school’s charter for another five years.

Tom Fliege, vice president of the charter school board, said the two actions were not related.

Concept’s contract with Quest’s governing board, the Peoria Charter School Initiative, expires July 30. The decision not to renew the contract was not motivated by finances or the FBI investigation of the Des Plaines-based company’s handling of federal money for school technology improvements, according to Fliege.

Instead, the charter school board has always planned to eventually take over school operations, he said.

“There’s no acrimony, this was mutually agreed upon. We’ll continue to work together as the contract comes to a close.”

Concept staff, which includes Quest Principal Ali Kuran, will help with the transition. The board has tentatively selected an interim executive director, who also will help with the transition, until an executive director is hired.

Details of the tentative agreement to extend the charter school contract will be released at District 150’s board meeting Jan. 26. District 150 board members are scheduled to vote on the contract Feb. 9. Quest board members will take a vote at a special meeting that has yet to be announced. Both boards must approve the final agreement.

“As is true with any agreement, they’re not totally happy, we’re not totally happy,” Fliege said.

The charter school board wanted more money from District 150, while the district maintained it was not fair for Quest to expect more money because the school district’s revenues are declining.

The charter school board had refused District 150’s last counterproposal. Apparent delays in negotiations prompted Quest board members to discuss the administrative process for closing the school.

But negotiations started moving, according to Fliege, when he and Quest board member Will Ball began meeting with Debbie Wolfmeyer and Linda Butler, the District 150 board’s president and vice president, respectively.

Initially, board members were not fully aware that the charter school board had to have negotiations completed within a specific time frame, according to Fliege. He complimented Wolfmeyer and Butler for “having the courage” to resolve the issue.

Also, for the second time, the charter school board tabled a proposal to partner with Peoria Heights High School to offer football for Quest High School students.

Read more: http://www.pjstar.com/article/20150122/News/150129639#ixzz3PtHLeY4M


Concept Schools aka GULEN INSPIRED schools PORN on website?

By Josh Sweigart

Staff Writer

Vice and publicly funded charter schools don’t mix, officials advise. That means what happens in Vegas does not always stay in Vegas. And people shouldn’t be looking for love on a charter school management nonprofit’s website.

A Las Vegas trip was made in 2013 by two employees of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an e-school with students across the state of Ohio. The staffers were there for a school safety conference, but when the conference ended on a Friday they stayed through the weekend.

Since the hotels and meals were on the school’s credit card, a state audit said the cost of the weekend stay must be repaid. Each employee repaid the $196 in findings in the audit.

More recently, officials from Concept Schools — a charter school management nonprofit that runs the Horizon chain of schools here and across the state — removed a lascivious link from their company’s website when asked about it by the I-Team.

The web page, brought to our attention by a reader, offered to help people “find a new sex partner.”

“We already have 2 million members registered on our website. This is YOUR chance to find a new sex partner easily (as well as discreetly),” it proffered. “Hundreds of people join our website every day, who have the same wish like you do: a sex date!”

Concept schools officials offered this explanation:

“The mentioned link is a result of one of our departmental web sites being affected by some malware/adware. The link has been removed and additional precautions put in place to prevent future attacks. Moreover, we are in the process of screening individual school sites to ensure that they have not been exposed to such malware/adware attacks recently either.”

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/gov-watch-e-school-employees-charged-school-for-we/njmbH/

Gulen "inspired" Schools are a danger to America

Gulen "Inspired" Concept Schools dba Horizon Science Academies, Quest Academy, Chicago Math and Science Academy, Indiana Math and Science Academy and more.

Using Turk­ish Islamic teach­ers just the tip of the ice­berg in char­ter irregularities!

Exhibit 1

“Chicago char­ter schools import 474 Turk­ish Mus­lim teach­ers as 40k Amer­i­can teach­ers go unem­ployed,” pub­lished on Novem­ber 22, 2014, reported the lat­est antics of char­ter school operators:

Hori­zon Sci­ence Acad­emy in Bond Hill… employs seven for­eign teach­ers, mostly from Turkey, brought to the U.S. on H-1B visas for jobs it says Ohio teach­ers are unqual­i­fied to fill.
Con­cept Schools, founded by fol­low­ers of a Turk­ish Islamic cleric secluded in the Poconos, already is under fed­eral and state scrutiny for pos­si­ble irreg­u­lar­i­ties in teacher licens­ing, test­ing and tech­nol­ogy contracts.
An Enquirer inves­ti­ga­tion has found that Chicago-based Con­cept Schools, which runs Hori­zon and 17 other char­ter schools in Ohio, annu­ally imports dozens of for­eign teach­ers in num­bers that far sur­pass any other school sys­tem in the state.

At least 474 for­eign teach­ers, again mostly from Turkey, have arrived at Concept’s Ohio schools between 2005 and 2013. The schools are col­lect­ing about $45 mil­lion in state funds annu­ally to edu­cate 6,600 chil­dren in kinder­garten through high school.…

The Ohio Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is weigh­ing com­plaints from for­mer Con­cept staffers that unli­censed, for­eign teach­ers were used.

Ohio teach­ers, mean­while, say plenty of qual­i­fied teach­ers are avail­able for jobs being filled by the for­eign­ers, espe­cially since about 40,000 are still with­out teach­ing jobs because of the reces­sion. [bold and red in original]

Exhibit 2

Are Amer­i­cans who live in cities where char­ter schools exist exam­in­ing their prop­erty tax bills?
Is the fact that their prop­erty taxes are going, in many cases, directly into the pock­ets of for-profit enti­ties, not into the tra­di­tional school bud­get cof­fer, not of some con­cern to them?
Is the fact that char­ter schools have no school boards that rep­re­sent the vot­ers of the entire munic­i­pal­ity of no con­cern to them?
Is the fact that Com­mu­nist Core Marx­ist cur­ricu­lum, assess­ment and reme­di­a­tion of their children’s atti­tudes, val­ues and beliefs will exist in their child’s char­ter school, and they won’t have the right to com­plain about “it” not of con­cern to them?
Is the fact that char­ter schools are being used to teach reli­gion of no con­cern to them?
There used to be a pro­hi­bi­tion against tax-funded pub­lic edu­ca­tion pro­mot­ing reli­gious beliefs. Many state con­sti­tu­tions for­bid tax money going to reli­gious schools! Why is this uncon­sti­tu­tional char­ter school entity not being chal­lenged in the courts?
What is it going to take for the hard-hit Amer­i­can tax­payer and/or par­ent to wake up and focus on the prob­lem of tax-funded  gov­ern­ment schools with no elected boards (char­ter schools)… and, in addi­tion, to wake up and under­stand that once the gov­ern­ment funds any form of pri­vate educ­tion,  includ­ing reli­gious and home edu­ca­tion, that this edu­ca­tion entity in effect becomes “public”/“government” edu­ca­tion (the kind of edu­ca­tion one finds in Cuba, China, or any Social­ist, Com­mu­nist country)?
What is it going to take for Amer­i­cans to real­ize that the inter­na­tion­al­ists, Neo­con­ser­v­a­tives, Left­ists, cor­po­ra­tions and their phil­an­thropic agen­das (such as Bill Gates), the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, the U.S. Dept. of Edu­ca­tion and the Carnegie Cor­po­ra­tion “mafia” do NOT care about their children’s futures? They all sup­port tax-funded school choice in order to imple­ment the life­long global work­force train­ing agenda. This Com­mu­nist work­force agenda can­not be imple­mented with­out tax-funded school choice.

http://agenda21news.com/2014/11/common-core-charter-school-craziness/

Horizon Science Academies part of the Gulen Movement business model

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/education-inc/


Over the summer, FBI agents stormed nineteen charter schools as part of an ongoing investigation into Concept Charter Schools. They raided the buildings seeking information about companies the prominent Midwestern charter operator had contracted with under the federal E-Rate program.
The federal investigation points to possible corruption at the Gulen charter network, with which Concept is affiliated and which takes its name from the Turkish cleric Fetullah Gulen. And a Jacobin investigation found that malfeasance in the Gulen network, the second largest in the country, is more widespread than previously thought. Federal contracting documents suggest that the conflict-of-interest transactions occurring at Concept are a routine practice at other Gulen-affiliated charter school operators.
The Jacobin probe into Gulen-affiliated operators in Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California found that roughly $4 million in E-Rate contract disbursements and $1.7 million in Department of Education Race to the Top grantee awards were given to what appear to be “related parties.” Awarding contracts to firms headed by related parties would seem to violate the FCC’s requirement that the school’s bidding process be “competitive” as well as “open and fair.”
Unlike most charter schools networks, the Gulen charter network has received significant scrutiny in the US press, primarily because of the international profile of its Islamic cleric leader and xenophobic fears of “education jihad.” Such coverage distracts from what appears to be systemic corruption at the public’s expense, a predictable consequence of the US charter school model. This has nothing to do with Fetullah Gulen’s religious teaching and everything to do with the private management of public education dollars.
Like most big-time charter operators, the Gulen charter network has developed a growth model more reminiscent of a Fortune 500 company than a public school district. As the sociologist Joshua David Hendrick told Jacobin, the Gulen charter school movement links “private Turkish capital with a shared sub-economy that builds upon an initial educational venture and then expands from there.”
Armed with startup capital from Turkish foundations, the charter school network has quickly grown to over 130 schools in twenty-five states while employing the same business strategy: invest in lawmakers to win charter school contracts, import Gulen adherents to staff schools on H-1B teaching visas, and award school contracts to education resource firms led by former employees.
The cycle can then repeat itself as enriched former school employees donate to the plethora of Turkish foundations, securing political influence for individual charter school operators.

A Suspect Bidding Process 

Records indicate that Gulen charter schools nationwide may be regularly violating federal competitive-bidding laws by disbursing contracts and grants to firms owned by other Gulen schools or former Gulen school employees.
In August, the Chicago Sun Times reported that in Chicago alone Concept management may have engaged in nearly a million dollars worth of related-party transactions with E-rate contractor Core Group, Inc. An analysis of Core Group’s E-Rate program disbursement shows their only successful bids have come from Concept charter schools across the Midwest and that these fifty-eight bids amount to over $3.2 million.
More obviously suspect are the contracting deals sometimes crafted between Gulen chains. Apex Educational Services, for example, presents itself as a stand-alone education technology firm, but a 2013 IRS file from a Chandler, Arizona, branch of the Gulen-affiliated Sonoran Science Academy chain lists Apex Educational Services, Inc. as one of its properties.
Hence it is no surprise that nearly all of Apex’s forty-eight E-Rate bids have gone to Gulen-affiliated chains across California, Nevada, and Utah, and all four of Apex’s successful bids have come from Magnolia Science Academies, one of the country’s largest Gulen charter chains. To date, Apex has earned about $114,000 from Magnolia’s E-Rate disbursement.
Ties between other Gulen-affiliated chains and their E-Rate providers may also violate the FCC’s competitive-bidding requirements.
There appears to be an intimate relationship, for example, between Harmony Public Schools, a Gulen-affiliated Texas charter chain, and the telecommunications firm Brighten Technologies, which from 2010 to 2014 earned roughly $670,000 off of twenty-three Harmony’s E-Rate contracts. Set up and staffed by former Harmony computer-science teachers, Brighten Technologies exists almost exclusively for Harmony contracts (94 percent of Brighten Technologies’ E-Rate applications have been for Harmony Public Schools).
In an email to Jacobin, Harmony denied these practices constitute a conflict of interest, claiming that their contracting approach to federal grants is “fair and open.” Nonetheless, despite being unaware of their close relationship, the Universal Service Administrative Company – the independent agency responsible for reviewing E-Rate applications – has rejected thirteen of Harmony’s applications to contract with Brighten Technologies for failing to prove it had a competitive-bidding process.
Regarding their contracting with Brighten Technologies, Harmony officials wrote, “A range of factors, including price, product availability, and demonstrated ability to deliver are evaluated in selecting vendors, and all the criteria for ‘best value’ have to be met, not just low price.”
Such a response is telling; rather than simply explaining why no conflict of interest exists with Brighten, Harmony officials stressed twice to Jacobin that “low price” is not their only contracting criterion, a line they used to justify what appeared to be overly generous contracts to Turkish-owned construction firms three years ago.
Additionally, federal data does not support Harmony’s claim that Brighten Technologies offered any “better value” in lieu of its overcharging. In fact, most of Brighten’s applications were rejected for failing to provide basic planning standards. To date, only twenty-six of Brighten’s ninety-eight applications have been accepted. Had Brighten been competent enough to meet USAC’s basic requirements when applying for Harmony contracts, it could have netted well over $5 million from past applications alone.
But Harmony’s apparent competitive-bidding violations go beyond the E-Rate program. In February 2014, Harmony’s school newspaper announced that the Cosmos Foundation had secured a $29.8 million Race to the Top grant from the Department of Education to purchase Google Chromebooks for over 16,000 students.
Brighten Technologies received a roughly $905,000 Department of Education Race to the Top grant, secured for them by Harmony Public Schools — another potential federal violation of Race to the Top grant rules, which stipulate that recipients must foster “full and open competition” when contracting for goods and services.
Further analysis of the same Race to the Top grant shows that Harmony also awarded $805,000 in contracts to the Gulen-affiliated Texas Gulf Foundation for various consulting and instructional services. But as the New York Times reported in 2011, the foundation, like Brighten Technologies, was started by former Harmony employees and used to have its offices on a Harmony campus.
Harmony officials denied that this contract award violated competitive-bidding guidelines; Brighten Technologies has not returned Jacobin requests for comment.

Building Influence, Building Schools

Gulen-affiliated chains have grown most rapidly in the Midwest, Texas, Arizona, and California, where, as in Chicago, stories abound of Gulen-affiliated charter officials appealing to state authorities to override the contracting decisions of local school districts.
In Illinois and Texas, Gulen-linked Turkish cultural foundations have invited lawmakers on numerous trips to Turkey, and consistently fund the campaigns of those in a position to expand their fast-growing network. When the Chicago Public Schools declined Concept’s offer to build two more schools, for example, Concept appealed to the Illinois State Charter School Commission, an agency formed by Illinois Democratic Chairman Michael Madigan, among others. The commission overturned the school board’s decision and approved Concept’s expansion.
Madigan had taken four trips to Turkey that were hosted by the Niagara Foundation, whose honorary president is none other than Fetullah Gulen. From 2010-2012, the Niagara foundation paid for at least thirty-two sojourns for Illinois lawmakers.
In New Orleans, two members of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education traveled to Turkey at the invitation of the Gulen-affiliated Pelican Foundation. The trips prompted local rumors of a quid pro quo when one of these members was the sole dissenting vote against revoking Pelican’s right to operate Abramson Science and Technology Charter School, despite shocking stories of alleged mishandling of sexual-abuse cases.
Similarly, the Houston-based Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, which a Stratfor email leaked by Wikileaks described as “definitely a nonprofit related to the larger Fethullah Gulen movement,” has been called into question for its lavish trips for Texas lawmakers. Prominent members of the nonprofit have close ties to Harmony Public Schools, Texas’ largest charter chain, and its 2012 IRS 990 form alone lists nearly $1.9 million in travel expenses.
The founder of Harmony Public Schools, Yetkin Yildirim, is also the Austin branch representative of the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, a position from which he regularly lobbies local politicians.
And their influence may extend beyond their regional bases. On February 9, 2010, Kemal Oksuz, the president of the Turquoise Council, and Yildirim, the founder of Harmony Public Schools, both attended a White House “Briefing for Turkish American Leaders.” In a statement to Jacobin, Harmony Public Schools claimed to have no affiliation with the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians and denied any connection to the Gulen movement, despite several investigative reports that have linked the two.
Additionally, Buzzfeed reported this summer on the tens of thousands of dollars that Gulen adherents were pouring into Texas races, particularly to that of US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. School officials denied these donations were part of a centrally coordinated influence-building effort. Nonetheless, in July, Harmony CFO Erdal Caglar admitted that Jackson Lee was helping the chain expand to a location in DC.

Education or Immigration?

Despite the financial success of many Gulen schools, several sites have driven themselves to bankruptcy, spending enormous amounts of public funding on immigration fees for fellow Gulenists. As the Atlantic recently reported, Utah’s Beehive Academy, a Gulen school, spent “about 50 cents to pay the immigration costs of foreign teachers for every dollar that it spent on textbooks.” This eventually caused the school to be temporarily shuttered.
In California, Magnolia Science Academies, a Gulen-affiliated chain, recently made headlines for allegedly misusing $3 million in public funds to cover the immigration costs of six non-employees. The Los Angeles Unified School District ordered the closure of two Magnolia schools, citing financial mismanagement, but a July court order reversed the decision.
For Gulen, it goes beyond financial impropriety. Gulen chains appear to use H-1B slots for teaching positions to facilitate immigration and further business expansion, rather than to improve teaching quality. According to Canadian consular officials, teachers being brought from Turkey to teach in Gulen schools on H-1B visas are often not credentialed. “While the H1B petitions were for teaching positions at charter schools in the United States,” wrote one Canadian official, “most applicants had no prior teaching experience and the schools were listed as related to Fethullah Gulen.”
Records indicate that from 2001-2010, Cosmos Foundation, the charter operator of Texas’ Harmony Public Schools, filed 1,157 H-1B visa applications and brought in 731 employees — higher than all other providers of secondary education combined.
In a statement to Jacobin, Harmony officials explained “the national shortage of math and science teachers” had pushed them to hire a “small percentage of international teachers” whose qualifications were “based primarily on academic professional credentials.”
The story of Brighten Technologies, the telecommunications provider closely linked to Harmony, illustrates how Gulen schools use H-1B visas not only to guarantee American residency to fellow Gulen adherents, but also to create in-house companies to profit off of federal and state grants.
Take Joseph Duzgun, the founder of Brighten Technologies, who came to the states sometime around 2002. According to his Linkedin page, Duzgun studied mathematics at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey, though his profile does not include any information regarding teacher training.
Nevertheless, Duzgun served a short teaching stint at Harmony Schools from as early as 2004 to at least 2006. Two years later, he started Brighten Technology Solutions (later called Brighten Technologies), which has benefitted from numerous publicly financed contracts from his former employer, Harmony Public Schools.
Likewise, Turkish immigrant Gökhan Sancar was a computer teacher and technology instructor at Harmony Science Academy Lubbock from 2008-2009 and at the Harmony School of Ingenuity from 2009-2010. He joined Brighten Technology Solutions in 2010. He currently lists his position as Brighten’s VP of Sales. Neither Duzgun nor Sancar responded to Jacobin requests for comment.
Brighten Technologies exemplifies the Gulenist corporate expansion strategy. School officials bring over fellow Gulenists on H-1B teaching visas, keep them in Harmony schools for a few years, then organize them to found companies — which are guaranteed a profit from providing services to Gulen schools, often at inflated costs.

A Charter to Steal

Harmony’s E-Rate and Race to the Top programs federal grants have netted Brighten Technologies over $1.57 million in dubiously legal related-party transactions. Such transactions appear to violate many federal grant application rules, and also occur at the state level, where such nepotistic practices are often even more difficult to regulate.
In Texas, where Harmony has quickly grown to become the largest charter school chain, nine regulators oversee the operations of 671 charter school campuses — a number that hasn’t changed since 2011, according to Texas Education Agency spokesperson DeEtta Culbertson. This regulatory force is so inadequate that in 2011, even Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, admitted, “They don’t have the capacity at the state level to do the job.”
From 2009-2011, Harmony awarded thirty-five contracts worth a total of $82 million to Turkish construction firms with close links to school officials. Despite offering substantially lower bids for the same jobs, competitor firms were shocked to find out they’d lost.
Investigation into Harmony Public Schools’ contracting practices from 2009-2013 indicates that tens of millions in public dollars have continued to flow to closely associated Turkish firms. Since 2009, TDM Construction has brought home over $45 million, Solidarity Construction over $45 million, and Atlas Construction over $3 million, totaling well over $95 million from Harmony contracts alone.
To finance their massive construction projects, Harmony Public Schools has also issued hundreds of millions in bonds, which will rely heavily on public financing to pay off. A 2012 New York Times report, for example, found that Harmony has been granted $200 million in bonds since 2007, making it Texas’ largest charter school bond issuer by far. Last July, the city of Houston alone issued Harmony a $101,555,000 bond to build two more schools, renovate four existing ones, and refinance some of Harmony’s existing debt.
Harmony’s plan to finance their overall debts is projected to cost nearly half a billion dollars over the course of twenty-nine years, a plan which could come back to haunt taxpayers, given that in the last five years the Texas Education Agency has shut down eleven Harmony schools. And unfortunately for the people of Texas, the state’s permanent school fund will guarantee the principal and interest of these bonds, thus exposing Texas higher education funding to considerable risk.
While these sweetheart deals, guaranteed windfalls, and potential financial collapses are troubling, they are endemic to the charter school movement nationwide. The widespread corruption at Gulen charter schools is not due to the religion of Gulen charter school executives, but rather because doling out millions in public funding to private education operators with little to no oversight protects and encourages such fraudulent practices.
Indeed, despite the FBI raids this summer, Chicago’s Board of Education authorized Concept to expand to two more sites just one month later.
The move came as a shock to many Chicagoans, still recovering from the Chicago Board of Education’s historic move to shut down fifty schools last year, mostly in working-class black and Latino neighborhoods. As Chicago NBC reporter Mark Anderson lamented, “a federal raid on a company doesn’t seem to mean much anymore, especially if that firm is a politically connected charter school operator ready to take millions in taxpayer dollars to stay in business.”
The contracting practices of Gulen-affiliated charter schools appear to be not just nepotistic, but illegal. Such corruption, however, must not be ascribed to the ideologies of the Gulen movement, but rather to the structure of the charter school sector, which it has successfully gamed.
In addition, the Gulen expansion strategy should be viewed not as an outlier within the charter school movement, but as its most successful example. Gulen foundations invest in politicians to win charter contracts, and use the resulting public funding to import Gulen adherents on H-1B teaching visas. Though these employees do not necessarily have teaching credentials, they are often qualified to form education resource firms, which consistently earn generous contracts from Gulen schools across the country. The cycle then expands as employees of these firms give back to the very foundations that initiated the process.
It’s a process that enriches private actors and hurts students. But as long as US lawmakers push for private control over public education, the corruption and public plunder that Gulen schools exemplify will only continue.