Two for-profit charter school EMOs behaving badly

by David Safier

Here are a few quick stories about for profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs) bleeding charter schools dry for personal gain.

• According to Phoenix Business Journal, a new online charter is coming to Arizona: Life Skills Online. Life Skills runs 25 charters in 4 states. It is part of the Ohio-based for profit EMO, White Hat Management. I wrote about White Hat last December. The corporation is firing people because it's losing money. The owner, David Brennan, is a deep pocketed contributor to Ohio Republicans and even managed to get charter school law written to benefit him — bribery may have been involved — but White Hat is still falling on hard times. A judge is insisting the company "turn over detailed financial records, including tax returns, building leases and transactions with its subsidiaries, to show how it spent millions in tax dollars received each year." White Hat refuses. Even though the charters give 96% of their taxpayer dollars to the for profit corporation, it says the money can't be considered public funds once it is sucked up by the corporation.
• Florida's Tampa Bay Times writes about 2 charter schools run by the for profit EMO, Imagine Schools Inc. that spend twice as much per student on rent as the average for other charters in their areas. One of the charters is also among the lowest achieving schools in its area. School Finance, owned by Imagine Schools, owns the buildings and rents them to the schools at the exorbitantly high rates, as happens at Imagine charters across the country. [As an aside, the article calls Imagine Schools Inc. a nonprofit when in fact it's a for profit. I don't blame the reporters. Imagine tells the "nonprofit" lie to anyone who will listen.]

A NOTE TO ARIZONA JOURNALISTS: Almost a quarter of the country's Imagine charter schools are right here in Arizona — 18 out of 75 — yet there have been no serious investigations of the for profit EMO in any of our media outlets. I've collected easily a hundred articles, most of them somewhat or extremely negative, from (listed alphabetically): California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana (great stuff from Fort Wayne!), Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C. I will be happy to share background information and the articles with any journalist, or serious journalism student, who is interested in doing the work to find out if the kinds of problems happening in Imagine charters in other states are also happening here.