White Hat Management, a for profit charter school org, is not one of the good guys

by David Safier

Schools run on the profit motive and K-12 education do not mix well. We've seen that again and again.

I've written a lot about for profit Imagine Schools which runs the largest string of charter schools in the nation and is notorious for its bad practices.

I've written plenty about K12 Inc., the for profit online charter school corporation which has its share of problems and bad acting, past and present.

But I've written little about White Hat Management, another for profit charter company, though it belongs in the same category as the other two. (White Hat has one Arizona school: Arizona Life Skills Center in Phoenix.)

Here's a story out of Ohio, where White Hat is based. The headline says most of what you need to know.

White Hat employees told company must boost enrollment, profits

The gist of this story is, White Hat is firing employees because, according to owner David Brennan, it's losing money, mainly because it's losing students.

And according to Brennan, it's the other guy's fault, not his.

“As so often happens to pioneers, our backs are full of arrows and our opponents are vigorous and too often successful,” the letter says.

. . . “Our opponents have created a climate that is making it extremely difficult for us to succeed,” the letter says. “Most of our problems are political and legal.”

Before you cry for poor, besieged Brennan, take a look at some of the facts.

In 2010, ten Ohio schools affiliated with White Hat sued to void their contracts with the company. According to an AP story,

 “White Hat Management is a for-profit company. Its interest in making a profit often conflicts with the schools’ goal to educate and show student progress,” said April Hart, legal counsel for the schools. “There are no real rules in place to make White Hat fully account for the nonprofit dollars they receive to manage Ohio charters.”

According to the same story, Brennan is a deep pocketed contributor to Republican campaigns and "pushed for the law that governs the schools."

According to the Columbus Dispatch, in 2007,

Charter schools operated by Akron industrialist David L. Brennan paid board members multiple times for attending the same meeting — as much as $2,125 per session, a state audit discovered. . . . [The audits] also found $2,005 in improper credit-card purchases, widespread bookkeeping errors and lack of documentation to support many expenditures.

According to a 2007 HuffPo post referring to an article in the Cleveland Scene,

Cleveland's city paper, the Cleveland Scene, is complaining that Colorado Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer is deflating the price of bribery in the wake of allegations that he sold his vote on the Colorado school board for $4,000 from the head of White Hat Management — a charter school company. The donor in the middle of the scandal [Brennan] has spent tens of thousands of dollars on campaign contributions in Ohio to buy votes on similar issues.

Brennan a poor, hapless victim being shot in the back by his opponents? I don't think so. He sounds more like a guy who thought the fix was in, thought the vote money and hush money were paid, but some people thought otherwise. Now Brennan is in trouble and he's blaming everyone but himself.