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Teach for America loves to expand its reach, and so it has again, this time partnering with the controversial Imagine schools, the nation's largest for-profit charter school network. That's an interesting pairing. Imagine is based in Arlington, Virginia, with some 75 schools in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The for-profit charter operator has been investigated in some states for the way it exercises control over the schools it manages, essentially ignoring the boards of trustees that are supposed to really run the schools. It has also come under scrutiny for its complicated real estate deals that generate millions of public dollars for Imagine.

Ravitch, who came to realize that what works in business doesn't work when it comes to education, notes that her critics condemn her as a defender of the status quo. But the status quo is now the unproven approaches championed by Wall Street's hedge-fund managers and billionaire "philanthropists" whose education reform views just happen to fall perfectly in line with efforts to crush organized labor, including teacher unions. The key to improving schools isn't found in vouchers, charter schools, teacher evaluations, merit pay and all of the other current approaches, according to Ravitch. Schools must end the punitive approach to education. They must identify their best performers and allow them to share what they know with other educators. It's making the arts a key piece of the curriculum and ensuring that students learn how to think critically and write well. It's ensuring health care for all children - including prenatal care - and quality early childhood education.

In an era when school reform and budget savings are championed by representatives of both major political parties, Long Island cannot economically, politically, or culturally afford to maintain small racially segregated school districts. Based on demographic data available in New York: The State of Learning, an annual statistical profile of New York State school districts, Malverne schools and schools in surrounding communities do not have to be racially segregated. In near by Rockville Centre, 80 percent of the students are white. If Malverne, Lakeview, and Rockville Centre were combined into one school district, the student population would be 53 percent white, 30 percent black, 13 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian. If we think even more broadly and Malverne, Lakeview, Rockville Centre, West Hempstead, Lynbrook, and East Rockaway were consolidated into a manageable district with under 11,000 students, the student population would be 69 percent white, 14 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, and 4 percent Asian.

Breaking her silence on the city's plan to overhaul 33 struggling schools, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said late Wednesday that she believes "turnaround" is a political strategy, not an educational one. "There's a fight going on here that has nothing to do with what's going on at the school," she said. "It's a labor dispute between labor and management and has nothing to do with the kids."

"I make numbers talk," Richard Bowman likes to say when describing his new profession. But he isn't in finance or economics, he's in education policy, and he hopes to use his analytic expertise to help reform the country's public school systems with the help of a program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Since 2008, the Strategic Data Project (SDP), under Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research, has placed fellows like Bowman in state education agencies, school districts, and charter school management organizations where they are helping policymakers to decode an avalanche of educational data. Their mission is to transform the use of data in education to improve student achievement.

Recent research has indicated that teacher coaching and high expectations for student behavior are characteristics of the most effective charter schools. In "Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching," researchers from the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education and New Jersey-based research firm Mathematica probe into exactly what those polices look like.

More than a dozen school districts are taking part in a leadership fellowship sponsored by the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter network, in order to learn how the network trains its school leaders. The KIPP Leadership Design Fellowship, which is funded through a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation grant, has also brought together representatives from charter management organizations and educator training programs.

You know what one of my great pet peeves is? When prominent people, who are granted a prominent place in our society's discourse, cite "research" without telling us what that research is. Case in point: Newark Superintendent of Schools Cami Anderson: Research shows that effective teachers put students on an entirely different life trajectory - toward college, a higher salary, even a more stable family life. I am committed to ensuring that we have a strong teacher in every classroom and great leader in every school. Based on my 20-plus years in education, I know we must significantly change how we recruit, select, develop and retain our educators. [...] Some research shows that we lose our best teachers to charter schools and other professions because they feel they are not growing and they become disheartened seeing students in ineffective classrooms. After multiple poor ratings validated by several people, we should presume that these few teachers are ineffective and partner with the union to manage them out - efficiently. [emphasis mine] I would dearly love to see this "research." I would love to evaluate it for myself and decide whether it's think-tanky nonsense or serious work done by serious people. But I can't, can I? Because Anderson won't tell me what it is, and the Star-Ledger thinks it's enough for her to cite it without checking it for themselves.

The largest charter school network in the United States is operated by people in and associated with the Gulen Movement (GM), a secretive and controversial Turkish religious sect. With 135 schools enrolling more than 45,000 students, this network is substantially larger than KIPP, the well-known charter management organization with only 109 schools. A lack of awareness about this situation persists despite it being addressed in a national paper and in articles about Gulen charter schools in Utah (also here), Arizona, (also here), Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvania (also here), Indiana, Oklahoma (and here), Texas (also here), Arkansas, Louisiana (also here), New Jersey, Georgia, and North Carolina. It was also reported that the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education are investigating practices at these schools.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

On the board are some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education, including Ms. Rhee; Mr. Klein, now a News Corporation executive; and Eva S. Moskowitz, the former councilwoman who now runs a chain of charter schools. Also on the board are former Mayor Edward I. Koch; Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone organization, a network of charter schools; and a number of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, who have served as the movement's financial backers. Aside from promoting changes throughout the state, members of the group hope to neutralize the might of the teachers' unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

One of New York City's wealthiest charter school operators is expected to be approved for a 50% increase in per-pupil management fees

There's some research that shows charter schools suffer from higher teacher turnover than traditional public schools do. One recent estimate put turnover in charters at 25 percent per year, compared with just 14 percent in traditional public schools. Several explanations have been offered for this attrition. Charter school teachers, for instance, tend to be relatively young, and more susceptible to making quick exits from the profession, some studies suggest. Dissatisfaction with working conditions, and lack of administrative support have also been cited as reasons why charter teachers tend to head for the door. A new paper, based on research as well as a survey of charter school teachers, offers school leaders and charter management organizations advice on how they can keep more charter school teachers in the fold. Released by a Boston nonprofit called Teach Plus, the paper says charter schools can reduce teacher turnover by taking four steps.

Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories, wanted the school to institute austerity measures and re-engineer its academic offerings around inexpensive, online education, the emails reveal. Led by Rector Helen Dragas, a real estate developer appointed six years ago, the board shared a guiding vision that the university could, and indeed should, be run like a Fortune 500 company.

Even in public education, the rich keep getting richer. That's the message the trustees of the State University of New York will send Monday when they vote to approve a huge 50% increase in the per-pupil management fee of one of the city's wealthiest, biggest-spending and most controversial charter school operators. The Success Academy Charter Schools Inc., run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, applied in April for an increase from $1,350 to $2,000 in the annual per student payment it receives from the state to run 10 of its charter schools.

That sense of immediacy, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now," gave rise to the charter school movement. Charter schools are public schools that operate under separate management, giving them the freedom to innovate, to refine, and to tailor approaches to specific groups of students. Many charters have longer school days, weeks, and years. We have seen urban charter schools that perform better than their traditional public school counterparts, making up ground that students have lost in traditional schools. They are a right-now education solution for children who need a high-quality education.

This post is about a for-profit charter management organization, Imagine Schools, and real estate/facilities. I'm using the dataset ImagineSchools posted here. Imagine is one of the largest charter operators in the country. The company currently operates 70-something schools. A common challenge for charter schools is access to facilities. Some districts give charters access to entire schools, some allow district schools and charter schools to operate out of the same building ("co-location"), and some charters secure facilities through non-profit or for-profit organization in the private sector. To the best of my knowledge, Imagine does not have any schools in district facilities. Instead, Imagine either owns the schools through the company's real estate arm, SchoolHouse Finance, LLC, or partners with one of two real estate investment trusts ("REITs"), Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development. As of right now, EPT owns 27 facilities used by Imagine and IPPD owns seven facilities used by Imagine. To gather financial information I collected data from IRS 990 forms for the years 2008 through 20101. I pulled the following information

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

Akron businessman David Brennan told employees of White Hat Management last month that his family can no longer afford to subsidize the company he founded in 1998 and owns. White Hat is one of the country's largest for-profit charter school operators.

Here in NYC, while expanding the bureaucracy, increasing spending on education by 50 percent and raising teacher salaries by 40 percent, Bloomberg has also managed to eliminate thousands of teaching positions.  Class sizes this year in the early grades are the largest they have been in eleven years. The result?  Student achievement has stagnated.