FYI - this is what I keep talking about. Incompetent management at charters, this new one isn't opening anymore in September. The board chair and board who are to manage the school, had no clue. Which is quite common because most boards have no clue what their fiduciary responsibilities entail. In the end, all those students who were to attend this charter, got screwed. We demand high-performing, well managed charter schools. Authorizers must stop granting charters like they're free candy.
Tom Vander Ark’s New York-Area Charter Schools Falter
By ANNA M. PHILLIPS, NY Times
After years spent directing the distribution of more than $1 billion from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into hundreds of schools across the nation, Tom Vander Ark set his sights on the New York area, with a plan to create a network of charter schools of his own.
Mr. Vander Ark, the foundation’s former executive director of education and a national leader in the online learning movement, was granted charters in 2010 to open a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two others in Newark. The New York school, Brooklyn City Prep, also got space in a public school building — a precious and controversial commodity — hired a principal, and welcomed applications from 150 eighth graders this spring.
But after spending more than $1.5 million of investors’ money on consultants and lawyers, Mr. Vander Ark, 52, has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.
“If we had plotted a worst-case scenario, no one could have constructed the current situation,” said Mr. Vander Ark, saying the weak economy and the difficulty of establishing charters in New York and New Jersey “led to less success than we had hoped for.”
In an e-mail to the board members he had recruited, Mr. Vander Ark added, “I have a lot more sympathy for nonprofit leaders now that I’m on this side of the table.”
Those he has been working with had a harsher assessment.
“He’s flying 30,000 feet on the air, but can’t do it on the ground,” said Joshua Morales, a former official with the New York City Education Department who was hired by Mr. Vander Ark to develop the schools.
James Wiley, an educational technology consultant who has been serving as chairman of Brooklyn City Prep’s board of directors, said: “I’m from the Bronx, so you can imagine what language I used when I found out he was having these problems and we didn’t know anything about it. We just assumed that he was ticking along and things were going O.K.”
Mr. Vander Ark said he had kept his colleagues informed.
“So it’s ridiculous for them to claim that they were unaware,” he said. “They created these ideas. They helped pitch these ideas.”
While many new charter schools are asked to take a year for planning, it is relatively rare to require two, and unusual for a founder — in this case, a well-known figure in education reform — to walk away.
A former businessman and superintendent of a Washington State school district, Mr. Vander Ark doled out more than $1.6 billion in Gates Foundation money from 1999 to 2006, much of it to create and support small high schools. In 2008, he founded City Prep Academies, a for-profit organization intended to create and operate charter schools that combined traditional classroom teaching and online learning. He said the group was financed by $1.5 million from Revolution Learning, a venture fund where he is a managing partner.
But City Prep Academies immediately ran into problems. Its first application for a New York charter, made in summer 2009 as a close copy of the NYC iSchool that opened in SoHo the year before, received a tepid response from the city’s Education Department. Like the iSchool, Brooklyn City Prep promised to blend traditional classroom teaching with online learning, but many who read the application found it lacking in details.
“There was definitely the sense that they were not immediately ready to open the school,” said Michael Duffy, who was the director of the city’s charter school office at the time.
Dirk Tillotson, a charter-school consultant who read the application, agreed. “It didn’t seem like there was enough of a ‘there’ there,” he said, adding, “You didn’t know what the school was going to look like.”
The city and state approved the charter the next year, on the condition that Brooklyn Prep take an extra year to ready itself, with the opening scheduled for September 2011. At the same time, the first of the Newark schools, Vailsburg Prep, had its opening postponed to 2011 from the requested 2010, and the second, Spirit Prep, applied in 2010 for a 2011 opening but was also delayed a year.
After the initial $1.5 million investment from his own venture fund, Mr. Vander Ark found himself unable to raise the money — up to $500,000 per school — that he said he needed to open them. He switched strategies and asked the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit investment fund based in Colorado, to help him start a charter management organization, City Prep Academies Northeast. He also changed the name of his for-profit organization to Open Education Solutions.
Known as OpenEd Solutions, the company is a consultancy that helps schools, districts and states “make the pivot to digital learning,” according to its Web site. In summer 2010, it hired Curtis Lawrence Jr., a principal in Newark, to be the principal of Brooklyn City Prep. The company also brought in Mr. Morales, who had worked with charters in New York, as vice president of schools. He was told he could eventually become chief executive of City Prep Academies Northeast.
By spring 2011, Mr. Morales had secured space for Brooklyn City Prep in a public school building on Marcy Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He and Mr. Lawrence were interviewing teachers and reviewing student applications, confident that the school would open in September.
All they needed was a management agreement with City Prep Academies Northeast, which Mr. Wiley, the school’s board chairman, said he was negotiating with Kathi Littmann, the president of OpenEd Solutions.
But in April, Mr. Wiley came to an unsettling realization: City Prep Academies Northeast existed in name only.
In a phone call on April 21 that Mr. Wiley characterized as “explosive,” Mr. Vander Ark and Ms. Littmann acknowledged that City Prep Academies Northeast had no money to pay for Brooklyn City Prep’s opening costs and would not sign a management agreement.
Mr. Vander Ark had been unable to get any money from the Charter School Growth Fund or other similar national organizations. He had basically abandoned the idea of beginning a charter management organization and left the three schools-in-progress to find outside help on their own.
Mr. Tillotson, the consultant, said: “It signals what’s wrong with the so-called charter school community. Somebody who doesn’t deserve a charter gets a charter. Somebody who doesn’t deserve a building gets a building. And then somebody who doesn’t care about the communities can turn their head and walk away.”
Incensed, Mr. Morales pushed City Prep Academies Northeast’s would-be board members to meet and officially establish the organization. He said he would lead the organization even if Mr. Vander Ark would not finance it. Mr. Morales said he did not need thousands of dollars to open the school, given that it had access to a free space and would receive operating money from the city on a per-pupil basis, as all charters do. He even paid a month of Mr. Lawrence’s salary, more than $7,000.
Mr. Vander Ark, for his part, said he did what he could to help the schools open, suggesting they sign contracts with Connections Academy, a nonprofit cyberschool network that enrolls students who study from their homes, as well as with OpenEd Solutions. But the boards were not interested: connections was unfamiliar to them, and it was unclear why they would need both organizations.
Now, Brooklyn City Prep has lost its claim on the Marcy Avenue space, and is applying for a second planning year, with the hope of opening in 2012. Mr. Lawrence is still the principal, though he is not being paid. The two Newark high schools are also looking to 2012. All three boards are seeking new management organizations, and their members are no longer in contact with Mr. Vander Ark, who as chief executive of OpenEd Solutions travels the country evangelizing about online education and writes for the EdReformer blog.
“Now it’s all about finding a good Samaritan or a management organization that will get us to the next steps,” said Patrick Byrne, a former principal of a Newark parochial school, who worked for years on the Newark applications and is still trying to open the schools. “It doesn’t turn out like ‘The Music Man,’ where the uniforms and instruments appear at the end.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/nyregion/tom-vander-arks-new-york-area-charter-schools-falter.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
