Gülen-affiliated school in US stirred by teacher's inappropriate relatio...

LAUSD moves to DENY 3 applications from Gulen operated Magnolia Science Academy

 

* UPDATED

The LA Unified school board is expected on Tuesday to deny more applications for new charter schools and charter renewals than they may approve. This is the first time the recommended denials exceed approvals since the new configuration of the school board was seated last July.
Already, the board has denied as many charters in the past half year than in the previous two school years combined.
On Tuesday’s agenda, three denials have been recommended by LA Unified’s Charter School Division and two approvals. The board is not bound to follow the recommendations but usually does.
Three additional charter proposals, from Magnolia Public Schools, were pulled in advance of the school board meeting because they had been recommended for denial. CEO and Superintendent Caprice Young said she withdrew the three new charter applications last week rather than face the likely rejection by the board. In 2014 LA Unified denied renewals for two of its charters based on what it said were questionable practices. A judge ordered the schools change some of its practices but allowed them to stay open. In May, the board voted to renew the charters and the district settled a lawsuit with Magnolia that the charter organization had filed.
Two of the three schools recommended for denial Tuesday are from the Partnership to Uplift Communities (PUC), which was co-founded by one of the newest school board members, Ref Rodriguez.
It would be the first time in 17 years of operating schools in the district that PUC would be denied, said Jacqueline Elliot, co-founder of PUC, which operates 14 schools in the district. “I haven’t experienced this level of challenge and scrutiny in my two decades as a charter leader in the city,” Elliot said in an email to LA School Report. “But I believe the school board will recognize the tremendous value PUC adds to the school district and will demonstrate leadership by continuing to support our program for the thousands of families hungry for excellent educational opportunities in these neighborhoods.”
Since July, six of 11 applications for new charters in LA Unified have been denied, according to an LA School Report analysis. This represents a 45 percent approval rate, compared with a 77 percent approval rate for the 2014-2015 school year, when 10 were approved and three denied. In 2013-2014, 17 were approved and three denied, for an approval rate of 85 percent.
The reasons for Tuesday’s three recommended denials include low test scores, which the staff report says is “well below the performance of the public schools that the charter school pupils would otherwise have been required to attend.”
The staff found that the charter schools present “an unsound educational program” and that PUC is “demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program.”
Recommended for denial is a renewal for PUC’s Excel Charter Academy and a new charter for PUC’s International Preparatory Academy as well as a new charter for WISH (Westside Innovative School House) Academy High School.
PUC’s 14 schools show mixed results when compared to LA Unified schools in performance on the recent Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced standardized tests. The number of PUC students on average who met or exceeded the standards in the English Language Arts test was 40 percent, compared to 33 percent for the district. However, on the math test, PUC students averaged 23.85 percent, compared to 25 percent for the district.

PUC Excel’s average was below the district average in both math and English, with Excel averaging 28 percent in English and 15 percent in math.

The staff recommended that the board on Tuesday approve new charters for Arts in Action Community Middle School and El Camino Real K-8 Charter School, but the latter is at the former Highlander campus which may have another public school planned for the site and therefore could be denied by the board. The board is also being asked to renew the charter for the Gifted Academy of Mathematics and Entrepreneurial Studies.
Meanwhile, also on the agenda for Tuesday are three violations at charter schools, for Clemente Charter School, Ingenium Charter Middle School and Ingenium Charter Elementary School. The violations include fiscal mismanagement, violations of law and other concerns that the LAUSD staff found.
Independent charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed schools. Most employ non-union teachers, and the school board’s oversight of them is limited. The board can approve or deny new charter applications, and every five years existing charters must be re-approved. The board’s decisions by state law are to be based essentially on if a charter school has a sound educational plan, sound management and its financial situation is in order.
Already, LA Unified has 221 independent charter schools, which is the most of any school district in the country. And many more may be on the way through a new private group, Greater Public Schools Now (GPS Now), which plans a major expansion of school funding.
The school board meeting has a closed session beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday and a later meeting at 1 p.m.

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* Updated to reflect that Magnolia now says it does not plan to resubmit its applications, and to include information about its settlement with LAUSD.
Craig Clough contributed to this story

Magnolia Science Academies part of the Gulen Movement Business Empire - Apex Educational Technology E Rate Technology Grants

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.

Magnolia Science Academy makes a weak attempt to answer LAUSD and OIG charges

Gulen Movement is the catalyst for the charter schools

and the charter schools are the BUSINESS catalyst for Gulen Movement

 

 

Magnolia Public Schools responded this week to a report which accused the charter school operator of financial mismanagement and insolvency.
An attorney and an accountant for Magnolia admitted there had been bookkeeping errors but argued most of the discrepancies could have been cleared up if Los Angeles Unified school district officials had given them an opportunity to respond.
“We don’t want to get into a big fight with the organization that funds us. We want to get back into a dialogue so we can clear up some of these things,” said Kim Joseph Onisko, a certified public accountant representing Magnolia. “There’s no reason organizations with these type of academic results should be put out of business for bookkeeping boo boos.”
The school board voted in March 2014 to conditionally approve two Magnolia schools – Magnolia Science Academy 6 in Palms and Magnolia Science Academy 7 in Northridge.
On June 27, district staff sent a letter to Magnolia stating the charters for the two schools had not been renewed. The letter cited the findings of a forensic investigation by Vicente, Lloyd & Stutzman, although the full report was not released until last month.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Luis Lavin granted an injunction in July, allowing the schools to remain open. Lavin said the non-renewal decision should have been made at a public meeting.
The investigation summary focused on funds passed between schools and to the Magnolia Educational and Research Foundation, the charter operator. The summary also questioned the organization’s solvency due to “deficit spending.”
Onisko denied the schools were ever financially insolvent. Magnolia Public Schools has $9 million in net assets, he said, and none of the schools had deficits as of June 30, 2014.
“A lot of the financial issues in dispute between the parties relate to a question of whether Magnolia Public Schools should be treated as one single entity or whether it should be treated as 11 separate public schools and a separate charter organization,” said attorney Jerry Simmons.
Magnolia views the transfer of funds between schools the same as moving money from one department to another. Simmons said this is consistent with how other charter management organizations and other school districts operates. Simmons said they file one tax return and operate as a single entity for all other purposes.
The report also showed the school spent more than $200,000 for immigration fees over five years. The report stated the school paid for six non-employees, although Magnolia says it was only three.
Under federal law, the school is required to pay visa expenses for potential employees, so the immigration expenses for non-employees were for potential teachers who were denied visas. Magnolia has 20 foreign teachers.
The forensic review also raised questions about a field trip taken by students at two Magnolia schools. The school purchased the airline tickets and booked the hotels to save through collective purchasing, but all expenses were paid by student fundraising, according to Magnolia.
School officials also defended their relationship with the Accord Institute for Education Research which provides a variety of services, including curriculum development and professional training. Magnolia has paid approximately $3 million to the vendor. The auditors said the fee was 30 percent of the schools’ budget, although Magnolia states it is only 4 percent of the overall budget.
The schools have also faced accusations that they use their vendor agreements to pay for services they did not receive in order to support the controversial Gülen movement led by a Turkish Islamic scholar.
“Individual employees are free to do what they want on their own time, but as an organization, we have no association with any religious sect or movement and they have never received any funds from the school,” Magnolia stated.
Simmons and Onisko claim LAUSD did not follow state law when it conditionally renewed Magnolia’s charters. The Charter Schools Act only allows the board to vote for or against renewal, Simmons said. He argues the board should have renewed the charters and then started revocation procedures if new evidence was discovered.
Simmons said the revocation procedure would have allowed them an opportunity to respond at public hearings. Onisko said it is also unusual for an organization being audited to not have an opportunity to respond to the findings.
“It’s troubling if it’s true they relied on the report that wasn’t even issued until September to make a decision in June,” he said.
Although the school board voted in August to support the decision not to renew the charters, the Los Angeles County Office of Education stated the charters will remain renewed as long as the injunction remains in place. At this point, the district has not expressed any plans to ask the judge to drop the injunction. School board member Tamar Galtzan declined to comment due to the pending court action.
Magnolia now faces more investigations. LAUSD has expanded its probe to include all nine of Magnolia’s LA County schools, including Lake Balboa and Reseda. The state is also conducting an audit which is expected to take six months.

http://www.postperiodical.com/magnolia-public-schools-responds-lausd-report/

Magnolia Science Academy- California State Auditor launches extensive investigation

This is from Educational GURU Diane Ravitch's blog http://dianeravitch.net/2014/08/15/california-investigating-magnolia-charter-schools/

Another scoop by KPCC’s Annie Gilbertson. The California State Auditor is investigating four of the state’s 11 Magnolia Science Academies, part of the Gulen charter chain.
“After sampling transactions from Magnolia campuses in 2012, L.A. Unified found over $43,000 in duplicate payments to vendors, flagging those as potential misuse of funds.
“The Los Angeles Unified school board ordered a second audit in 2014, voting to close two of the schools if any fiscal problems arose.
“The audit, which the district is calling a “forensic review,” revealed that schools sent $2.8 million to the network’s management organization. The funds were poorly documented loans, and much of the cash was never paid back to classrooms, according to L.A. Unified.
“District auditors found the management organization met the definition of insolvent, operating on a $1.7 million deficit.
“Magnolia refutes much of the findings.”

LEARN HERE HOW ACCORD INSTITUTE IS RELATED TO FARUK TABAN AND TURKISH
LOBBYING
http://gulenpoliticians.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-gulen-boys-are-at-it-againthis-time.html

Magnolia Science Academy Elton San Juan performs at Turkish Olympiad

My cousin, Elton Sanjuan performing a Turkish poem at the 6th Turkish National Olympiad in Long Beach,CA . Has been 1st place from his school, then 1st place from Los Angeles and once again 1st place of California. Made it to the Top 5 and after this great perfomance, he was able to take 4th place home. Good job, primo.
.
School: Magnolia #8 Middle School
Teacher: Mr. Veli

Magnolia Schools Opening ends close business relationship

As one of the conditions for allowing Magnolia Science Academy 6 in Palms and Magnolia Science Academy 7 in Van Nuys to remain open, Superior Court Judge Luis A. Lavin ruled last week that the parent company, Magnolia Public Schools (MPS), could no longer do business with Accord Institute for Education Research. That effectively ended a close business relationship.

LEARN HOW ACCORD INSTITUTE IS CONNECTED TO GULEN MOVEMENT POLITICAL LOBBYING VIA FARUK TABAN

 http://gulenpoliticians.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-gulen-boys-are-at-it-againthis-time.html

 

 A very close business relationship. Magnolia Public Schools, the parent of the two charters, is located at 13950 Milton Ave in Westminster, Suite 200A. Accord is located at 13950 Milton Ave in Westminster, Suite 200B. Close ties are also evident in two of Accord’s three board members who previously served on the board for MPS and were intimately involved in launching a few of the charter schools. The Accord website says current board president Ertan Salik was a “key figure in the charter school development team for Magnolia Science Academy, where he served as the board president from 2002 to 2005.” Another Accord board member, Suat Utku Ay, was on the board of directors for Magnolia Science Academy 1 in Reseda from 2005 to 2007. He was also the lead petitioner for Magnolia Science Academy 2 in Van Nuys.

In ruling against LA Unified, which wanted to close the schools over financial concerns, Lavin listed six conditions that could not be violated for the schools to remain open. One was an end to MPS’s outsourcing core administrative services for all eight of its LA Unified schools to Accord. Accord provided professional training, human resource and financial support, curriculum development, teacher evaluations and other academic support services for MPS. LA Unified contended that transferring those responsibilities called into question MPS’s accountability in the operations of its schools. While Lavin did not explain his reasoning for insisting on the breakup, in a June 27 letter to MPS, Jose Cole-Gutierrez, head of LA Unified’s Charter School Division, said the overlap of services provided by MPS and Accord “raises the question of the purpose of (MPS) and the management fees it receives from the schools when it appears that Accord is providing wholesale operations to the school.” LA Unified concluded that MPS spent nearly 30 percent of its total 2012 spending in payments to Accord and 26 percent in 2013. Between 2010 and February of 2014, the district said MPS paid Accord about $3 million. MPS denied all accusations of impropriety and argued that the $3 million represents a only 2.75 percent of the parent company’s five year, $110 million revenue stream, according to Mekan Muhammedov, Chief Finance Officer of MPS.

But Mehmet Argin, MPS CEO, told LA School Report, “We will comply with all the conditions” set by Lavin. “I believe the judge made a fair decision.” Lavin’s prohibition against the MPS-Accord business relationship struck at least one other charter executive as curious. David Hyun, Chief Financial and Operating Officer for Alliance College Ready Public Schools, which will operate 26 district charter schools when schools open in August, says Alliance would avoid the perception of a conflict interest but that there is nothing inherently illegal in what MPS is doing. “I don’t think the location matters; I think it’s about control,” he told LA School Report. “If the Accord board members are not on the board of Magnolia anymore, and they are two separate legal entities, then I don’t see where the conflict lies. Now if that board member was on Magnolia and Accord, at the same time, then I see the conflict.” It is unclear whether MPS or another outside company will now assume the responsibilities once performed by Accord. http://laschoolreport.com/magnolia-schools-opening-ends-close-business-relationship-lausd/

IF JUDGE LAVIN ORDERED MAGNOLIA TO SEVER TIES WITH ACCORD INSTITUTE
WHY IS THEIR LOGO STILL ON THE WEB SITE?

American Education Guru Diane Ravitch discusses Magnolia Science Academy closures

http://dianeravitch.net/2014/07/21/gulen-charter-chain-in-trouble-in-los-angeles/