Mavericks High of Palm Beach County

“Audit claims Palm Springs charter school got nearly $160K more in state money by overstating enrollment.” Palm Beach Post (FL), 1/6/2013

A Palm Beach County charter school got nearly $160,000 more in state education money than it was entitled to receive after overstating 2011-12 enrollment, a draft audit released last week by the school district’s inspector general claims.

According to the draft audit from Inspector General Lung Chiu, Mavericks High School in Palm Springs counted and was given funds for at least 56 students who did not attend the school at all during two 11-day “survey periods” last year required by the state Department of Education. The survey periods are used to establish enrollment figures on which the department bases its per-student funding to schools.

Mavericks, a West Palm Beach-based chain of seven Florida charter schools, offers live and online classes and caters to at-risk students. It’s perhaps best known for its president and chief development officer, Frank Biden, brother of Vice President Joe Biden.

Chiu’s office began investigating the school after a former teacher — Angenora Mechato — filed a lawsuit in April alleging that Mavericks fabricates enrollment data and that she was fired for refusing to falsify records. Two teachers at the Mavericks school in Homestead have made similar allegations in lawsuits. The Miami attorney for all three teachers, Dale Morgado, could not be reached for comment...

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“Lawsuit alleges high school asked teacher to fabricate grades in classes students didn't take.” The Palm Beach Post, (FL), 4/14/2012  

PALM SPRINGS — A former teacher at the new Mavericks High School in Palm Springs has filed a lawsuit alleging that the school falsifies enrollment records and fabricates student grades in classes the students did not take.

The lawsuit, filed by Angenora Mechato, is the third such whistleblower lawsuit to be filed by former employees of the chain of Florida charter schools. The chain is run by a for-profit management company based in West Palm Beach, Mavericks In Education Florida LLC...

Mavericks in Education Florida LLC

“Mavericks High Schools Hope to Profit From Education – But at What Cost?” Broward-Palm Beach New Times (FL), 12/29/2011    

...This is Frank Biden, the brother of Vice President Joe Biden. He's here, at a ribbon-cutting event August 31, to promote the first Palm Beach County location of a local for-profit chain of charter schools called Mavericks in Education Florida...

But so far, Mavericks' lofty goals haven't materialized. Most of their schools graduate less than 15 percent of eligible students. On state report cards, the schools get "incompletes" because so few of their students are taking the FCAT. In Miami, two former teachers filed whistle-blower lawsuits alleging the Homestead school is inflating attendance records and failing to report grades properly.

Plus, there are rampant financial questions, cozy ties between Mavericks and local politicians, and a legal fight with former celebrity spokesman Dwyane Wade...

Mavericks' story begins in Akron, Ohio, with a wealthy industrialist who loved to wear big cowboy hats and donate millions of dollars to Republican politicians. In 1998, David Brennan launched White Hat Management. His charter schools were housed in strip malls, and the students herded in to sit at computers for three shifts a day. This was an education model Mavericks would later call the "next generation in education." But state auditors weren't so fond of the company...

One of White Hat's early leaders was Mark Thimmig. As CEO from 2001 to 2005, he helped grow the company into one of the largest charter school chains in the country. As of 2010, White Hat had 51 charter schools in six states, including ten charter schools in Florida called Life Skills Centers.

Two years after leaving White Hat, Thimmig alleges in court documents, he was approached by Palm Beach Gardens developer Mark Rodberg about launching a chain of charter schools here. Rodberg had built a few schools for White Hat, but had never run one before. He owned restaurants, including Bucky's Bar-B-Que in Boca Raton and Bucky's Grill in Fort Lauderdale. Together, Thimmig and Rodberg came up with a plan that was nearly identical to White Hat's: Students would attend school but take all their courses online, using virtual technology that required minimal maintenance. Classrooms could hold rows of cubicles with computers where kids would sit elbow-to-elbow. There would be no after-school sports teams, just "cyber-athletics" that allowed kids to play Wii instead of shooting hoops...

Each school is overseen by a local, nonprofit board. Mavericks in Education Florida LLC then charges the nonprofit hundreds of thousands of dollars in management fees to run daily operations. Mavericks also handles the real estate, charging the schools $350,000 a year in rent...

Hollander says the charters planned to use the basketball star [Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade] as a celebrity spokesman, encouraging kids to enroll in Mavericks and graduate. "Kids related to him. Parents related to him. Even grandparents related to him! He was the biggest celebrity ever to be connected with the national high school dropout crisis," Thimmig told New Times in 2009...

But pairing schools with a restaurant chain and a basketball star turned out to be a lethal mix. Wade would later allege in court documents that the partners were scheming to cut him out of profits. When they asked him to invest $1 million in the Aventura location of the restaurant, he refused...

In December 2009, Thimmig resigned as CEO. Then he sued Mavericks for back salary and money he said he lent the company — a total of at least $300,000. He also aired the company's dirty laundry in public court documents. Just two years after its founding, the hope factory was floundering...

... Only Michigan has more charter schools run by for-profit companies than Florida, according to a 2010 study published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. Last year, there were 145 schools in Florida run by companies such as Mavericks.

Plenty of government grants help charters grow. Reports submitted to the state by Mavericks show their schools each receive about $250,000 a year in federal grants...

Often these schools struggle academically or financially, yet their management companies are allowed to keep opening new campuses...

Biden says, "We just graduated almost 200 people in one location."

But figures from the Florida Department of Education paint a vastly different picture, showing that Mavericks schools have a worse graduation rate than traditional public schools in Florida...

On Florida's state report cards, Mavericks schools in Miami-Dade, Pinellas, and Osceola counties have all scored "incomplete" because not enough students have taken the FCAT. Hollander says she expects the FCAT grade to change as more students enroll...

Meanwhile, recent lawsuits filed against Mavericks raise questions about whether any of the schools' statistics can be trusted...

Mavericks' paper trail is also troubling. Accountability reports, submitted by Mavericks to the state, contain bizarre financial figures...

Money has long been a problem for Mavericks. At the Fort Lauderdale Mavericks in June, independent auditors found the school met state criteria for a "financial emergency," with a net deficit of at least $520,000. At the same time, an audit showed that the North Miami Beach Mavericks was $400,000 in debt and had borrowed from the Mavericks management company to stay afloat. The state department of education also required the Mavericks school in Pinellas to create a financial corrective action plan...

...In 2010, Mavericks in Homestead paid the management company $418,000, or 17 percent of its state funds...

But most of the time, Mavericks isn't buying buildings. It's striking deals with private landlords, then charging individual schools rent of $350,000 per year for five years, regardless of the price of the building. That's the case in Homestead, North Miami, Kissimmee, and Pinellas. In Homestead, the school building's current market value is $1.2 million, but the school is on the hook for $1.75 million in rent over five years.

That sum, combined with its management fee, means the Homestead school paid 28 percent of its revenue to Mavericks in Education in 2010...

BE SURE TO READ THE WHOLE THING!

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“Joe Biden’s Brother Helping God Privatize Public Schools.” By Doug Martin, Firedoglake, 11/29/2011   

When Lisa Rab outed Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, as a major force behind a for-profit education management organization (EMO) dead set on building 100 new charter schools across Florida,* it came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to the corporate school reform movement, the Obama/Biden/Duncan regime, or Florida.

What was surprising was that Francis W. Biden told Rab that he and Mavericks in Education Florida, LLC  were on “a mission from God.”...

Not testing students to earn state ratings is nothing new to Mark Thimmig, one of the original founders of Mavericks in 2007. In 2005, after the former AutoNation official joined the notorious for-profit charter school operator White Hat Ventures, Thimmig took heat from the Ohio Department of Education for not adequately reporting student test scores in four of its Life Skills high schools. Also, the Akron Beacon Journal discovered that when Ohio switched testing from the 9th to the 10th grade, White Hat enrolled almost half of its Life Skills schools’ student body into the 9th grade in order to avoid testing these students...

READ THIS ARTICLE, TOO!

International Charter School (Schenectady, NY)

A $2 BILLION DECISION: THE CASE FOR REFORMING NEW YORK’S CHARTER SCHOOL LAW, April 2010, New York State United Teachers report

…The Charter School Institute closed the International Charter School in Schenectady in June 2008 because of what trustees called “systemic failure.” The SUNY trustees found a lack of cohesion in the curriculum and quoted one teacher as saying that she was “making things up for myself” because of a lack of guidance from Victory Schools, its for-profit management company. Documents obtained also revealed allegations of violence, mismanagement, coaching of students before visits by inspector teams and grade tampering. These were investigated by the Charter School Institute and referred to the State Education Department. When the International Charter School shut its doors, enrollment had fallen from 693 students to 587 students, and the school faced more than $7 million in debts…

University Preparatory Charter High School (Uprep)

School mired in claims of cheating: Former University Prep teachers issue scathing report -- state clamps down (San Francisco Chronicle, July 8, 2007)

University Preparatory Charter High School in East Oakland bills itself as a high-end academy where students attract recruiters from the nation's top universities.

Photos of young scholars in caps and gowns grace its Web site above the names of colleges that accepted them -- Oberlin, Dartmouth, Pomona, Whitman.

But that bright image belies a grim truth: Someone at this inner-city public school, also known as Uprep, is cheating.

The state Department of Education has just concluded for the second year in a row that one or more adults interfered with state-required testing at the school. This spring, state investigators seized copies of 2005 tests being illegally used to prepare students for the 2007 exams.

State rules require that test booklets be turned in at the conclusion of testing each year because many exam questions remain the same. At Uprep, someone photocopied the 2005 test books and kept them…

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Charter school's director resigns (The Oakland Tribune, July 14, 2007)

The founder and director of an East Oakland charter school has resigned amid mounting evidence of cheating, falsifying course credits and other unethical conduct.

Isaac Haqq founded the University Preparatory Charter Academy, a high school known as Uprep, in 2001. The school's Web site boasts of high expectations, college-level electives and academic excellence, and Haqq has told the Tribune that he encourages his students to broaden their horizons by applying to colleges outside of California.

But for the second time in less than two years, the Oakland school district staff is deciding whether to close the school.

State education officials have documented evidence of cheating and security breaches on standardized tests administered in 2006 and 2007. Teachers, too, have raised concerns about the leadership at the school, from Haqq's rigid student-tracking system to the fudging of course titles and credits.

In a May letter written to a member of the school's governing board, teacher Bob Martel wrote: "It is clear to the staff that STAR irregularities at UPREP form a pattern of behavior as opposed to a singularity. Because of this phenomenon and the other seven areas of concern, we recommend that the Executive Director be removed ..."

Haqq could not be reached for comment Friday. His departure will be taken into consideration as the Oakland school district determines how to proceed, said Allison Sands, who has been overseeing Oakland's charter schools on an interim basis.

But, Sands said, more questions remain.

In June, the charter school's governing board responded to allegations of testing irregularities, grade and transcript changes, attendance-reporting discrepancies, course content rigor, intimidation of students, improper firings, arbitrary tracking of students and other concerns…

This isn't the first time Uprep has faced possible closure -- or allegations of cheating. Last year, the district threatened to revoke the school's charter over administrative matters, such as its failure to administer the California English Language Development Test.

But in April 2006, then-State Administrator Randolph Ward decided to keep Uprep open. According to board minutes, Ward stated he was satisfied with the school's plans to remedy those problems.

Not long after Ward's decision, state department of education officials began looking into a suspicious pattern of erasures on the school's 2006 standardized tests. Staff has since determined that adult tampering did take place, and has invalidated the scores, said Bill Padia, deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability for the California Department of Education…

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Students' stolen dreams: Charter school board votes to shut Uprep, after Chronicle reports grades, test scores, attendance figures were changed (San Francisco Chronicle, August 1, 2007)

The governing board of Oakland's troubled University Preparatory Charter Academy unexpectedly closed the school Tuesday, leaving hundreds of students in the lurch just weeks before the start of a new school year.

After an hour of discussion and deliberation, the board voted 3-1 to shut the school amid allegations of test-score cheating, manipulation of student grades and transcripts and fraudulent collection of state funding…

Preuss School

School test scandal claims decorated principal (USA Today, December 21, 2007)

A decorated San Diego high school principal has resigned in connection with a case of alleged cheating and grade-tampering. Observers say this is part of a growing problem, as educators' and students' lives increasingly rest on the results of a handful of high-stakes tests.

Preuss School Principal Doris Alvarez, a former national Principal of the Year, submitted a letter of resignation on Tuesday, said the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), a week after a university audit found that three-fourths of reviewed Preuss transcripts had one or more grades changed — most of them to benefit students. Alvarez denies any role in changing grades.

Preuss, a lauded charter school for middle- and high-school students, was founded eight years ago by a UCSD professor and earned several prestigious awards during Alvarez's tenure. Just last month, the school, which prepares low-income and minority students for college, ranked 10th out of 18,000 U.S. high schools in new rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Preuss ranked second in the USA among charter high schools. Last May, Preuss ranked 10th among 1,200 high schools deemed the nation's best by Newsweek.

UCSD officials didn't immediately return calls seeking comment, but in a statement issued Tuesday the university said it "maintains a high level of confidence in the school, its mission, and its students." UCSD says it will retain a consulting firm to conduct a comprehensive review of Preuss management practices and academic operations.

The scandal is similar to dozens in other states, says Don Sorenson of Caveon LLC, a Utah-based security firm that specializes in school cheating and has reviewed about 15 million test results.

Caveon is often hired to perform "data forensics" when teachers or administrators are suspected of changing students' answers on tests.

"Because of No Child Left Behind and standardized testing, we've seen lots and lots of incidents," he says. No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law, requires schools to continuously improve student scores in math and reading. If they don't, schools face mounting sanctions that can include restaffing and school closures.

Caveon often investigates when a school's test scores make a sudden jump. "The only way it generally happens is when somebody messed with the scores," Sorenson says. The following year, school districts generally monitor testing more closely — and scores often fall.

"As soon as they're monitored, then everything drops off," Sorenson says.

Preuss is jointly chartered by UCSD and the San Diego School District. It opened in 1999 with 150 students; it currently enrolls 755 students in grades six through 12 and relies heavily on UCSD students as tutors. Of last June's graduating class of 78 seniors, the university says, 96% were accepted to four-year colleges, including all University of California campuses.

But the audit last month found that 75.8% of transcripts reviewed had "one or more grades inaccurately reflected in student transcripts" or discrepancies between grades posted to electronic grade tables and student transcripts. It also found that about 71% of the inaccuricies helped students' grades or academic standing — and that grades on 10 students' transcripts, if unaltered, would have made them ineligible for admission to the state university system.

The audit found that Alvarez and a counselor "likely had knowledge of and/or directed inappropriate grade changes." Former and current teachers interviewed said she and the counselor had pressured them to give a few students "extraordinary accommodations" to improve their grades, such as extra time and "unusual extra credit assignments" not offered to the remainder of the class.

All Preuss students must take Advanced Placement (AP) courses, regardless of how well they did in these subjects earlier in school, the audit said. AP teachers complained that because of pressure from Alvarez and others, they "sometimes felt compelled to lower the rigor of AP courses in order to be able to assign more students passing grades."

In 1997, Alvarez was named Principal of the Year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Last May, when Preuss made Newsweek's top schools list, she said, "Every student knows why they are here, to get ready for college."

She couldn't immediately be reached on Friday, but in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, she said she had no role in changing grades — and called accusations that she pressured teachers "the most ludicrous statement I've ever heard."

"I'm the captain of the ship," she told the newspaper. "You can call me responsible, but you can't call me dishonest."

She also questioned the competence of auditors and said that, in many cases, they didn't report actions she took to correct grade-tampering. "When I discovered the grade inaccuracies, I immediately took action," she said.

Alvarez said she was "amazed" by the number of inaccurate grades reported, but added that most were due to computer or human error.

San Diego schools spokesman Jack Brandais had no comment on the case, but said Preuss' charter, which allows it to operate, is up for renewal in June and must be approved by the school board.