Gage Skidmore
Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has stacked the state board of education with proponents of charter schools.
After Hurricane Katrina severely damaged her neighborhood public high school in New Orleans in 2005, Karran Harper Royal was heartened by invitations from local officials to attend community meetings and join parent committees to help rebuild the school.
Her son, who had long struggled with a learning disability in New Orleans’ chronically underfunded schools, would soon be old enough to attend. So Harper Royal eagerly pitched in to help shape the new school, even as she struggled to put her own life back together after the storm.
But months into the work, local officials announced the new facility would be a charter school. Harper Royal and her fellow parent volunteers realized then that most of their plans and dreams would be for naught.
“No one working to create this new school asked for it to be a charter,” she tells me now.
The fact the school would be a charter made all the difference to these parents. Because charter schools are run by appointed boards and are not subject to most of the same regulations as public schools, they often don't feel the pressure to serve students with special needs.
Harper Royal would eventually withdraw her son from the charter to continue her search for the school he deserved.
The surprising backdoor entry of charter schools into the lives of families like the Haper Royals and communities like New Orleans is now commonplace in large school districts battered by chronic underfunding and pushed to adopt certain “reforms” favored by influential politicians and philanthropists. Many of the reform mandates, especially charter schools, are touted as “market solutions,” supposedly more responsive to parent demands that allegedly hidebound public schools resist.
Yet, in New Orleans, Harper Royal and many other parents contend the push to expand charters was driven more by political subterfuge and powerful philanthropic and political groups than by community demand. Indeed, the top-down way charter schools were rolled in New Orleans has become a recurring pattern in other large school districts. This pattern is not only discernible in hindsight, but is happening in the present day in Louisville, Kentucky.
Kentucky was, until recently, one of just a handful of states to not yet allow charter schools. Opposition to these schools in the state is intense and bipartisan. Even after state lawmakers made the schools legal, a bill to fund charters died in the legislature.
Charter proponents, nevertheless, have waged a campaign to push their schools, taking actions that challenge ethical, if not legal, boundaries. The list of actors promoting charters in the state includes not only politicians and private advocacy groups but also financial interests, especially in the real estate industry. And charter collaborators are operating behind the scenes to push their cause in backrooms deep in the corridors of influence and political power.
Charter collaborators are operating behind the scenes to push their cause in backrooms deep in the corridors of influence and political power.
After Republican Governor Matt Bevin came into office in 2015, he immediately endorsed and intensively lobbied for legislation to create new charter schools, and when he had the chance to remake the state board of education, he restocked it with proponents of charters. Once the new board took office, its first action was to replace the State Education Commissioner with Wayne Lewis, a well-known advocate for charter schools.
As soon as Lewis took over, he took aim at the state’s largest school district in Jefferson County, which includes the city of Louisville. Lewis recommended state takeover, based on a list of charges having nothing to do with charters. But locals I spoke with believe imposing charters on the district is the goal, and their evidence is convincing.
“The reason for takeover is ideological,” says Brent McKim, the head of the local teachers' association in the county. “Bevin has a privatization direction,” he says, a reference often used to describe charter schools.
“We’ve elected school board members who are not inclined toward that direction,” McKim says, but now Bevin and others who support charters are trying to circumnavigate the will of voters. “If you can’t succeed democratically, then maybe a hostile mechanism will get you what you want,” he surmises. Also, takeover of the district would provide access to funding to create new charters.
In a recent statement to local news outlets, Lewis denied “rumors” that takeover of the district is about forcing charters. But other locals I spoke with don’t believe him.
“I don’t trust his statement,” says Gay Adelmann, a local parent who helped form the grassroots group Dear Jefferson County Public Schools that opposes charters. Adelmann recently ran for state senate in the Democratic Party primary, campaigning on a platform supporting local public schools. She lost, but managed to garner 44 percent of the vote as a first-time candidate with little funding. She sees Lewis and the state board as still being actively involved in “setting up the marketplace” for charter schools.
“Lewis has had long ties with many charter pushers,” Tiffany Dunn tells me. Dunn is a lifelong Republican and English-as-a-Second-Language teacher in the district. She helped found and lead a number of grassroots teacher advocacy groups including Save Our Schools Kentucky. She points to an online PowerPoint document compiled by a local public school advocacy group that catalogs the many connections Lewis has with other active proponents of charters in the state.
Locals also note Lewis’s recommendation for state takeover still has to be approved by the state education board, the very folks handpicked by Bevin to install Lewis.
Among Bevin’s first appointments to that board was Ben Cundiff. At the time of his appointment, Cundiff served on the board of two charter schools in Nashville. The schools are operated by a Nashville nonprofit whose CEO coordinated with the political group Stand For Children in a 2016 school board election in that city to recruit campaign workers for pro-charter school candidates.
Stand For Children, a strong proponent of charter schools based in Oregon, has also been active in funding and influencing school board races in Indianapolis and Denver, as well as a ballot initiative in Massachusetts to curb teachers’ labor rights. The group won't say how much money it spends on these activities or how it funds them.
BB&T’s investments in spreading capitalist doctrine and education reform are not strictly ideological or altruistic. The bank finances charter schools.
Other Bevin appointees are connected to the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a rightwing think tank in the western part of the state. The Bluegrass Institute is funded by a pipeline of dark money from conservative interests that support the Institute’s agenda for charter schools and other school privatization schemes.
The Bluegrass Institute also benefits from academic talent funded by regional banking giant BB&T, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which funds at least two BB&T-endowed professors on the Institute’s staff.
BB&T has collaborated with the Koch Brothers for years in funding academic centers and professorships at colleges and universities across the country with the stipulation gifts will support teaching about principals of free-market capitalism and use the works by libertarian icon Ayn Rand. The bank has donated millions more for capitalism programs at the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
But BB&T’s investments in spreading capitalist doctrine and education reform are not strictly ideological or altruistic. The bank finances charter schools. “BB&T Capital Markets has been ranked the No. 1 charter school underwriter in the nation for two consecutive years,” claims the bank’s website, where it also lists numerous charter school properties across the country financed by the bank.
The connections between charter school expansion and real estate development are underreported and little-understood but worth exploring. Charter school expansions in many states, including North Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey, have been accompanied by new schemes to profit off the land and buildings related to the charter organizations.
In Louisville, locals see this scheme playing out similarly. Rob Mattheu, a Jefferson County parent and avid blogger about local schools, explains in an email, “There are big bucks to be had” in connecting new charter schools with land deals.
Under the district’s current school enrollment plan, which promotes racial integration and gives parents a choice of where to send their kids to school, “parents have no incentive to move to areas where there are good schools” because the district provides transportation to desirable schools. This poses a problem for real estate developers who want to exploit escalating land prices in proximity to desirable schools.
However, with charter schools, Mattheu explains, which do not have to provide transportation, developers can profit from the land around a desirable charter. “Creating desirable [charter] schools in areas and eliminating transportation to them encourages wealthier people to move near them,” he says. “This makes the land surrounding the schools very valuable.”
Kentucky’s new charter school law certainly provides ample opportunities for real estate deals. It exempts the schools from “zoning and local land use regulation.” The law also requires the state publish an annual list of the addresses of any “vacant and unused buildings and vacant and unused portions of buildings that are owned by the state and that may be suitable for the operation of a public charter school.” Charter boards have “all the power necessary” to “acquire real property.” Charter property is exempt from all taxes and fees.
Among concerned members of the Louisville community, the intricate network behind the effort to impose charter schools has raised alarms.
Hal Heiner, another Bevin pick for the state education board and now current board chairman, has been involved in launching numerous charter school advocacy groups, including one in 2013. He also has a huge footprint in the real estate business, having led a “commercial division of a multi-state development firm” and founded Capstone Realty. Capstone’s holdings consist of numerous spacious office facilities strategically located in the Louisville metro area.
Heiner and Rich Gimmel, yet another Bevin board appointee, are also connected to charter school advocacy and real estate big money through their involvement with the Bluegrass Fund (no relation to the Bluegrass Institute).
Begun in 2012 by prominent business leaders to elect pro-charter candidates to the Jefferson County school board, the Bluegrass Fund raised over $700,000 in its first two years. Among its first donors was Heiner, whose charter advocacy group the Kentucky Coalition for Education Reform donated $8,000. Gimmel contributed $1,500.
The Fund is chaired by a real estate developer David Nicklies. Companies he heads have contributed $145,000 to the fund. Also, among its supporters are members of the Home Builders Association of Louisville, which gave $10,000, and Jean Frazier, president of the real estate development firm HFH Inc., who gave $150,000.
Among concerned members of the Louisville community, the intricate network behind the effort to impose charter schools has raised alarms.
“A large chunk of the state board . . . have been joined together for years with one purpose in mind: bringing privatization to our public schools in the form of charters,” Mattheu says.
“Lewis, Bevin, and others appear to have been working behind the scenes for nearly a decade,” says Adelmann. “Any reasonable thinking person can connect the dots and see something is not right.”