OUSD alleges that Chavis misappropriated about $3.4 million in public funding in rent, construction, and other fees. First of all, it is not illegal to lease facilities to a charter school that you are affiliated with as long as your financial interest is disclosed, which it clearly was. Secondly, the rent that Dr. Chavis charges AIM Schools is significantly below the market rate and less than half of what OUSD charges charter schools per square foot. The construction costs also fell way below competitors’ rates.

Below-market rents and facility upgrades resulted in big savings for AIM Schools. None of this information was included in the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) audit, the main source used to justify revoking all three charters.

Adding insult to injury, the FCMAT audit was not conducted by real accountants. No one on the team is a CPA. By contrast, the CPAs who conducted AIM Schools’ independent yearly audits for the past eleven years never found any misstatements or problems.

The FCMAT audit contained over one hundred errors! It concluded, “fraud or misappropriation of assets … may have occurred.” Therefore, it did not determine that any fraudulent activities actually took place. FCMAT forwarded its findings to the District Attorney’s office almost a year ago; the DA has not filed any charges against Chavis or the schools.

Dr. Chavis states his innocence. He has not been accused of a crime or of breaking the law, yet OUSD has stepped in and acted as judge, jury, and executioner based on its own unfounded allegations and its own bogus “auditing.”

Who is the ultimate victim? The students and families who, instead of continuing to get an incredible public education at AIM Schools, will be forced to attend the dumbed-down, dropout zone otherwise known as Oakland Unified.

I think it’s safe to say that Chavis has made a lot of enemies in OUSD who would love to harm his reputation and see the schools he founded disappear. Also keep in mind that charter students represent a loss of money to the district. AIM Schools currently serve about 1,200 students. If each student represents the potential for $17,000 in funding, then AIM Schools causes OUSD a loss of about $20 million per year. In ten years, that’s a loss of over $200 million. If AIM Schools close, then OUSD regains a hefty amount of funding.

The good news is there’s hope. AIM Schools is appealing to Alameda County, which has the authority to overturn OUSD’s decision.

What can you do to help? Please go to saveaimschools.com and sign this petition.

Thank you!!!

I wish people would take a look at the big picture rather than generalizing from a soundbite. Does it make sense that an educator (himself a minority) would devote time and money to educating poor minorities yet in fact be a racist?

Dr. Chavis likes to joke about race and use it as a motivator–in part, perhaps, because it has become such a politically correct, hush-hush topic of conversation. He knows there are racist assumptions out there, just as you do and as I do. So he will say things, like: If you don’t do your homework and are lazy in school, then people will assume you’re just another lazy Mexican. Is that right that people think that? No. But is it reality? Yes. Dr. Chavis knows the way to prove people’s stereotypes wrong is through achievement. He pushes all of his students to excel in school, which is why all AIM schools rank in the top 1% of schools in California. His schools send poor Mexicans, blacks, and other minorities to four-year universities like Cornell and UC Berkeley. How many other people run schools that provide the poor and underserved with so many extraordinary opportunities?

Read Crazy Like a Fox to find out Dr. Chavis’s views on race and racism. Get the full context. Then comment and judge. But not before.

The first link below features Ben and the students. Click the other links to enjoy seeing Stossel make mental fools out of union bosses, as well as gain insight on school reform from Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, and charter schools in New Orleans.

1.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyswCDwe3uo&feature=player_embedded

2.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGNz0Y9vrBo&feature=related

3.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlg1LBHlNAc&feature=related

4.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Irx9o7DjO8&feature=related

5.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_–4EDg06A

6.      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR3I6LUknxo&feature=related

There will be a new Stupid in America special program. Rumor has it that former American Indian Public Charter School students will be interviewed.

Read John Stossel’s blog on the subject.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored…

…While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

…In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows….

…Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?src=busln

“Most Americans have long known that our public schools aren’t getting the job done, but as our country increasingly falls behind our economic competitors and a wide academic gap within our country persists between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers, these twin achievement gaps have reached crisis proportions.  Simply put, the failure of our public schools is the most pressing domestic issue our nation faces.
 
“There’s good news, however: we now know what must be done to fix our schools and a wave of reform is beginning to sweep the country.  But it won’t be easy – the system, while failing children, has been working very well for the adults, who fight ferociously to maintain the unacceptable status quo.  The outcome of this battle will determine the long-term future of our country.
 
“Whitney Tilson committed himself to this issue more than 20 years ago, when he was one of the first people to join Wendy Kopp in starting Teach for America.  She in turn later introduced him to David Levin, the co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools, and he has served on KIPP’s board in New York City for nearly a decade. Mr. Tilson is also one of the founders of Democrats for Education Reform, Rewarding Achievement (REACH), and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, and serves on the board of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Council of Urban Professionals, and the Pershing Square Foundation.
 
“After spending more than two decades on the front lines, witnessing first-hand public education’s shocking failures and remarkable successes, Mr. Tilson was inspired to assemble a powerful and at times unsettling presentation about the twin achievement gaps and what must be done to address them.  He utilizes the latest data and research to paint the most detailed portrait of American public education ever committed to film.  More importantly, he presents us with a way forward so our nation can deliver on its promise to all of its children and ensure its long-term future.”

Jay Mathews provides a touching tribute to Jaime Escalante’s education legacy in the following article:

Jaime Escalante didn’t just stand and deliver. He changed U.S. schools forever.

By Jay Mathews
Sunday, April 4, 2010; B02

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/02/AR2010040201518.html

From 1982 to 1987 I stalked Jaime Escalante, his students and his colleagues at Garfield High School, a block from the hamburger-burrito stands, body shops and bars of Atlantic Boulevard in East Los Angeles. I was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post, allegedly covering the big political, social and business stories of the Western states, but I found it hard to stay away from that troubled high school.

I would show up unannounced, watch Jaime teach calculus, chat with Principal Henry Gradillas, check in with other Advanced Placement classes and in the early afternoon call my editor in Washington to say I was chasing down the latest medfly outbreak story, or whatever seemed believable at the time.

Escalante, who died Tuesday from cancer at age 79, did not become nationally famous until 1988, when the feature film about him, “Stand and Deliver,” was released, and my much-less-noticed book, “Escalante: The Best Teacher in America,” also came out. I had been drawn to him, as filmmakers Ramón Menéndez and Tom Musca were, by the story of a 1982 cheating scandal. Eighteen Escalante students had passed the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam. Fourteen were accused of cheating by the Educational Testing Service, based on similarities in their answers. Twelve took the test again, this time heavily proctored, and passed again.

Whether they cheated was an intriguing mystery, but not the one that kept me hanging around Garfield. I wanted to know how there could be even one student at that school taking and passing AP Calculus, perhaps the hardest course in American secondary education. Garfield offered the worst possible conditions for learning: 85 percent of the students were low income, most of the parents were grade-school dropouts, faculty morale was bad, expectations were low.

Yet the school had produced phenomenal results that would challenge widespread rules barring average and below-average students from taking AP classes. The stunning success at Garfield led U.S. presidents to endorse Escalante’s view that impoverished children can achieve as much as affluent kids if they are given enough extra study time and encouragement to learn.

In 1987, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed the AP Calculus exams attended a single high school: Garfield. That meant that hundreds of thousands of overlooked students could probably do as well if they got what Escalante was giving out. But what was that?

Whenever I suggested that the great teaching I was seeing at Garfield might be the reason so many students were succeeding in AP, people at parties dismissed me as romantic and naive. I was living in Pasadena, where my children, like my neighbors’ children, attended private schools. People there didn’t believe in teaching; they believed in sorting. The idea that the sons and daughters of immigrant day laborers and seamstresses could be made to comprehend calculus, the intellectual triumph of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, made no sense to them.

“I bet if you checked out their backgrounds, you will find those teachers are skimming off the few kids whose parents went to college,” one professor told me. More common was the assertion that Escalante, and the school’s splendid history and government teachers, drilled enough facts and formulas into their kids to fool the AP tests but had no chance of giving them the conceptual understanding that well-prepared suburban students developed.

These theories quickly fell apart. I surveyed 109 Garfield calculus students in 1987 and found that only nine had even one parent with a college degree, and that only 35 had a parent with a high school diploma. The engineering and science professors at USC, Harvey Mudd and the other California colleges recruiting Garfield grads laughed at the “no conceptual understanding” myth, as did the Escalante students I started running into who had become doctors, lawyers and teachers.

It took me several years to understand how Garfield’s AP teachers, and the many educators who have had similar results in other high-poverty schools, pulled all this off. They weren’t skimming. It wasn’t a magic trick of test results. They simply had high expectations for every student. They arranged extra time for study — such as Escalante’s rule that if you were struggling, you had to return to his classroom after the final bell and spend three hours doing homework, plus take some Saturday and summer classes, too. They created a team spirit, teachers and students working together to beat the big exam.

Escalante celebrated “ganas,” a Spanish word that he said meant the urge to succeed. He was so convinced of the power of teaching that he lied to keep students with him. He said school rules forbade dropping his class. He told the parents of absent students that if he did not see their children in his classroom the next day, he would call the immigration authorities to check on their status.

I left Pasadena and moved to Scarsdale, N.Y., in 1992. At Scarsdale High School, I had a shock. My younger son wanted to take AP U.S. history. I assumed that, like Garfield, the school would welcome anyone with the gumption to take such hard course. Instead, he was told he could get in if he passed an entrance test. Once again I was in a land ruled by sorting, not teaching.

There are fewer schools like that now, largely because of a change in teacher attitudes. My annual surveys of AP participation for Newsweek magazine show schools like Garfield emerging all over the country, particularly in the Washington area. Low-income students are being offered a chance to challenge themselves. Those schools are full of educators who tell me they have read everything about Escalante.

When I discovered that his vocabulary was spreading even to grade schools, I knew that he had triumphed over those who wouldn’t even open the AP door to some students. In 2001, a fifth-grade teacher in Southeast Washington told me that she had instituted “ganas points” for students who took an extra step to help themselves and others prepare for college. That school became the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, the city’s top-performing public middle school.

Escalante liked that story when I called him in Bolivia. It was amazing, he said, what teachers could do if they believed in their kids. He said he was still teaching. He was never going to stop.

When I got a call a couple of days after his death about another school planning to open AP to all, I decided he was exactly right.

KTLA News, 2:17 PM PST, March 1, 2010

Jaime Escalante

LOS ANGELES — Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles math teacher whose inspirational career was made famous in the 80s hit movie “Stand and Deliver” is battling cancer. His family has run out of money to pay for his medical bills.

The Bolivian-born Escalante is 80 years old.

Actor Edward James Olmos who portrayed Escalante in the film is putting together a fundraiser to help raise money for his friend. Olmos posted this message on his website:

www.edwardjamesolmos.com

“Anyone who has seen “Stand and Deliver” knows how much Jaime Escalante (Kimo) has done for this country. The love and dedication he gave to his inner city students, and his unfailing conviction that every one of them was “gifted,” brought out talent that had been untapped – and unseen – by other teachers.

The genius that he awakened in the “unteachable” commanded the attention of the entire world. It caused countless educators to reconsider what their students might really be capable of if, like Kimo, they could awaken the “ganas” (desire) in them. Jaime didn’t just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives. Gang members became aerospace engineers. Kids who had spent their youth convinced their lives didn’t matter discovered they were leaders.

Now, Kimo needs our help. He is seriously ill, and the treatment he needs has depleted all the funds his family can raise. They did not want to ask for help, but we took it upon ourselves to get the word out to all the country and around the world, to make his final days as comfortable as possible – and maybe even give him a chance to beat the cancer that has afflicted him.

I have been moved to tears to hear of the circumstances of this great man and am calling for a last National Understanding of his selfless contributions to “making a difference in this world.”

Together, we have a chance to make a real difference in his life. I could not bear to think that we would do any less for one who has given so much for so long. You have my deepest appreciation for any and all prayers and help that you can give.”

Escalante taught math to troubled students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

While some dismissed the students as “unteachable,” Escalante was able to reach them and help them live up to their potential. He started an advanced mathematics program with a handful of students.

In 1982, his largest class of students took and passed an advanced placement test in Calculus.

Some of the students’ test scores were invalidated by the testing company because it believed the students had cheated.

Escalante protested, saying the students had been disqualified because they were Hispanic and from a poor school.

A few months later, many of the students retook the test and passed.

If you want to help raise money for Escalante, you can send a check payable to:

“Friends of  Jaime”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                c/o FASE
236 West Mountain Street
Suite 105
Pasadena, CA 91103

Those who wish to make a contribution by credit card can call (626) 793-5300 or download a donation form at: www.edwardjamesolmos.com/PDF/JAIME-ESCALANTE-DONATION.pdf

“Where our real focus needs to be is admitting that this school has failed thousands of kids for so long. And I’m ashamed we let it go on for as long as we have,” Davis said.

“For the first time, we have the courage, at the local level, at the state level, at the national level to say ‘this is not okay.’ Just because you were born in [Zip Code] 02863, that you’re going to get a lousy education. That is not acceptable, and we will not shrink from our responsibility to step up and say we are going to change this. We are going to have higher expectations for these kids.” http://www.projo.com/news/content/central_falls_turmoil_02-28-10_TQHGS9N_v292.38b0e26.html

Poverty is no excuse for a sub-par public education. That point is made over and over again in Crazy Like a Fox, but unfortunately it’s not a belief that many people share.