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$21 million charter school

By George N. Schmidt

Aspira A politically powerful but controversial not-for-profit organization, Aspira, is on the verge of becoming one of the largest charter school operators in Illinois and is already in line to receive more than $18 million in property and more than $3 million in public school operating funds for the 2005-2006 school year.

Aspira’s unprecedented growth in the charter school business comes less than two years after the organization opened its first charter school. That school — a small operation called the “Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter School” — opened in September 2003 and is presently located in a run-down brick building at 2435 N. Western Ave. Although the Mirta Ramirez school presently has fewer than 200 students in 9th and 10th grades, has not graduated anyone, and does not even have its achievement data reported on the CPS website, it has been granted unprecedented powers to expand.

The expansion comes through the creation of “branches” in existing public school buildings, at public expense, and the awarding of millions of dollars in operating funds out of the Board of Education’s supposedly tight instructional budget. The transfer of operating funds to Aspira comes at a time when virtually every regular public elementary and high school in the city is being ordered to cut back on teaching and other services to children because of a so-called budget “deficit” discussed regularly by CEO Arne Duncan.

It took the community more than ten years of struggle to ge the new $18 million Haugan Middle School at 3729 W. Leland Ave.to relieve the overcrowding at the nearby Haugan Elementary School. But the Chicago Board of Education has voted to turn the new school (above) into a branch of a small but politically connected charter school and despite widespread outrage, clout is winning. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt

Duncan declined to be interviewed for this report.

The expansion comes thanks to two controversial actions of the Chicago Board of Education on the recommendation of Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan and his staff. One action — the creation of a “branch” of a the Mirta Ramirez charter school in the “New Haugan Middle School” located at 3729 W. Leland Ave. — will give Aspira operational control over the newest building in the public school system. The expansion was approved without discussion at the board’s January 2005 meeting.

The other action, which began to come to light at the board’s April 27, 2005, meeting, has not yet formally proposed by Duncan and his charter school staff. That action, which reliable sources predict will take place before the beginning of next school year, will turn a large part of Chopin Elementary School, located at 2450 W. Rice St. (near the intersection of Chicago and Western Aves.), over to Aspira for another branch of its fledgling charter high school.

If both actions go through, by September, one of Chicago’s smallest charter schools — a school so new that it still didn’t have a school report card on the CPS website in April 2005 — will by the opening of the 2005-2006 school year become one of the largest charter school operators in Chicago and, indeed, in Illinois.

More questions than answers...

The Board Report that created the “Haugan” branch of the Mirta Ramirez Charter School was passed by the Chicago Board of Education on January 26, 2005 without discussion. Although the Haugan Middle building was built to house 900 children, Arne Duncan recommended that the new “Mirta Ramirez” campus be capped at 650 students (above right). Despite claims by Duncan that public schools must face cuts in teaching staff for the coming school year, the Mirta Ramirez Haugan budget was not discussed by members of the board during the January 26 meeting. The Board Report itself was not even proofread and included some language (“the Board of Education received the Mirta Ramirez … proposal in May, held a public meeting thereon on May 13, 2002, and takes the following action…”) that was cut and pasted from a previous Board Report. The sloppiness of the proposal and the Board Report are of little consequence, since the merits of the various proposals were less important than the clout behind the Mirta Ramirez expansion.

Prior to three years ago, Aspira was one of more than two dozen community organizations that operated tutoring and alternative school services under the umbrella of Chicago’s Alternative Schools Network. Aspira’s rise in the world of Chicago’s public schools began in 2002, when the Chicago Board of Education approved the creation of the “Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter High School.”

Aspira

The current “Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter High School”, located at 2435 N. Western Ave. (above), has been in operation for less than two full school years and currently has approximately 175 students in 9th and 10th grades. Chicago Board of Education databases contain no evidence that Mirta Ramirez charter can fulfill any of its grandiose promises. The Haugan community worked for more than a decade to get the Board of Education to build a new school to relieve overcrowding, but the board, in a series of unusual moves, maneuvered the new school into the hands of the Aspira charter. In addition to receiving control over a building that has cost the taxpayers at least $18 million (and rumored to be much more than that), Aspira has also received a $3 million operating budget for the 2005-2006 school year. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt

On September 25, 2002, the Chicago Board of Education approved a Board Report (02-0925-EX02) entitled “Approve Charter School Proposal”. The agenda itself did not indicate that the proposal was to allow Aspira to open the “Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter School”, and anyone who wanted to know the content of the proposal had to obtain the longer agenda that requires members of the public to go to the Board offices at 125 S. Clark St.

According to the September 2002 Board Report, “the Board of Education received the Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter School proposal in May, held a public meeting thereon on May 13, 2002, and takes the following action to approve the proposal, subject to the execution of a Charter School Agreement...” No report of the May 13 meeting was provided to the members of the board at the September meeting, but they voted unanimously and without discussion to approve the report, which was signed by CEO Arne Duncan and approved by Marilyn Johnson, who was then General Counsel for the school board.

According to reports and one visit to the school from this reporter, Mirta Ramirez grew slowly, opening with approximately 100 9th graders in September 2003 and adding additional 100 10th graders in September 2004. Thus, at the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year, Mirta Ramirez has approximately 200 students in 9th and 10th grades and had produced no educational record upon which its claims could be evaluated.

The actual size of the school has not been clear. During a brief visit by Substance to the school on April 22, 2005, this reporter was told by principal Patricia Munoz-Rocha that the school had “about 175 students.” At the time, Ms. Munoz-Rocha said that a visit to the school and further information could be gathered the following Monday. But when Substance called to arrange the interview and school visit on April 25, Munoz-Rocha said that any visit had to be approved by Aspira CEO Jose Rodriguez. Attempts to reach Rodriguez throughout the last week of April to arrange the school visit and get additional information about the school were ignored. On April 29, Substance left a last message for Mr. Rodriguez, who has read Substance for years, saying that the paper was on deadline for a major story about Aspira and the Mirta Ramirez charter school. The request was still ignored.

Although the Board of Education includes data from charter schools on its website, a late April visit to the board’s website turned up no data on Mirta Ramirez. According to Dan Bugler, chief of research at the board, the school so far has only provided demographic information. Bugler said that Mirta Ramirez claimed 204 students for the 2004-2005 school year. No test data was available.

At Substance press time, both Aspira CEO José Rodriguez and Mirta Ramirez principal Muñoz-Rocha had declined to be interviewed for this article.

From the outside, the building that houses Mirta Ramirez at 2435 N. Western Ave. is in disrepair. Several windows are covered with plywood, and the brickwork is in need of tuckpointing. Inside, the building reflects its alternative school roots, although this reporter was unable to get any visit through the facility, either during an initial visit or after several attempts.

According to a Mirta Ramirez promotional brochure, the school will eventually offer a “concentration” in an area of “computer science” to its students in 11th grade. But since the school does not have any 11th graders at the present time, there is no way to evaluate the claim that the concentration exists, nor is there any material available to the public regarding the curriculum for the “concentration.”

Promotional materials also claim that “Mirta Ramirez...prepares students to successfully attend any college or university through a high quality curriculum. Students will be primed to score high in college admissions tests such as the ACT and SAT.”

As of April 2005, officials at the Chicago Board of Education told Substance that the board has not ACT or SAT data from Mirta Ramirez to support that claim. Although other charter schools that offer high school courses have posted data on the school board’s website for public review, Mirta Ramirez has not.

During the tumultuous months following Mayor Daley’s announcement that Chicago’s public schools would undergo a “Renaissance” that would witness the creation of “100 new schools” to upgrade “troubled” schools across the city, many of the details of what was going on were difficult to assemble, and power was concentrated in the hands of ward officials, including aldermen, and people on the Board of Education’s staff, especially those in the “new schools” department and the “charter schools” department, both of which are housed in the CEO’s offices on the 5th floor of board headquarters.

By the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year, the school board was promoting the creation of “Transition Advisory Councils” — or TACs — for a large number of CPS schools that had been targeted for “renaissance.” One of those TACs was announced for Haugan Middle School. The announcement of the Haugan TAC was the first time that parents and teachers at the Haugan Elementary School knew that the new Haugan Middle School being built two blocks away might not be available, as they had been led to believe, to serve the upper grades from the overcrowded school community.

Parents, teachers, and many community leaders at Haugan were already organized, however, having spent more than a decade attending capital budget hearings and other school board events to pressure for a new school because of the extreme overcrowding at Haugan. As a result, according to teachers and parents, when the TAC was announced, people from the school were ready and held meetings, at least one of which, according to teachers, “nearly filled the auditorium.”

Upon learning that the Haugan Middle School was going to be a “Renaissance 2010” school and that proposals were being sought, teachers and others joined together and prepared a plan to maintain the Haugan Middle School as a traditional Chicago public school, something that everyone had expected during the decade of struggle that led to the construction this year. According to parents and teachers, the TAC initially approved the proposal to keep the school as a regular public schools.

Between November 22, when the proposals were due for submission to the school board, and January 26, 2005, when Arne Duncan issued the Board Report recommending that the Aspira proposal be approved by the school board, several unusual events occurred. Incomplete public records (or records which have yet to be made available to Substance under FOIA requests) leave the record confusing, and several attempts to get concrete answers have been only partly successful.

Under the guidelines for “Renaissance 2010” schools, applicants are required to specify whether they wish to open a “charter,” “contract” or “performance” school. On November 22, 2004, the deadline for proposals, four proposals had been submitted for the Haugan Middle School building. Aspira’s proposal was for the establishment of a branch of the Mirta Ramirez charter high school. The Haugan teachers and community had submitted a proposal for a performance school that would, in effect, be what the community had anticipated all along.

At first, teachers and parents were told that the performance school proposal had been approved by the TAC. Then, in a series of still confusing events, the TAC met again, virtually in secret, heard a presentation from Aspira, and quickly approved the Aspira proposal despite the fact that most parents and teachers had not been informed of the meeting. Sources at the school and in the community told Substance that Alderman Marge Laurino was behind the change of plans.

Confusion reigned at the Haugan school as the school dismissed students for Christmas vacation in December 2004. Things were no better when school resumed in January. When the agenda for the January 26 meeting of the school board became public on January 24,

Teachers from Haugan attended the January 26 board meeting and challenged the awarding of the charter to Mirta Ramirez, but despite some discussion during the public presentation portion of the meeting, the board members voted unanimously and without discussion during the business section of the meeting to approve the Aspira proposal and reject the community proposal.

Haugan teachers Maria Cristina Vargas (center) and Catherine DeFrancesca (right) told the January 26 Board of Education meeting that massive meetings of Haugan parents and teachers had expressed the desire that the new school remain a traditional public schools. They also noted that the Haugan TAC had originally approved the proposal to sustain the Haugan Middle School as a traditional public school, and then after a series of semi-secret meetings, the position changed. The teachers also reported that parents and the community are overwhelmingly opposed to a charter school. The teachers were treated politely by Arne Duncan and Michael Scott, but the facts they presented to the meeting were ignored and the Aspira charter was approved unanimously a few hours after the teachers made their appeal. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.

Renaissance 2010 does not require due diligence

Despite several obstacles to accurately reporting this story, as of Substance deadline Substance has been able to confirm the fact that the Haugan TAC did not even examine Mirta Ramirez itself before making its controversial recommendation. Substance has been unable to determine whether Arne Duncan or the board’s general counsel, Ruth Moscovitch, actually visited the school prior to signing the Board Report recommending the expansion of the Mirta Ramirez charter to include the new Haugan building.

From the documentation itself, however, it is clear that little attention was paid to the actual record of either Aspira or Mirta Ramirez either by the TAC, by Duncan’s office, or by the members of the Chicago Board of Education at the time they approved the controversial proposal.

At various times in the public record, there are anecdotes about how Aspira was able to make a bold presentation. Aspira was also active at virtually every Renaissance 2010 event sponsored by the school board beginning in the summer of 2004. At several meetings, Aspira CEO Jose Rodriguez is positioned within ten feet of Arne Duncan for photo ops. Aspira also turned out students and parents to provide testimony regarding the claims of Mirta Ramirez during public hearings on Renaissance 2010 at the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year.

At no time, however, does the public record reflect whether Arne Duncan, anyone in his staff, or any member of the Chicago Board of Education actually asked whether the Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter High School had more than brochures, Power Point presentations, and bold dreams on behalf of their proposal.

Substance has been unable to determine whether the guidelines for the review of “Renaissance 2010” proposals require that public officials — Duncan, the General Counsel of the Chicago Board of Education, the individual members of the Chicago board — has a duty beyond reviewing words on paper and carefully staged presentations replete with moving anecdotes. It is unusual for contracts for the spending of public funds — especially for the spending of millions of dollars — not to require a “due diligence” aspect. During the late 1990s, when this reporter sat on a committee at the school board’s technology office (then called the Department of Management Information Systems), we reviewed a number of bids for computer hardware and software. No low bidder could be recommended unless that company could also provide proof that it had a record of fulfilling orders of comparable size.

If the CEO, the board members, and the board’s attorney are also required to engage in the due diligence they must follow by law before awarding contracts for everything from milk supplies to paint jobs, then the $21 million in public funds that will be going to the branches of the Mirta Ramirez Computer Science Charter School have failed to pass the simplest test and the officials who have moved those contracts forward have failed in a public duty.

Were the children of the Haugan community served milk from a corporation that had a record of selling tainted milk, the city would know it had a scandal. The Inspector General of the Chicago Public Schools regularly investigates much smaller problems in the awarding of contracts and in performance.

Under “Renaissance 2010,” there is apparently no due diligence requirement for turning over large public buildings and millions of dollars in operating funds to an entity that can come up with a hefty proposal and make a presentation, but has no record of performance to indicate that it can fulfill the promises of the words it forwards to the board.

Aspira

A brochure provided by Mirta Ramirez contains the usual generalities about education. Since the school has no record to base its claims on, the school board’s decision to award more than $21 million to the Aspira project seems to lack the due diligence required when public moneys are spent for private contractors. Note above that Mirta Ramirez claims that its’ students “will be primed to score high in college admissions tests such as the ACT and SAT.” No SAT and ACT scores for the school’s students are available on the Chicago Public Schools website, so it is impossible for the public to tell whether the “priming” worked or not.

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