Here’s one to add to the grifter file:
Greater Works Charter School will no longer open in Rochester in 2015, part of the continuing fallout over lies in the resume of its 22-year-old founder.
Ted Morris Jr. represented himself to the New York State Education Department as a precocious businessman and educational advisor with bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees earned mostly online. In fact, he has no college degrees and scant professional experience.
He resigned Nov. 25, the day most of the misrepresentations came to light and just a week after the school gained approval from the state Board of Regents. […]
For such a young man, “Dr.” Ted is sure a very prodigious liar, since he he inflated his role as administrative assistant at a non-profit into CEO status, and also claimed a different alma mater in a previous filing with the state. No matter: Ted’s little grift was one of the few chosen by the state for funding:
In the fall 2014 charter approval cycle, 51 organizations submitted letters of intent, 17 were invited to submit full proposals, and only four, including Greater Works, were approved, according to the state education department.
In other words, 34 applications were written out in Crayola on Big Chief tablets, or scribbled on the back of 7-11 receipts. 17 of them used full sentences at the 8th grade reading level, and were invited to put pen to paper for a handwritten note to the state. 1 of the 4 that made it through that arduous process was “Dr” Ted’s. No wonder every charlatan, quack and ne’er-do-well wants to open a charter school.
NotMax
You can’t spell charter without c-h-e-a-t.
Nicole
My son is in pre-kindergarten in a Title 1 school here in NYC and it’s very frustrating to see how the charter school companies here get their talons into everything. One of the constant drumbeats you hear about in education is “small class size.” But then, here, when some public schools do manage a small class size (which means fewer than 22 to 25), the charter schools point to the public school and say that clearly that school is not making good use of its space and so a charter school should be able to come in and take over some of that space. And so classes get cut so the charter school can take some space in the building and soon they’re overflowing in the public school.
Two charter schools have so completely taken over the large public school building near us that the public school, kindergarten through fifth grade, is barely 100 students. And the school is understaffed accordingly.
The other thing that’s not getting press is that some charter schools, at least here in NYC, have opted to, in springtime, expel some special needs kids from their schools. By law, the public schools are required to take in those students, many of which need attendants, which the school must pay for. Except the final budgets are done in January, which means the charter schools keep the money for the special needs students they kicked out, while the public school the kid is sent to has to find money in their depleted budget for the additional students and the students’ needs.
As has been said before, if charter schools are so amazing, why aren’t middle class suburban communities screaming for them?
Davebo
It’s all a huge conspiracy perpetrated by the Teachers Unions! They managed to wipe out this young man’s stellar educational and management credentials and while they were at it they also added a birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper!
Roger Moore
I suspect you have the logic wrong. It’s more likely that the problem with the proposals that were rejected out of hand is that their authors were sufficiently grounded in reality not to promise the moon and the stars. The 13 that made it to the full proposal stage but were not funded promised implausible success, and the 4 that were funded promised the impossible. That’s what happens when your whole premise is that it should be possible to do more with less, even when all the evidence suggests that the biggest single problem with poor schools is lack of resources. Nobody can actually deliver on what the proponents of charter schools want, so the funding goes to the best liars.
SatanicPanic
Is it wrong to kind of be in awe of the chutzpah this man has displayed?
Lee Rudolph
As until very recently—in fact, just minutes ago—one of the Sheeple, I was very glad to receive your wake-up call, and will be sure to subscribe to your newsletter.
slag
@Roger Moore: What you said.
Amir Khalid
Was no one suspicious when a lad of 22 turned up from nowhere claiming a bachelor’s degree, a masters and a doctorate? Such a prodigy would surely have been well-known to people in legit academic circles.
Botsplainer
@SatanicPanic:
Agreed – he is my hero. He took a simple carny act, made it even more absurd and sold it like a boss to people who pretend to be brilliant.
No slow clap for him – he gets enthusiastic applause.
Belafon
Actually, I think you have this backwards. 34 applicants quoted the actual cost, 17 quoted a lower price with a kick back for legislators, and the four that made it promised reach arounds.
RSR
It’s all so frustrating. Here in Philly, the school district was required by state law to accept new charter school applications as a condition of receiving a pittance of funding. The school district does not have to approve the applications, but rejected applicants may appeal to the state. (It used to be the school district’s decision to solicit and approve charter applications–or not–was final.)
One of the forty new applicants is a quasi-Catholic high school headed by a priest on a leave of absence from his vocation. On the board of this school is our current District Attorney, who I guess doesn’t really get the whole separation of church and state thing. http://thenotebook.org/blog/147959/hearings-start-dec-8-40-new-charter-school-applicants
Personally, I think the school’s philosophy sounds fine, but just open as a Catholic school and charge tuition.
But the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has been shuttering a large number of parochial schools. In 2012 the archdiocese joined the Great Schools Compact, which seeks to blend the formerly rival public and parochial systems. http://thenotebook.org/blog/124741/archdiocese-joins-great-schools-compact
Now the students from the closed diocesan schools are likely clients of existing and future charter schools.
It’s a backdoor voucher system.
Nicole
@Roger Moore: This is true, about the lack of resources. I’m getting quite an education about public schools and money as I negotiate kindergarten applications for my child. One of the in demand lottery schools (a public one) in my district apparently expects each family of kids attending to contribute $1000 a year to the PTA. And they let out which kids’ parents are not putting in their share.
PTAs pay for a lot of things in public schools, which is all well and good, and involved parents are a good thing, except that it ends up being yet another way schools with poor students get screwed (along with the property tax thing), because the parents can’t put in their own money. The school my son is in right now has a terrific PTA, but it’s a huge struggle because they’re aware the majority of the parents have no disposable income and so all fund raising has to come from sources besides parents’ pockets. Sigh.
Mnemosyne
And here I was hoping from the title that the post would have more pictures of Tim F’s toddler daughter.
Oh well. :-)
CarolDuhart2
@Amir Khalid: Good question. And did they ever ask why such a protigy wanted to create a charter school in the first place instead of going for a Rhodes Scholarship, or becoming a tenured professor.
What amazes me is this still happens in the age of Google. I mean, if my college had someone like that, they would be all over the website, plus local media. Phi Beta Kappa and all the rest would make them a featured
OzarkHillbilly
I’m in the wrong racket.
SRW1
@Amir Khalid:
You work with the school ‘entrepreneurs’ you have, not the ones you wish you had.
Btw, the UK has seen similar scandals, involving apparently qualified persons. Only yesterday The Independent reported that the executive head of an Academy Trust who had been the head teacher of the first academy primary school in England has been suspended for gross misconduct. Apparently, the lady, her husband, and a headteacher falsified exam results in order to avoid having one of her schools qualified as a failure.
The irony is that the person is question was lionized by Michael Gove, the one time education secretary in charge of privatising education, as a trailblazer and awarded a CBE for her ‘services to education’.
shelley
So this adjective was used cause he was 22 years old?
I’ve only seen ‘precocious’ used refering to toddlers.
SiubhanDuinne
This is O/T, but I would have sworn I saw a Tom Levenson open thread a short time ago. I went away for a few minutes and when I came back, it had disappeared. Tom, if you’re around: am I hallucinating or did you put up and then take down a post just recently?
Villago Delenda Est
I wouldn’t prosecute the young man.
I’d have the Board of Regents purged by fire for approving his proposal. They’re utter, complete dickheads.
Nicole
@shelley:
That is untrue; it is also an adjective repeatedly used to describe a woman possessing Bette Davis eyes.
Villago Delenda Est
@Nicole: My thought exactly!
Great minds, etc!
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Ignore; Tom’s thread is back up.
ET
The charter/for profit education sector is ripe for grifters and its supporters will likely never acknowledge how much because it makes them look bad and those places as a bad investment and it undercuts the “private sector does it better” argument.
NonyNony
@Nicole:
That’s because the drumbeat for “smaller class sizes” comes from teachers and education researchers and parents. Nobody else cares and in fact most non-teacher, non-education researcher, non-parents will be of the opinion that a teacher who wants to teach 20 kids instead of 30 is just being lazy and wasting taxpayer money.
Administrators tend to fall into that camp – especially administrators who were expressly hired by school boards to cut costs because the community refuses to keep budgets for schools at pace with inflation. They promise to work magic and somehow that magic always results in doubling the size of the classroom. Funny how that works…
Another Holocene Human
@Nicole: Same scam as other places, where they are jacking public buildings. But your public school budget paid for those buildings, paid for their upkeep. Why can’t the charter schools pay rent with all that money? $$$$$$$$$$$
Private-operator charters are a sick joke.
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: Wow, like IT hiring in the 1990s! Ooo, the memories!
The want ads were hilarious … 10 years Java experience and other fascinating alternative universe (at that point) requirements.
Villago Delenda Est
@NonyNony: “Small class size” seems to me (critical thinking somewhat smarter than the average bear person that I am) to be a no brainer.
The entire idea is to give each pupil the attention they need to grow and learn, and smaller class size plays into this idea.
But of course, I reject the MBA mentality that is driving the current education “reform” movement.
Another Holocene Human
@RSR: How is this not totally illegal?
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human:
I think you know the answer to that question.
Hookers and blow for the perpetrators of the scam.
Another Holocene Human
@Nicole: $1000 per family or kicked out of school? That’s a frigging tithe.
Or a cult.
Kay
@Nicole:
I follow this ridiculously closely because I’m obsessive, and this is advice you can take or leave, but I think the key to co-locations and advocating for public schools (generally) is taking the focus off charters and re-directing it to what is happening to public schools within these systems.
Schools are systems in a given geographical area. It doesn’t matter if one set of schools claims they aren’t part of the public system, they are and when one pulls a string in a system the fabric changes. The delusional part of all this is the assumption that all the parts of the system will benefit with “reform”. That isn’t true for co-locations with public schools. The public schools that were there take a hit.
This is an example, and it’s out of Newark. It’s an admission by a charter school promoter there that in her system, public schools are acting as a safety net for the charters. That has to be recognized and dealt with.
To me, that’s a belated recognition of what should have been anticipated – schools are systems and when you change one piece the whole picture changes. The assumption must have been the changes would be win/win, but that’s crazy. Why did they think that?
So, I think public school advocates and parents and teachers have to ask not about charters but about what happens to existing public schools when you introduce a second system. Public schools are completely ignored in the charter analysis. That’s crazy.
What I ask now when ed reform is marketed locally is “how does this proposed reform benefit existing public schools”? That’s a really important question! We’re allowed to ask it.
Nicole
@Kay:
That’s really great; thanks for weighing in. One of our PTA members regularly attends the council meetings for our district, where charter schools are particularly eager to keep moving in, and I’m going to pass what you said along to her. Because the schools are getting ignored- the charters get permission to open, with the location to be determined later, and then of course it becomes a horrible situation when they decide which public school they want to push into. I mean, who applies to open a business without having a location selected in advance? Augh!
Villago Delenda Est
@Nicole:
I think you know the answer to that already.
Griftng asshats.
Kay
@Nicole:
We did it here with vouchers (I know you don’t have those yet, but you will!).
When they expanded vouchers (which would all go to a Catholic school here, because we only have one private school) we questioned whether anyone had considered how that would affect the public school (which after all is the school the vast majority of kids attend).
It turned out not to matter, only two families took the vouchers, but I think the debate changes when one asks that question. It goes from anti-charter or voucher to pro-public. The existing system deserves consideration. No one signed onto harming one set of schools to promote another. That wasn’t how ed reform was sold to the public.
I’ve also noticed that public school parents don’t pay attention to charters and the whole debate centers around charters. They don’t listen, because they hear “charter” and they think “mine is in a public school, doesn’t apply to me”. They only notice when there are adverse system effects, because then they’re brought it into it.
Shakezula
Michelle Rhee’s on Line 1!
D58826
@ET: Shorter version – the supporters get a cut of the profits from the con
cintibud
@Kay: Excellent points and strategy Kay. I was a high school teacher in another life, 6 years in a Catholic school, 8 years in a Joint Vocational School. Some things were the same, they both needed to recruit students, neither had a union and both had an authoritarian leader – the Principal was the King at the Catholic school, the Super at the JVS was an Emperor.
Some things were very different however. It was a breeze to teach at the Catholic school – the discipline was built in. Troublemakers were summarily dismissed. I only sent one person to the principal’s office in the time I was there because the students knew what awaited them there and would decide to work with me. I could teach advanced concepts and be demanding.
On the other hand the JVS had to fight to not simply be a dumping ground, but we did have a lot of students who had no place else to go. I had a lot of students who simply could not read (this is 11th-12th grades BTW). However I had to keep up the fiction that I was actually educating them without acknowledging their problems. I was directed to give open book vocabulary tests. Basically you could pass my class if you just showed up every day and turned in a couple papers at the end of class that were given at the beginning of class- didn’t have to be correct, just partly to mostly completed. Even then I was told I could not fail a student who only showed up for class once or twice a week.
I was a good teacher. Not the excellent, Stand and Deliver type of teacher, but good. But I couldn’t take it – I quit when I saw myself turning into the stereotypical “this is why teachers shouldn’t have tenure” type teacher like the alcoholic jerk down the hall from me. If I had left earlier I might still be in education, but I was too burnt out when I left. I switched careers and found that being a software developer was SO much easier that I never considered going back, although I do miss the intrinsic rewards of teaching.
At any rate, the Catholic school was like the charter schools of today, skimming off the top and the JVS was similar to the left overs that some of the public systems are now experiencing. My experiences are almost 20 years old now and it has undeniably gotten much worse for teachers and non-privileged students.Teachers today have to be incredibly dedicated because it’s a suckers game anymore – TBTB seem to just want babysitters.
Unsympathetic
Who actually thinks charter schools are a good thing these days? Everyone has at least one friend who is or was a teacher.
Most things in life are part of a complex system and not accurately modeled as a one-off calculation..
I realize people WANT things to be simple.. but do we have to constantly relive the Simpsons monorail man episode [Written by Conan O’Brien, fyi]?
The motto, as always: Just because someone asserted it [Charter schools solve all of life’s problems!] doesn’t mean it’s true.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking. It seems to me that wishful thinking is the whole foundation of the charter school movement. The fundamental assumption is that the main problem with our schools is with the way they’re run, so that we can fix all their problems by reorganizing them. It ignores the real problem with our failing schools, which is that we’ve abandoned the populations they’re serving, and schools are just one sign of that abandonment.
D58826
ot I sure this will come as a shock to everyone – the NY grand jury has refused to indict the cop in the choke hold death.
D58826
@cintibud: I was a student in an excellent public high school and saw the same thing. A steady stream of malcontents, time servers and trouble makers showing up at our door after they were kicked out of the local Catholic high school. Of course we had our own share of bad students so we really didn’t need any more.
rikyrah
I’m in the wrong racket. I can’t even believe this. Actually, I can. I remember a string in Ohio that was also a ripoff scam and the children were thrown into the dirt during the middle of the school year when they were closed.
rikyrah
@Kay:
good points Kay
Renie
@Nicole: Cuz Eva Moskowitz runs all those Success Adacemy Charters in NYC and she is in cahoots with Wall Street. She uses public dollars to enrich herself and friends.
Aaron S. Veenstra
Quite audacious. That and a brown handful of cigarillos will get you shot dead in some places.
TriassicSands
Maybe Dr. Ted can call fellow fabulist Stephen Glass for some career advice. Glass may tell him not to bother going to law school.
TriassicSands
@SatanicPanic:
It’s understandable to be in awe of someone with this kind of gall. But, like Stephen Glass, this is a very bad person who should never be trusted. This isn’t simple dishonesty — as is indicated by your awe — but major perversity that will ultimately hurt a lot of people if allowed to flourish.
So, be in awe, but don’t give him any of your personal information and hide everything if he stops by for a visit.
john halloran
When is someone going to address the elephant in the room. Charter Schools are complete scam. They are for profit schools. PROFIT! That is all that matters. People making money off your tax dollars. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy. The race to the bottom!