Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas

[ensho]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/education/07charter.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2


TDM Contracting was only a month old when it won its first job, an $8.2 million contract to build the Harmony School of Innovation, a publicly financed charter school that opened last fall in San Antonio.

It was one of six big charter school contracts TDM and another upstart company have shared since January 2009, a total of $50 million in construction business. Other companies scrambling for work in a poor economy wondered: How had they qualified for such big jobs so fast?

The secret lay in the meteoric rise and financial clout of the Cosmos Foundation, a charter school operator founded a decade ago by a group of professors and businessmen from Turkey. Operating under the name Harmony Schools, Cosmos has moved quickly to become the largest charter school operator in Texas, with 33 schools receiving more than $100 million a year in taxpayer funds.

-snip-

Some of the schools’ operators and founders, and many of their suppliers, are followers of Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish preacher of a moderate brand of Islam whose devotees have built a worldwide religious, social and nationalistic movement in his name. Gulen followers have been involved in starting similar schools around the country — there are about 120 in all, mostly in urban centers in 25 states, one of the largest collections of charter schools in America.

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aahh, the silver tongued religiously insane

are so very good at making money

(an aside: I once knew a man that could out silver tongue the religiously insane leaders and make money off them. It was amazing to watch him do this)

[denverbill]

1. I'm surprised Texans aren't outraged that their tax money is funding Islam.

[ScreamingMeemie]

2. Ummm...because the majority of us are level headed people.

:shrug:

[thanks_imjustlurking]

3. Nope, but I'm outraged that

it's funding these charters while the regular public schools are being gutted....

[Igel]

4. The schools in Houston tend to be better than average.

Better than public schools, more often than not. Both in standardized in-state test scores, graduation rates, and in things like SAT/ACT scores. They're also fairly regularly in the news here because their science projects, while not always cutting edge or incredibly creative, show a bit of ingenuity or at least daring.

I've been in one, observing 7th grade classes. Disproportionately Middle Eastern (I suspected "Turkish" at the time) and "non Anglo". I found it odd that they actually had Turkish classes (along with German and, IIRC, French)--then again, given the proportion of ME kids it shouldn't have been odd. A lot of immigrant parents these days really think where they left from was better in every respect, and by high school many kids are so into studying their "home culture" and constricting their worldviews to little outside their own skins it's scary.

The kids at the school were pretty much on-task and right on target with where I remember being 40 years ago in my public school. On the other hand, they were covering "stuff" routinely covered in 8th grade in most public schools here and still not clearly mastered by at-risk kids in 10th grade.

If Muslim, there's a problem with the (pork) pepperoni pizza that's served weekly.

I don't think I trust Gulen--there's a theme among some Islamist groups of being moderate in word to outsiders, to gain a lot of popular support by doing good works (esp. among Muslims), and in private to be extremist in some or many ways. Truly odd, a lot of progressives think the idea of "good works" by Islamic or Islamist groups is a Good Thing, above reproach, but when a Xian group does it it's inherently evil and deceptive. Eh.