FL: MSM Catches On To Donalds' Charter Grift

The Miami Herald finally caught on. I guess it takes a big election to get them to pay attention.

Byron Donalds is running for governor of Florida; his wife has been a player in her own right as the queen of school choice in Florida.

The couple got together while Byron was still with his first wife (a public school teacher who still seems a bit grumpy about the whole business). He hooked up with the Tea Party, and Erika became an investment banker. Her school choice origin story is that in 2013, her second child had some sort of run-in with a teacher at school, and Donalds, unsatisfied with administrative response, put the child in a private school and transformed into an advocate for school choice.

Donalds has had a hand in the founding of a multitude of groups. She helped start Parents ROCK (Rights of Choice For Kids). When Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, Donalds helped launch School Choice Movement, a group that pushed for policies that would cut the throat of public education, including one that said charters must be approved by the state, not a local district; the group has since gone silent.

Back in 2015, while she was still serving as a school board member, she helped launch the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, meant to be a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. They started with four members-- Donalds, Jeff Bergosh, frequent collaborator Shawn Frost, and Bridget Ziegler, future co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who called Donalds the face of charter schools in Florida. Tina Descovitch, another M4L co-founder, would later join FCSBM and was the president when they folded in May 2020, just a few months before the founding of M4L.

Donalds served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee (along with Jeb Bush edu-pal Patricia Levesque), the group that tried to sell Amendment 8, yet another attempt to kneecap public schools. Fortunately, the Amendment was such a deceptive con job, a judge threw it off the ballot.

And she's the CEO of Optima Ed, a private ed biz that offers school management and works with a variety of partners, including Step Up For Students, the outfit that manages the money fueling school vouchers--and that outfit is chaired by John Kirtley, who reportedly runs DeVos-funded PACS (included American Federation for Children) and who allegedly provided support for the FCSBM. Optima Ed also operates a chain of Hillsdale-powered charter schools.

What the Miami Herald's Claire Heddles writing for the "Reality Check" series turned up is Optima's use of the classic sweeps contract. 

Florida requires charter schools to be non-profit. In practice, this law means less than the 55 mph speed limit on your favorite road. Donalds uses the classic management company dodge-- set up your "non-profit" charter school, then turn around and hire your charter management company to operate the charter school. Non-profit charter school collects taxpayer dollars and hands them all directly to the absolutely-for-profit charter management company.  And as Heddles notes, a bonus feature is that your privately owned and operated charter management company doesn't have to tell anyone doodly or squat about how they spend that money. Just like that, a pile of taxpayer dollars disappears into a big for-profit black box.

You could call this a "regulatory loophole" but since this loophole has been widely known and publicized for over a decade (Heddles links to a ProPublica article about it from 2014), I wouldn't call it a loophole so much as a deliberate choice to legalize this self-dealing money-grubbing grift. 

And Byron Donalds is running for governor. As Heddles notes:

Erika Donalds has promised that as governor, her husband will pave the way for an “economy of education” where “profit is not going to be a bad word.”

Heddles reports that the couple's money mostly comes from Erika's biz. If Donalds becomes governor, he will be in a great position to influence regulations controlling his own personal finances. Sure, he could get all ethical and recuse himself from state actions covering charter school finances. I will not be holding my breath. [Okay, alert readers inform me that it's not a done deal and I now see that many polls are calling the race against David Jolly a dead heat, so by all means-- go make a difference!] Byron Donalds, for his part, says he will follow the legal guidance and ethical requirements. But school privatizer Jeff Yass is among the out of state Rich Guys throwing money behind him. 

Byron has been active in the ed world before; Byron Donalds is the legislator who gave Florida the law that says all textbooks must be "balanced" and that any taxpayer can challenge course content.

Heddles and the Herald do a decent job of scratching the surface. But last year reporting from Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows just how deep and twisty this mess gets.

In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported paying Erika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.

But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”

State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.

Bredderman also notes that in 2023, three of Optima's flagship schools fired the Donalds firm, apparently due to "deficiencies" in accounting. Heddles gets into this, plus an ongoing case in which Treasure Coast Classical Academy is suing Donalds' nonprofit foundation. 

As with many such charter and education management organizations, the Optima brand is a twisty set of relationships, with OptimaEd, the Optima Foundation, and Optima Management services all part of the empire. Bredderman further uncovered an address connection between OptimaEd and Optima Management Services with Quest Educational Foundation, which is run former state education chair Tim Brady and Ed Morton, former chair of Florida Gulf Coast University Foundation. Quest operates the Freedom Institute of Collier County, a private school that markets to home schoolers.

In December 2023, Erika Donalds tweeted an endorsement of the Freedom Institute’s “customized homeschool hybrid experience for high school students on a path to economic freedom,” and touted it to her followers as a “great option” for their state-funded education savings accounts.

But it turns out (thanks to more digging from Bredderman) that the Optima family of businesses are in turn controlled by a company called "Onesto, LLC" whose sole owner is Erika Donalds.

It's great that the Miami Herald picked up on much of this story. It's especially timely because Donalds is breaking into the hugely profitable cyber school business. And of course that whole election thing-- Byron could cement her standing further, though Heddles quotes him as saying that he will draw a clear distinction between his wife and himself. 

“Erika is a successful entrepreneur with deep experience in education policy and school operations. I value her perspective, which she has earned through her own work,” he said. “There is only one governor.”

Certainly the Donalds power couple will help Florida continue the work of fully dismantling public education. Good luck to the families and students in the state— may the Donalds actually lose this thing.