Prime Prep Academy was going to be one of the great celebrity-based charters, an educational experience spearheaded by a high-profile rich guy famous for accomplishments having nothing to do with education.
The story of Prime Prep Academy has been long and troubled. Well, troubled anyway. The school launched in 2012, on top of the charter bubble. It was meant to be a college prep academy that would be a launching pad for the best high school athletes around. It was a tremendous mess from the very beginning.
For more complete reading about the full-on mess that was Prime Prep, I recommend two articles-- a good summary by Barry Petchesky at Deadspin, and Amy Silverstein's fully fleshed-out and researched piece for the Dallas Observer. But even a brief highlight reel is nstructional.
Sanders partnered with Damien Wallace, who right off the charter application bat set himself up to be paid rent with taxpayer money. The application also included corporate partners who weren't actually partners, and it apparently cut and pasted portions of other school applications. None of these problems slipped by Texas regulators-- but they approved the charter anyway. Silverstein seems a bit surprised by that; perhaps she was unaware that using the rental payment shell game is a not-uncommon way for charter operators to turn a handy profit.
The whole launching-pro-careers thing turned out to be problematic. Graduates found that they weren't eligible to play in college. So the whole point of the school was in question.
Computers were stolen. The school was evicted over a rent dispute. Administrators came and went quickly. Sanders and Wallace became locked in a power struggle, each trying to drive the other out. Sanders frequently expressed displeasure with the amount of money he was making. Several individuals, including Wallace, alleged that Sanders physically assaulted them. Sanders was fired.
Last July, Texas finally announced it would pull the plug. The alleged last straw was having the feds yank the school's eligibility for free and reduced lunches, given the schools mis-handling of previous federal lunch funds. Their finances were a mess, and Texas found them out of compliance with state education code.
Sanders vowed to save his school and as recently as last week there will still rumors (based, possibly, on statements by Sanders) that Prime Prep would be merging with Triple A Academy. Not the first merger rumor to be floated. Triple A's founder and chief flatly denied that any such merger was in the works.
So as Prim Prep limps into 2015, the charter board could not even manage to close the door on themselves. The school was being run by a state-appointed superintendent and board of managers. Monday the non-profit board of directors attempted to hold a meeting to surrender its charter, but that was canceled when they were unable to gather a quorum. Tuesday the state was granted a final default judgment against the charter in its final appeal.
It remains now to be seen if Prime Prep has enough money to finish the year. According Jeff Mosier in the Dallas Morning News, the school is facing $75K in legal bills, lost $40K in a lawsuit, and owes $45K to the state agriculture department. Plus they have a monthly rent bill of $12.5K.
Texas handed Prime Prep $8.5 million in aid and the feds chipped in a chunk of change as well. That bought two and a half years of high profile celebrity charter hijinks with no educational benefits for the students caught in this mess.
When choice and charter advocates are making their arguments about how competition promoted excellence and choice makes for better educational opportunities for all students, they will probably not bring up this celebrity-stoked unsupervised amateur-hour waste of time, money and resources.
Showing posts with label Prime Prep Academy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prime Prep Academy. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Monday, August 18, 2014
Sanders's Charter School Not Ready for Prime Time
The problem of athletic academies that push sports and ignore academics is not a new one.
One recent growth industry has been the post-grad prep school, schools set up so that athletes who failed to make the necessary scores to qualify for NCAA play can take another year to make their numbers while still maintaining their sports edge. That tightening in standards grows out of repeated "discovery" by NCAA schools of athletes who can barely read. But private sports academies that gave students full days of practice with scant language or math studies were around long before the current growth in the charter school biz.
There has been an allure for decades in the prospect of finding fame and fortune on the court or the field. Add a famous name to the mix, and you have marketing gold for a rising charter enterprise.
Prime Prep Academy was just such an enterprise, launched to cash in on the charter movement and the star power of Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders. In the New York Times, reporter Michael Powell lays out the crashing and burning of that Texas enterprise. You should read the story-- it's a great piece of reporting.
The goal of a powerhouse sports giant that would rank nationally-- that they achieved. Academics, not so much. Instead, athletes receive the grades they need to stay eligible, and the staff and faculty who stay work in an atmosphere-- well, the former executive director is quoted in the article "I would say there was not a culture of safety at that school.”
The lesson here is twofold. One lesson we already know-- turning the charter school business into a handy way to get rich without having to actually prove that you know what you're doing is not healthy for schools. And really-- there's nothing else like it going on in any other sector. No state has said, "Sure, pretty much anybody can set up a law practice or a hospital." In state after state (I'm looking at you, Ohio) we are seeing charter authorizers who are less vigilant than my dog (who would greet a burglar with invitations to play with his chew toys and share slobber). "Hey, this guy is famous" is not much of a charter school plan. And yet as the article makes clear, that was the plan.
The second lesson is for free market school choice fans. One of the articles of faith in the choice crowd is the notion that the market, once freed from its government-forged chains, would rise up and demand educational excellence. What we find again and again is that a fair-sized portion of the market rises up and demands things like a school where students can play sports all day and don't have to worry about ever being challenged in academic classes. And the we get scholastic train wrecks like the Prime Prep Academy.
One recent growth industry has been the post-grad prep school, schools set up so that athletes who failed to make the necessary scores to qualify for NCAA play can take another year to make their numbers while still maintaining their sports edge. That tightening in standards grows out of repeated "discovery" by NCAA schools of athletes who can barely read. But private sports academies that gave students full days of practice with scant language or math studies were around long before the current growth in the charter school biz.
There has been an allure for decades in the prospect of finding fame and fortune on the court or the field. Add a famous name to the mix, and you have marketing gold for a rising charter enterprise.
Prime Prep Academy was just such an enterprise, launched to cash in on the charter movement and the star power of Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders. In the New York Times, reporter Michael Powell lays out the crashing and burning of that Texas enterprise. You should read the story-- it's a great piece of reporting.
The goal of a powerhouse sports giant that would rank nationally-- that they achieved. Academics, not so much. Instead, athletes receive the grades they need to stay eligible, and the staff and faculty who stay work in an atmosphere-- well, the former executive director is quoted in the article "I would say there was not a culture of safety at that school.”
The lesson here is twofold. One lesson we already know-- turning the charter school business into a handy way to get rich without having to actually prove that you know what you're doing is not healthy for schools. And really-- there's nothing else like it going on in any other sector. No state has said, "Sure, pretty much anybody can set up a law practice or a hospital." In state after state (I'm looking at you, Ohio) we are seeing charter authorizers who are less vigilant than my dog (who would greet a burglar with invitations to play with his chew toys and share slobber). "Hey, this guy is famous" is not much of a charter school plan. And yet as the article makes clear, that was the plan.
The second lesson is for free market school choice fans. One of the articles of faith in the choice crowd is the notion that the market, once freed from its government-forged chains, would rise up and demand educational excellence. What we find again and again is that a fair-sized portion of the market rises up and demands things like a school where students can play sports all day and don't have to worry about ever being challenged in academic classes. And the we get scholastic train wrecks like the Prime Prep Academy.
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