A short history of Seth Andrews after he pleads guilty to embezzlement in federal court

Bank surveillance photo of Seth Andrew from DOJ indictment

Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep charters and former Advisor to Arne Duncan and the White House on the use of education technology has pleaded guilty to stealing more more than $200K from the charter network he founded, in order to receive lower interest rate on a mortgage for an apartment he had purchased in NYC.  

Seth started Democracy Prep in 2005 when he was only 28 years old.  The charter school's curriculum was portrayed as focused on instilling "civic values", and the network was encouraged to expand rapidly by then-Chancellor Joel Klein, who gave his charters space in NYC public schools.  I met Seth a few years later, when he reached out to me and gave me a tour of one of his co-located charter schools in Harlem.  

I found him an intriguing character, obsessively throwing a rubber ball against the wall while we walked through the halls of the school, and never taking off his baseball hat though the network had a rigid dress code for students, who were forbidden to wear hats, wear the wrong color socks or the wrong kind of belt.  When we were touring the school, he stopped one student in the hall and berated her for having her Uggs showing. I wondered how long he would last at his own charter school before being suspended or pushed out.  I later learned that his baseball hat was something of a calling card for Seth, and it is even mentioned in the indictment document.

Democracy Prep  is a "no excuses" charter chain, known for its strict disciplinary practices and high attrition rates.  I questioned him about their demerit system which called for keeping students after school for small lapses of behavior, to sit in a room silently, without being able to read or do homework. We discussed Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, and when I asked him if she didn't give a bad reputation to the charter school movement, he said he thought she was useful because she kept negative attention off other NYC charters like his.

In 2012, the network received $9.1 million from the US Department of Education to expand to states outside New York, and then another $12.7 million in 2016, aided by recommendations from former NYC Chancellor Joel Klein, former DOE "Chief Equity Officer" and scandal-plagued Harvard professor Roland Fryer, and former Louisiana State Superintendent John White.

In 2013,  Andrew was appointed senior advisor to Arne Duncan and  superintendent-in-residence at the U.S. Department of Education; you can see the cast of characters who congratulated him on Twitter. He later served under Obama at the White House Office of Educational Technology, while continuing to be on the payroll of Democracy Prep, according to this CNBC article. 

In 2016, he helped start a charter school in DC, the Washington Leadership Academy. based on virtual reality.  The school won the $10 million XQ prize from Laurene Powell Jobs'  Emerson Collective.  He explained the benefits of having an imaginary science lab to a reporter:

“During that time, no child will be burned, no child will have a chemical spill, and it will cost the school a fraction of what building a lab would require.” said Andrew.

After leaving the Department of Education, he served as Global Director of Policy & Partnerships at Bridge International Academies from 2017 to 2018, which runs for-profit schools in India and Africa, and which I have critiqued on this blog here and here. 

Andrew left BIA to run an organization called Democracy Builders, and in 2020, he announced that they would buy the campus of the now-defunct Marlboro College in Vermont to start a hybrid college program for low-income students, dependent on federal funding. 

But later that year, in April 2020, he was arrested and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements.  Through complex maneuvers taking place over several months between March and November 2019, as described in the Justice Dept. indictment, he had transferred over $218,000 from three Democracy Prep's escrow accounts that they are required to retain, and deposited these funds into his own accounts.  His goal was to qualify for a lower mortgage rate for a Manhattan apartment on Central Park West that he and his wife had purchased in August 2019 for $2.37 million.

According to Chalkbeat, the embezzlement was first noted by the SUNY Charter Institute, in a renewal report dated February 2020 for two Democracy Prep schools.  As  the report states:  

The 2018-19 audited financial statements ... continued to identify concerns regarding the internal control structure of the merged education corporation and network. ...Recently, a network contractor discovered a theft of approximately $142,000 in two of the education corporations dissolution reserve fund bank accounts during the 2018-19 fiscal year. The auditor deemed these amounts to be uncollectible and wrote them off in the financial statements....

The most recent audit report for June 30, 2019 reported material weaknesses in record keeping of general ledger accounts and transactions, lack of reconciliations, and overall lack of timely analysis of the financial records and accurate reporting. This, in turn, put the board in a position of not having accurate and up to date information for fiscal decision making. In addition, a cash theft from inactive bank accounts went undetected for months during 2018-19.

Nevertheless, SUNY recommended the renewal of these two charter schools.

Andrew's indictment was first announced April 27, 2021.  After pleading guilty last week, his defense attorneys have now released a  statement that for over two decades, Andrew "has worked tirelessly to expand educational, democratic, and technological opportunity to disenfranchised communities around the world."  His sentencing is scheduled for April 14.  Though the maximum charge is 20 years in prison, the prosecutors and his defense lawyers agreed in a written plea deal that a sentence of 21 to 27 months would be appropriate.

After his departure from Democracy Prep, its expansion has not gone easily. In 2018, its DC charter school in  DC announced it would close , for poor performance as well as "suspension and expulsion rates...drastically higher than citywide averages." Other members of the chain have also experienced serious financial and management problems, as reported here.

More recently, Democracy Prep has been accused of racist practices by former and current students and staff. Seth Andrew subsequently wrote a somewhat ambivalent apology on Medium in June 2020, that he later deleted but is archived here. 

Is this the end of Seth Andrew on the corporate education stage?  Who knows. He seems to have an infinite capacity to re-invent himself and acquire powerful patrons. I wouldn't put it past him to bounce back after prison to launch some other trendy edu-company or product.

A video of his Ted Talk from 2012 is below.

  

How Betsy DeVos much-criticized tweets echo earlier disinformation campaigns by Bill Gates and Arne Duncan

In recent days there has been much criticism of Betsy Devos for putting out this deceptive graph on Twitter that purported to show that school spending has no impact on student achievement as measured by the NAEPs:

The Nation’s Report Card shows that test scores continue to stagnate. This is not something we’re going to spend our way out of and not something we’re going to regulate our way out of. #RISE2018 pic.twitter.com/H6GHz8YpYg

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) April 12, 2018

Here's a sample of the criticisms that she received:

Chart has some enormous flaws best refuted by research by @SchlFinance101 & @KiraboJackson Data in the hands of simpleminded education commentator is worse than ignorance itself because it will mislead others. But will fight fire with fire in my next post.

— Ed Law Blog (@DerekWBlack) April 13, 2018

Here's the response from economist Kirabo Jackson, showing his contrary analysis that indeed, money matters in improving student achievement:

Here is a similar graph without the nonsensical scaling.https://t.co/1CgoRZxlT1 pic.twitter.com/MZw6NfAP7p

— C. Kirabo Jackson (@KiraboJackson) April 12, 2018

Yet the sort of deceptive chart employed by DeVos has been disseminated for years by corporate reformers.  This includes corporate reform Sugar Daddy Bill Gates, who provided this chart while asserting to the Governor's Association in 2011 that  "Over the last four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained flat, and other countries have raced ahead."

 

In his speech Gates implicitly endorsed the successful effort subsequently undertaken by many Governors to defund their public schools - which our education system has still not recovered from.  

The chorus of boos that recently met Betsy Devos' tweet on school spending is similar to how another one of her tweets was received last month:

Does this look familiar? Students lined up in rows. A teacher in front of a blackboard. Sit down; don’t talk; eyes up front. Wait for the bell. Walk to the next class. Everything about our lives has moved beyond the industrial era. But American education largely hasn’t. #SXSWEDU pic.twitter.com/kyy2r7bTud

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) March 6, 2018

This tweet got 6.7 thousands comments on Twitter, most of them scathing.

Yet just a few weeks before, Laurene Powell Jobs had made essentially the same claim to the New York Times, when her Emerson Collective LLC sponsored a nationwide television program that centered around the assertion that our high schools haven't changed in 100 years:

“For the past 100 years America’s high schools have remained virtually unchanged, yet the world around us has transformed dramatically,” intones the familiar voice of Samuel L. Jackson in a video promoting the TV event."

This contrast in how misinformation is received is also reminiscent of Arne Duncan's distressing record as Education Secretary, when he proclaimed to the American Enterprise Institute in 2010 that that budget cuts to education should be enthusiastically accepted as the “new Normal”:

“My message is that this challenge can, and should be, embraced as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements. I believe enormous opportunities for improving the productivity of our education system lie ahead if we are smart, innovative, and courageous in rethinking the status quo....

In our blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we support shifting away from class-sized based reduction that is not evidence-based. It might be that districts would vary class sizes by the subject matter or the skill of the teacher, or that part-time staff could be leveraged to lower class size during critical reading blocks.

I anticipate that a number of districts may be asked next year to weigh targeted class size increases against the loss of music, arts, and after-school programming. Those tough choices are local decisions. But it important that districts maintain a diverse and rich curriculum--and that they preserve the opportunities that make school exciting, fun, and engage young people in coming to school every day.

What did he suggest as the best most “smart” and innovative way to drastically cut budgets? That states and districts should adjust by allowing “smartly targeted increases in class size.”

Then again in 2011, Duncan told journalist Dana Goldstein that “Class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on."  Indeed, Duncan got his wish.   Schools all over the country laid off thousands of teachers during the recession, and most haven't recovered from the onslaught to their budgets and class sizes.  According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, while the number of students increased by 1.4 million since 2008, the number of public K-12 teachers and other school workers fell by 135,000.

In 2012, when Mitt Romney was running for President, he visited a Philadelphia school and proclaimed that class size doesn't matter.  His views were greeted with catcalls by many of the same Democrats who had kept their mouths shut when Arne Duncan said essentially the same thing.  Indeed, Obama ran a campaign ad, raking Romney over the coals for his erroneous views on class size, ignoring how this had become a standard line purveyed by Gates-funded DC think tanks and his own Education Secretary.

My point is simple: what's bad for the goose must also be bad for the gander.  Don't let educrats or so-called philanthropists get away with their false claims and damaging policies, no matter what party they belong to or how much funding they offer your organization. Because their rhetoric can become the "New Normal" and hurt kids and our schools for generations to come.

Arne Duncan still arguing for mayoral control -- when the trend is in the opposite direction

Arne Duncan - a fan of mayoral control

In the Sunday Daily News , former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued for the extension of Mayoral control.  The official legislative session is supposed to end Wednesday and Mayoral control expires at the end of the month.  Yet considering Arne's unpopular and controversial policies this probably is not the most effective endorsement.  He wrote:

"Mayors who are in control of their schools are directly accountable for the success of those schools. Education becomes a key to the Mayors' success. To put it another way, parents are hard to fool and parents vote."

Really? This certainly is a change of tone from Duncan’s earlier condescending remarks that parents only opposed the Common Core standards after finding out that “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

If NYC parents are so hard to fool, one wonders why can't they have the right to elect a school board as voters do in most of the country? 

Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina have offered their own unconvincing arguments.  The Mayor has said an era of “corruption and chaos” would return if mayoral control is not renewed: 

“Unfortunately a lot of chaos went with that. A lot of corruption went with that. A lot of patronage ... a lot of people went to jail, we’ve got to make sure we never go back to those days.”

Chancellor Farina’s hand-wringing is  even more extreme:

Managers, appointed by the local school boards, inflated the price of contracts to generate lucrative kickbacks that took money directly away from students and siphoned money from taxpayers. One district alone stole $6 million from students, paying 81 employees for jobs they never showed up to. In another, school safety was entrusted to a high-level gang member.

Yet as Patrick Sullivan points out in this blog, mayoral control in NYC has not ensured a lack of corruption.  In fact, several  multi-million dollar fraudulent DOE contracts were paid out while Mayor Bloomberg was in charge, far more costly than anything was stolen during the days of the local school boards.  A huge, potential billion dollar contract was awarded by the DOE in 2015 to a vendor that had engaged in a massive kickback scheme, only to be rejected by City Hall after the media had called attention to it.    Moreover, local school boards lost all power to hire or to award contracts in 1996, years before mayoral control was established, as well as the power to appoint district superintendents. All that authority was given to the Chancellor.  More on that here.  

Arne Duncan famously said in March 2009, “At the end of my tenure, if only seven mayors are in control, I think I will have failed.”"  In fact, no school district in the country adopted this governance system since Duncan made this statement – with Washington DC the last to do so in 2007, according to Wikipedia.

Just this spring, the Illinois Legislature voted to revoke mayoral control in Chicago, Arne’s home town and the first city to adopt the system.  As Chicago residents also found out, mayoral control is no defense against wrong-headed policies, mismanagement or corruption.  In fact, one could argue that autocratic rule makes it even more likely.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first hand-picked CEO of the Chicago public schools, Jean-Claude Brizard, lasted only a 17 months in the job; and the second, Barbara Byrd Bennett, who closed 50 Chicago schools in one year, is now serving an 4 ½  year sentence for kickbacks and self-dealing.

In 2015, Chicago voters overwhelmingly approved an advisory referendum to return to an elected school board, and a bill to do so was introduced in the Legislature.  As one of the co-sponsors, Illinois State Representative Greg Harris explained:

There is only one school district in the State of Illinois that does NOT have an elected school board, and that is the Chicago Public Schools.  Currently all members of the Chicago Board of Education are appointed by Mayor and are not accountable to the parents, students or communities they serve. It is time for a change. That is why I am proud to cosponsor HB 4268 which would change Chicago’s school board from appointees to an elected school board.

We know about the recent pay-to-play scandals rocking CPS. But for our neighborhoods there are so many other reasons that we need to take back control of our schools. We have seen our neighborhood schools losing resources for enrichment programs such as music, art, sports, foreign languages, advanced placement and special education. This year, CPS is proposing over $8.7 million in cuts to schools in our area.

It is also worth noting that at the same time the Board is cutting our schools and asking for a property tax increase, we will be paying $238 million in termination fees to banks and investors to get us out of interest rate swaps and other financial deals that the CPS Board itself instigated.

Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark

Chicago is not alone in its intention to go back to elected school boards.  Detroit just reinstated an elected school board  with the support of its mayor, after many years of "emergency managers" under state and mayoral control.  At least two major cities have successfully resisted adopting mayoral control despite attempts by their Mayors to exert more power: Los Angeles in 2006 and Seattle more recently in 2016. The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, has convinced the New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, to allow their elected school board to resume authority after 21 years of state control.

So why do Duncan and others of his political persuasion keep promoting this inherently undemocratic system?  Bill Gates poured $4 million into the campaign to allow Mayor Bloomberg to keep control in 2009, as the NY Post then reported for the following reasons:

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates — a pal of fellow billionaire Mayor Bloomberg — has secretly bankrolled Learn-NY, the group that joined the campaign led by The Post to extend mayoral control. “You want to allow for experimentation.” The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible.

Another big supporter of mayoral control, Bill Gates

Surely, it is always easier to only convince one person in charge to allow for untested policies to be imposed on our public schools and students, in the name of “experimentation,” without having to deal with school boards whose members may have different views.  Indeed, the top-down methods preferred by Gates and corporate reformers are far easier to implement without any of the limitations that messy democracy might require.

So what is the alternative?  As much as I’d like a citywide elected school board to replace the rubber-stamp Panel for Educational Policy, elected school boards are no panacea.  In Denver and more recently in Los Angeles and Oakland wealthy financiers, corporate executives and the charter lobby have combined to spend millions to elect school board members who complacently fall in line with their plans for privatization.  (Watch this terrific video if you haven’t yet of Kate Burnite, a recent Denver high school graduate, excoriating the school board for being in the pocket of Democrats for Education Reform and other privateers.)

Perhaps the simplest alternative would be for the NYC Council to be given the authority to provide some measure of checks and balance in an amended system of mayoral control known as municipal control.  Unacknowledged in all the heated rhetoric about the need to retain mayoral control in its current form is that the Department of Education is the only city agency where the City Council has no real power to affect change – or to exert any counterbalance against damaging policies.  

Right now, the City Council can only influence education by passing bills to try to influence policy through more reporting and/or through the overall budget.  The members have no ability to pass legislation when it comes to school closings, charter schools, testing or any of the myriad issues that deeply affect NYC students. The provision of municipal, local control would be a good first step—and because of strong campaign finance laws in NYC it would be difficult for privateer billionaires to hijack Council elections as they have done in school board elections elsewhere, and in the case of the GOP- and IDC- controlled NY Senate. 

Yet the members of the City Council would have to speak up more strongly to gain this counter-balancing authority over the DOE and our schools.  And the State Legislature tends to be very proprietary about retaining their prerogatives over NYC schools, and all too willing to use it as a bargaining chip, as occurs each time mayoral control comes up for a vote.   

The worst outcome of all would be for the Mayor and the Democratic leadership in the Assembly to trade mayoral control for more charter schools or tuition tax credits, as the Governor and the Senate GOP and IDC leaders seem intent on trying to extort.  Let’s hope this doesn’t happen – make your calls now to your Legislators, if you haven’t yet done this already; more on how to do this here.

video: Washington state parents demand RESPECT from Arne Duncan

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has denied NCLB waivers to many states and taken away the waivers from others including Washington, Vermont, and now Oklahoma -- on the basis of their refusing to adopt junk science value-added teacher evaluation systems or the unpiloted, rigid  Common Core. According to Michelle McNeil of EdWeek, nine states now lack NCLB waivers.

This means that every school district in these states must send a letter to parents, saying their child's school is failing.

NCLB was probably the dumbest law in the history of the United States because it mandated that every public school student be at grade level in every school by 2014 -- or else states would face penalties.  NCLB waivers that depend on states adopting the particular evidence-free predilections of Arne Duncan and Bill Gates are even dumber.  

Even the usual supporters of corporate reform, like Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, has urged these states  sue the US Department of Education,  as Duncan has "no constitutional right to do is dream up new mandates out of thin air and make flexibility contingent upon their embrace by supplicant states."

Watch below is the message sent by the parents, students and teachers of S. Kitsap school district in Washington state to Arne Duncan.

Journey for Justice and "School choice" week; just whose choices are being respected??

Last week was “School choice” week.  The entire concept of “school choice week” was invented by Jeb Bush  to promote the expansion of charter and vouchers,  supposedly to allow for more parental choice in selecting their children's schools.  Meanwhile, it was just revealed that Bush's organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), promotes the business of for-profit companies, including several that donate to the organization and at least one corporation in which Bush has stock.

The reality is that the corporate reformers pushing “school choice,” including Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee, are not interested in the real-life choices of parents;  but instead in privatization.

When thousands of parents repeatedly turn out across the country to oppose the closing of their neighborhood schools, are their choices listened to?  No, they are ignored, or else the people in charge, like Bloomberg, say that parents are too uneducated to understand the value of a good education.

When parents say that their first priority for their children’s schools is reducing class size, are their choices listened to?  No, instead, the same people who say they believe in parent choice vehemently oppose  lowering class size: Bill Gates insists that class size doesn’t matter, Michelle Rhee pushes for eliminating any caps on class sizes, and Bloomberg say he would double class sizes if he could.

When parents say their children are over-tested and they should be allowed to opt out, do the authorities listen?  No, instead they plan to subject them to even more frequent and longer tests.

Let’s all admit it; “school choice” is a myth,  meant not to give public school parents the choices they want for their children, but instead represent the choices of corporate raiders who want to give our public schools to private interests, like hostile takeover artists who took over companies in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in order to dismantle them and sell them off piece by piece.

Coincidentally during “School Choice” week, on Tuesday, as part of the "Journey for Justice" campaign, parents, students and activists from 18 districts all over the country traveled to DC, testified at the US Department of Education, and demanded a moratorium on the mass school closings that are occurring with the encouragement of the federal government, on the grounds that  their children’s civil rights were being violated.  See videos below by Jaisal Noor of The Real News of Tuesday's events. See also this week’s Village Voice, about the invasion of charter schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn run by Eva Moskowitz and her husband, despite the vehement opposition of parents in that community.

Journey for Justice: Parents and Students from 18 Cities Demand Nationwide Moratorium on Schools Closings and demand US DOE investigate Civil rights violations

Part 2: Chicago Parent and Activist Jitu Brown at "Journey for Justice" Hearings in DC 

Part 3: New Orleans Parent and Activist Karran Harper Royal at "Journey for Justice" Hearing in DC 

Autopsy of the failed teacher evaluation deal

In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement:  the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children.  Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems.  As I commented on the Schoolbook site, this insistence that the plan should be set in stone, with no sunset, shows Bloomberg as an arrogant wannabe Mayor-for-life. 

• On the UFT site, Edwize, Leo Casey posts what appears to be a DOE document, showing that the two year sunset had been accepted by the DOE before the Mayor blew the deal out of the water.  This evidence further contradicts Bloomberg's claim that it was the UFT who tried to slip the sunset provision in at the last minute. His claim is also inconsistent with what Ernie Logan has revealed, that the DOE had already agreed to an even shorter sunset of one year with the principals union, before Bloomberg blew up their evaluation deal as well.

•  Casey also reveals that towards the end, DOE tried to change “numerous scoring tables and conversion charts” that would incorporate the different components of the evaluation plan, including the growth scores based on student test scores, and that the DOE and the UFT then agreed to form a committee that would work on the scoring tables after the agreement was signed.  This suggests that even before the mayor rejected it, the deal was not really complete but could have faced serious conflicts in the future.

• There’s a good piece in the Village Voice with lots of quotes from Bruce Baker of Rutgers, about the fact that the state still owes NYC billions of dollars in funds through the CFE decision, and  that the Governor should not be allowed to cut $250 million, as he has threatened, because of the city's failure to come to an agreement.  If so, he will merely be hurting the children of NYC who deserve these funds no matter whether there is a new teacher evaluation system or not.  The article also contains links to Baker’s analysis, showing that the growth scores that would be included in the plan, required as part of Race to the Top,  are particularly unreliable, and the problem with “[these] policy prescriptions is they're trying to do it in a particularly dumbass way."

• Yoav Gonen reveals in the NY Post that the man who was primarily responsible for these dumbass prescriptions, Arne Duncan, called the Bloomberg and the UFT to urge them to make a deal.

• Meanwhile there is NY State Education Commissioner  King’s statement that the city and the UFT still have a “legal obligation to continue to negotiate,”  I suppose because the State promised this in return for getting RTTT funds, but whether anyone will take this seriously is doubtful.