Who Is Watching? Turkish Cleric, Accused of Motivating Military Coup, Controls Large Network of Charter Schools in the U.S.

By Gene Bruskin / AlterNet August 30, 2016

The calls were coming from around the country. A call from Springfield, Mass. was followed by a call from New Orleans, followed by a call from Columbus and also a call from Chicago. The callers were contacting my office at the American Federation of Teachers asking about charter schools in their area operated by Turkish men. We didn’t have any good answers.

By now, the scale and ambition of Fethullah Gulen and his followers are in the news daily with the fallout of the apparent coup attempt in Turkey this summer. I'd be lying if I said I knew how to interpret the events in Turkey. However, I am not the least surprised by the direct assertions by Republic of Turkey officials that Gulen—a nearly 80-year-old mullah living in the Poconos since 1997—is behind a large network of charter schools here in the United States. This fact has taken far too long to pierce the headlines, but it has now become a standard paragraph in both international and domestic coverage of the confusing events in Turkey.

In 2009, we were stunned by what we were finding as we ran down charter applications and tax forms for these widely dispersed but seemingly related schools. Teachers at the schools were contacting the union to determine how to proceed with asserting their rights in the face of management practices. (This is part of the challenge charter schools overall pose in public education, as these schools may receive nearly all their revenue from public sources, but their practices more resemble private entities than public schools. The teachers at one of those charter schools, the Chicago Math and Science Academy, ultimately became the subject of a landmark National Labor Relations Board case that found the CMSA was in fact a private employer and not covered by Illinois public sector labor law.)

As we pieced together the origin stories of more than 100 charter schools across the country, we found what can only be described as a public conspiracy. Dozens of Turkish men were forming charter school boards and applying to open schools for approval by city officials or school district administrators or state education department bureaucrats. These charter schools were allied with education management organizations—the private foundations or companies hired to run the daily operations of the schools—that were also run exclusively by Turkish men. The charter applications stated that these schools in part would be staffed by teachers or administrators brought to the United States from Turkey under the H1-B visa program for "specialty occupations." (The cumulative numbers of staff with H1-B visas nationally are difficult to know precisely; in 2014, the Cincinnati Enquirer identified 67 H1-B visa holders out of a total teacher workforce of 541—comprising 12 percent of staff at 17 Concept Schools in Ohio.)

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http://www.alternet.org/education/what-happens-gulen-charter-turkish-schools