brendan halpin

There’s quite the scandal in Boston education circles, as the CEO of The Croft School, which has 2 locations in Boston and one in Providence, was revealed to be keeping two sets of books and also gave his landlord a forged letter of credit. The school is millions of dollars in debt that nobody else knew about and may not have enough money to finish the school year. Oops!

Though The Croft School is a private school, I smelled “education reform” when the story came out, so I did a little research. Sure enough, Croft School founder/alleged fraudster Scott Given has deep roots in the “ed reform” community.

After getting his MBA at Harvard, where he apparently fell under the sway of then-Gates Foundation anti-public-ed person Stacey Childress, Given worked at The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, with future “Democrats for Education Reform” guy Liam Kerr. He then was a Broad Academy fellow (this is an anti public ed program run out of Yale). He was then a teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School, the principal of Excel Academy Charter School, and finally the founder of UP Education Network, a school management company that takes over district schools and tries to “turn them around,” usually by gutting labor protections for faculty and instituting draconian discipline procedures for students. Given “stepped down” from the organization he founded in 2016, shortly after their absolutely wild suspension numbers became public. (All this info comes from here.)

So why did I smell ed reform on the Croft School scandal? Because one thing ed reformers and the ed reform movement in general hates is transparency. In Massachusetts, Charter Schools are governed by self-appointing boards, the overwhelming majority of which have no parent representation. The only way charters are accountable to the people and communities they serve is through the charter renewal process, when the Department of Education rubber stamps a renewal every ten years. When I worked at a charter school, the board hired a new head of school who decided that this 200-student school needed 10 administrators. (Hey, he had cronies to hire!) Because there wasn’t any parent or student representation on the board, there was no pushback about this wildly irresponsible spending.

Anyway, so having one guy in charge of the money who was accountable to no one felt very ed-reformy to me, as indeed it was. And then I found out something even shadier. The Croft School, unlike the vast majority of private educational institutions in the USA, is a for-profit company. As a private company, it’s accountable to no one and is not required to be transparent about anything to anybody, except in its tax returns to the IRS, which are not publicly available. So salaries, expenses, all this stuff is a black box inside of Scott Givens’ head. Or possibly in the correct set of books he kept while showing the cooked books to the board.

Oh. About that board. Because Oxford Street Education, which operates the Croft School, is a private for-profit company, it’s not actually required to have a board. I noted that the note sent home to parents was signed by the “Board of Managers,” which sounds official but is not a legal title in Massachusetts. While said “Board of Managers” says they have fired Scott Given, they don’t have the authority to fire Scott Given and, indeed, his name is still listed as the principal (in a corporate sense, not an educational sense) on the LLC paperwork.

I do feel bad for the parents and students and faculty of The Croft School. Given insists that all of the secret debt the company is stuck with was plowed into school operations and he did not personally benefit from it. (surejan.gif) Color me skeptical because if you weren’t planning to profit, why’d you incorporate as a for profit corporation? Riddle me that!

Maybe he didn’t have any shady intentions in incorporating this way other than the arrogance and contempt for parents and students that is endemic to the ed reform movement. Why should you idiots have a say in your child’s school? I went to Harvard! Yeah, Given never said this, but also he didn’t have to. And trust me as someone who worked at a charter school, this is the sentiment behind the entire movement.

I don’t know what to conclude here other than the fact that the entire ed reform movement is shady as hell (it’s also rife with astroturf “organizations” consisting of a couple of people who pretend not to be funded by ed reform billionaires). And, if you’re enrolling your child in private school, ask about the financials. If you asked anyone in Croft School admissions if you could see their form 990 (the public financial document required of all nonprofit organizations), they’d have to tell you there isn’t one. Nor is there an annual report with any numbers because this isn’t a public company. And then you might ask them why that is. I wonder how they’d answer?