Idea Public Schools — a controversial charter school system that, despite the name, is absolutely not a public school system —recently announced plans to enroll 100,000 local students and open four new locations in east Tampa by 2021.
This aggressively expanding, nonprofit education chain, which was founded by former Teach For America members and backed by a board of wealthy bankers, currently operates 96 locations mostly in Texas and Louisiana, and has garnered plenty of criticism since its formation in 2000.
Over the past 19 years, the school has faced allegations of questionable student selection processes, high teacher turnover, and dishonest data reporting, specifically on its claim of a “100% college acceptance rate.”
“Graduating from high school isn’t the end game right, it's about all we are doing to prepare them to go to and through college,” said Executive Director Julene Robinson to local news station WFTS, which essentially gave the school a free advertisement this week.
She’s right. Getting into college is a big selling point for IDEA.
But according to the 2019-2020 IDEA student handbook, graduation is possible “only if the student successfully completes the curriculum requirements identified by the State Board of Education (SBOE), has been accepted into a 4-year college or university, has completed a minimum of 125 hours of community service, and has performed satisfactorily on required end of course assessment instruments.”
So, in other words, 100% of the IDEA students that already got into college are going to college. Great.
This ridiculous claim was first laid bare in a 2011 report from the Texas American Federation of Teachers, which found that IDEA’s college acceptance rate was actually closer to 65% when you include students that started in the 9th grade.
The study also found that the school claims to help “underserved” students, though IDEA doesn’t exactly clarify what this means, and has been accused of “cherry-picking” higher performing students from nearby districts. The school’s own handbook even says that it reserves the right to deny “students with a documented history of a criminal offense, a juvenile court adjudication, or other discipline problems,” which, of course, is a luxury public schools cannot afford.
“IDEA schools enroll lower percentages of economically disadvantaged students, special education students, bilingual education students, students requiring modifications or accommodations on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), and students scoring below average on the TAKS mathematics or TAKS readings tests,” said the report.
“IDEA systematically enrolls students who are more advantaged than students remaining in the local public schools,” the study continued, “This directly CONTRADICTS the claim by IDEA that they educate ‘underserved’ students.”
Administrators with IDEA have obviously denied these allegations in previous reporting, and did not respond to questions from Creative Loafing Tampa.
But there are also plenty of other major issues with IDEA, like the fact that the school has been accused of basically being a full-blown test factory. The Washington Post actually included seven of IDEA's schools in a 2016 ranking of “America's Most Challenging High Schools,” which is an achievement the school often boasts about.
This high ranking has a lot to do with the school’s intense focus on testing. According to a report from the Statewide Organization for Community Empowerment, students at a location in Rio Grande Valley actually wore uniforms which were colored-coded based on their test scores, “not on the basis of grade or age, but on standardized test-score achievement.”
All of this should be concerning when you consider that the Tampa Bay area is expected to be gouged to the tune of $125,455,531 over the next five years thanks to Florida’s recently signed private voucher bill, SB 7070, which allows a very small percentage of Florida students (18,000 kids) to attend private schools using $130 million in public tax dollars. New charter schools, like IDEA, won't help this issue.
For some perspective, in 2014 IDEA opened a new $13 million dollar campus in Austin, Texas, a move that shifted an estimated 80% of the students away from a nearby public school, costing the district “about $60 million over the next seven years.”
On top of this, the school’s co-founder and CEO, Tom Torkelson, reported to the IRS a salary of $373,307 just two years later, making him one of the highest paid school administrators in the country.
IDEA hasn’t said exactly where their four new schools will be located, but it truly has never been a more convenient time for one of the country’s shadiest charter schools to pop-up in Tampa Bay.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that IDEA would directly benefit from SB 7070.
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