Tuesday, March 27, 2012

My Gulen Movement charter school piece in WaPo

Today the Washington Post published my piece about the Gulen Movement’s US charter schools. It was a guest post for The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss’s excellent daily online column on education topics.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Much greater than expected: 2010-2011 Gulen charter school enrollment was 44,727

In August 2010, USA Today’s Greg Toppo wrote that Gulen movement-associated charter schools “educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they'd make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.”

At long last, the actual enrollment for the 2010-2011 school year has been tallied. The total is 44,727, nearly 10,000 students greater than the figure suggested by USA Today.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Gulen charter school timeline

(Updated 3/12/2012)
Additional schools are added as they appear @ http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/p/list-of-us-gulen-schools.html

The largest charter school chain in the U.S. is run by the members of the Gulen movement, a controversial, secretive, religious, and highly nationalistic group out of Turkey that is operating in a manner with no exact precedent. The "movement" simultaneously promotes Islam, Turkey, and GM-affiliated Turkish businesses as it pursues a strategic, power-accumulating geopolitical agenda. To accomplish its goals, the movement conducts a range of activities associated with its schools, interfaith dialog and Turkish culture-promoting organizations, media outlets, and business organizations. Members of the Gulen movement make up only a small portion of the Turkish people, but the group is very powerful