A trip down memory lane with Oakland’s “American Indian” charter schools & Ben Chavis

Last evening Oakland Tribune education reporter Katy Murphy sent out this tweet: Oakland school board just voted 6-1 to issue "notice of intent to revoke" to three American Indian charters. Final decision in March.

It seemed apropos to take a look back at some memorable news stories about these schools.

11/14/2001

“Beating a New Kind of Drum.” East Bay Express (CA) Martin Waukazoo helped establish Oakland's American Indian Public Charter School, which was created in 1996 with the mission of improving the dismal performance of Native Americans in the Oakland schools... By early 2000, things had gotten so out of hand that the school board seriously was considering shutting the institution down... new leadership took the form of Dr. Ben Chavis... NOTE: After Chavis arrived, the “American Indian or Alaska Native” (AI/AN) students at AIPCS were systematically eliminated in order to make way for some of the highest performing and most compliant students in the district. The enrollment of AI/AN students at the AIM Schools was 45 in 2001-02 (Chavis’ first year), then 42, 29, 27, 26, 17, 15, 18, 10, 6, and 6 by the time 2011-12 arrived. During that same time period, the three AIPCS American Indian Model Schools’ enrollment climbed from 106 to 698. In 2011-12, OUSD enrolled 109 AI/AN students in Grades 6-12. See this page for the trends.

12/16/2005

"HARD LINE, TOP SCHOOL.” San Francisco Chronicle (CA) ... With parental permission, Chavis cut the hair of a student accused of stealing. A boy who admitted to calling his classmate a derogatory name was pinned with a note that read "I'm an (expletive)" in front of other students... "My child was traumatized," [Monica Peoples-Brown] said. "It hurt me to sign him out. My child was really learning. But I can't deal with an administration that is a dictatorship." Some take issue with what they call Chavis' inappropriate use of racial stereotypes, cursing and name-calling to embarrass students at the school. Floundering students become the public targets of labels like "stupid" and "lazy Mexican."... NOTE: A huge number of these students and/or parents have either been forced out or have become highly dissatisfied and end up leaving. AIPCS’s Grade 6 to Grade 8 student retention for the past two years averaged 66%. For AIPCS II it was only 57%. AIPHS’s Grade 9 to Grade 12 student retention for the past two years was only 56%.

American Indian Model Schools enrollment trends: student retention and demographics

STUDENT RETENTION

American Indian Public Charter School School Code #6113807 3637 Magee Ave., Oakland, CA
	Total Enroll	5th	6th	7th	8th	9th	10th	11th	6th>8th	Student retention
2011-12	255	4	121	80	50				71>50	70.4%
2010-11	179	0	82	57	40				66>40	60.6%
2009-10	193	1	71	52	69				77>69	89.6%
2008-09	182	0	66	72	44				62>44	71.0%
2007-08	190	5	77	59	49
2006-07	174	11	62	54	47
2005-06	196		55	55	55	31
2004-05	150		59	59	32
2003-04	132		56	29	26	21
2002-03	162		27	31	28	76
2001-02	106		28	28	50
2000-01	34		11	13	10
1999-00	18		12	0	4			2
1998-99	65		21	6	16	14	8
1997-98	68		15	19	15	19
1996-97	42		12	13	17

The Gulen Movement in Azerbaijan & a quid pro quo?

It requires an ongoing effort to even minimally understand the Gulen movement, the secretive and controversial religious group which operates the largest charter school network in the United States. Details about this group's structure, recruitment and control of members, were recently presented by Fuad Aliyev in “The Gulen Movement in Azerbaijan” (12/27/2012). His article appeared in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a publication of the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. Aliyev is a Fulbright Scholar at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus, a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia [see maps below]. It has enormous energy reserves, including one of the largest natural gas fields in the world, the Shah Deniz II. Only discovered in 1999, this field will be the origin point for the Nabucco gas pipeline, a project being planned that will bring the first gas ever from the Caspian Sea basin to Europe, via Turkey. Construction has not yet commenced, but if built, the Nabucco pipeline will be one of the largest engineering projects in the world. Some estimates say it will be operational by 2017. The Nabucco will join the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to a Turkish port on the Mediterranean, a project that was first proposed in 1992 and completed in 2005.

The Gulen movement opened its first school in Azerbaijan in 1992. This was first school it opened outside of Turkey (see this article about its 20th anniversary from a Gulenist news source). The movement had expanded into Azerbaijan immediately after independence was attained in 1991 as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As Aliyev wrote, “Since the arrival of the [Gulen movement] in Azerbaijan, it has made a targeted effort to recruit the children of the country’s elite into their education institutions.” It has been reported that the offspring of many influential Azerbaijani officials are attending these schools.

Given the timing and other indicators, something to ponder is if interests in these newish energy sources in which Turkey is an integral player might have some bearing on our government’s unique relationship with Fethullah Gulen and his increasingly powerful group of intensely business-oriented followers. Is this somehow tied to the generous funding continually being provided to the Gulen movement for its charter school expansion? Is it tied to the strange silence from US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other members of our government about the fact that a secretive and controversial religious group from a foreign country is operating so many charter schools (none in 1998, two in 1999, and now 135)? Is our government enabling the Gulen charter school expansion as some sort of quid pro quo? There is an enormous amount of information which should be presented to the American public so that this large subject can be opened up for a much wider level of discussion.