Mavericks in Education Florida LLC

“Mavericks High Schools Hope to Profit From Education – But at What Cost?” Broward-Palm Beach New Times (FL), 12/29/2011    

...This is Frank Biden, the brother of Vice President Joe Biden. He's here, at a ribbon-cutting event August 31, to promote the first Palm Beach County location of a local for-profit chain of charter schools called Mavericks in Education Florida...

But so far, Mavericks' lofty goals haven't materialized. Most of their schools graduate less than 15 percent of eligible students. On state report cards, the schools get "incompletes" because so few of their students are taking the FCAT. In Miami, two former teachers filed whistle-blower lawsuits alleging the Homestead school is inflating attendance records and failing to report grades properly.

Plus, there are rampant financial questions, cozy ties between Mavericks and local politicians, and a legal fight with former celebrity spokesman Dwyane Wade...

Mavericks' story begins in Akron, Ohio, with a wealthy industrialist who loved to wear big cowboy hats and donate millions of dollars to Republican politicians. In 1998, David Brennan launched White Hat Management. His charter schools were housed in strip malls, and the students herded in to sit at computers for three shifts a day. This was an education model Mavericks would later call the "next generation in education." But state auditors weren't so fond of the company...

One of White Hat's early leaders was Mark Thimmig. As CEO from 2001 to 2005, he helped grow the company into one of the largest charter school chains in the country. As of 2010, White Hat had 51 charter schools in six states, including ten charter schools in Florida called Life Skills Centers.

Two years after leaving White Hat, Thimmig alleges in court documents, he was approached by Palm Beach Gardens developer Mark Rodberg about launching a chain of charter schools here. Rodberg had built a few schools for White Hat, but had never run one before. He owned restaurants, including Bucky's Bar-B-Que in Boca Raton and Bucky's Grill in Fort Lauderdale. Together, Thimmig and Rodberg came up with a plan that was nearly identical to White Hat's: Students would attend school but take all their courses online, using virtual technology that required minimal maintenance. Classrooms could hold rows of cubicles with computers where kids would sit elbow-to-elbow. There would be no after-school sports teams, just "cyber-athletics" that allowed kids to play Wii instead of shooting hoops...

Each school is overseen by a local, nonprofit board. Mavericks in Education Florida LLC then charges the nonprofit hundreds of thousands of dollars in management fees to run daily operations. Mavericks also handles the real estate, charging the schools $350,000 a year in rent...

Hollander says the charters planned to use the basketball star [Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade] as a celebrity spokesman, encouraging kids to enroll in Mavericks and graduate. "Kids related to him. Parents related to him. Even grandparents related to him! He was the biggest celebrity ever to be connected with the national high school dropout crisis," Thimmig told New Times in 2009...

But pairing schools with a restaurant chain and a basketball star turned out to be a lethal mix. Wade would later allege in court documents that the partners were scheming to cut him out of profits. When they asked him to invest $1 million in the Aventura location of the restaurant, he refused...

In December 2009, Thimmig resigned as CEO. Then he sued Mavericks for back salary and money he said he lent the company — a total of at least $300,000. He also aired the company's dirty laundry in public court documents. Just two years after its founding, the hope factory was floundering...

... Only Michigan has more charter schools run by for-profit companies than Florida, according to a 2010 study published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. Last year, there were 145 schools in Florida run by companies such as Mavericks.

Plenty of government grants help charters grow. Reports submitted to the state by Mavericks show their schools each receive about $250,000 a year in federal grants...

Often these schools struggle academically or financially, yet their management companies are allowed to keep opening new campuses...

Biden says, "We just graduated almost 200 people in one location."

But figures from the Florida Department of Education paint a vastly different picture, showing that Mavericks schools have a worse graduation rate than traditional public schools in Florida...

On Florida's state report cards, Mavericks schools in Miami-Dade, Pinellas, and Osceola counties have all scored "incomplete" because not enough students have taken the FCAT. Hollander says she expects the FCAT grade to change as more students enroll...

Meanwhile, recent lawsuits filed against Mavericks raise questions about whether any of the schools' statistics can be trusted...

Mavericks' paper trail is also troubling. Accountability reports, submitted by Mavericks to the state, contain bizarre financial figures...

Money has long been a problem for Mavericks. At the Fort Lauderdale Mavericks in June, independent auditors found the school met state criteria for a "financial emergency," with a net deficit of at least $520,000. At the same time, an audit showed that the North Miami Beach Mavericks was $400,000 in debt and had borrowed from the Mavericks management company to stay afloat. The state department of education also required the Mavericks school in Pinellas to create a financial corrective action plan...

...In 2010, Mavericks in Homestead paid the management company $418,000, or 17 percent of its state funds...

But most of the time, Mavericks isn't buying buildings. It's striking deals with private landlords, then charging individual schools rent of $350,000 per year for five years, regardless of the price of the building. That's the case in Homestead, North Miami, Kissimmee, and Pinellas. In Homestead, the school building's current market value is $1.2 million, but the school is on the hook for $1.75 million in rent over five years.

That sum, combined with its management fee, means the Homestead school paid 28 percent of its revenue to Mavericks in Education in 2010...

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“Joe Biden’s Brother Helping God Privatize Public Schools.” By Doug Martin, Firedoglake, 11/29/2011   

When Lisa Rab outed Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, as a major force behind a for-profit education management organization (EMO) dead set on building 100 new charter schools across Florida,* it came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to the corporate school reform movement, the Obama/Biden/Duncan regime, or Florida.

What was surprising was that Francis W. Biden told Rab that he and Mavericks in Education Florida, LLC  were on “a mission from God.”...

Not testing students to earn state ratings is nothing new to Mark Thimmig, one of the original founders of Mavericks in 2007. In 2005, after the former AutoNation official joined the notorious for-profit charter school operator White Hat Ventures, Thimmig took heat from the Ohio Department of Education for not adequately reporting student test scores in four of its Life Skills high schools. Also, the Akron Beacon Journal discovered that when Ohio switched testing from the 9th to the 10th grade, White Hat enrolled almost half of its Life Skills schools’ student body into the 9th grade in order to avoid testing these students...

READ THIS ARTICLE, TOO!