Tom Nida, DC Bankster and Charter School Board Chair

The open sewer of charter school corruption will be a major challenge for Mayor Vincent Gray's new administration in DC.  Having been run for years now as a source for loan portfolio building by the bank where the DC Charter Board President, Tom Nida, is employed, Gray must decide where to draw the line between public funding of zero tolerance charter schools and the private profits by banksters and charter school CEOs. 

In 2009, alone, the collective net profit by DC charters was $29,000,000.  In the meantime, DC children go to these total compliance corporate madrassahs without the benefit of school libraries, clinics, gyms, or even cafeterias.

Bill Turque has the latest installment on the continuing scam, and here is a clip that captures the moral repugnance by those who prefer to keep public schools under the oversight and governance of the public:

. . . . The debate over equity in the funding of public and public charter schools continues to simmer and is likely to get more attention in a Gray administration. Nida's banker's-eye view of the charter sector did not sit well with some school advocates, who said private financing and public schools are a toxic brew. Mark Simon, a DCPS parent, an education policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, said he found Nida's speech "abhorrent."

"This is the same Tom Nida, the banker who headed up the D.C. charter board while retaining his position as a bank vice president overseeing a profitable increase in his bank's mortgage portfolio due to mortgages extended to charter schools he was helping to oversee," Simon said. "The two concepts of private profit and public education should not be intertwined as Mr. Nida is wont to do. ... He represents what is wrong with mixing private profit and the management of public education." . . . .