If there's a better bigger-you-are-harder-you-fall story of late (not counting Atlanta, of course), I don't know if it will top the account in the New York Times, at least for intrigue, of one-time Gates Foundation education director Tom Vander Ark folding up his charter school tent; suddenly, and rather dramatically, as the Times' Anna Phillips reports it.? Vander Ark had been granted charters to open two schools in Newark and one in Brooklyn, but, says Phillips,
...after spending more than $1.5 million of investors' money on consultants and lawyers,? [he] has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.
It is hard to tell what this means for Vander Ark, who was plucked from the obscurity of running a small school district in Washington state in 1999 to be the Gates Foundation's billion-dollar point man on education. ?According to a 2006 Education Next profile by Paul Hill, it was Vander Ark who devised the small high schools strategy that Gates pursued, handing out tens of millions of dollars to school districts all over the country ? including Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, New York ? to break up large high schools.? Vander Ark would eventually move the foundation to fund entrepreneurial endeavors, including charter and choice initiatives.
Vander Ark left Gates at the end of 2006,? a nationally-known figure in education, and started City Prep Academies in 2008. It was a for-profit CMO that, according to Phillips, ?was financed by $1.5 million from Revolution Learning, a venture fund where he is a managing partner.?
This was the group that got the three charters, hired principals, found buildings, and was beginning to interview prospective teachers when Vander Ark pulled the plug.? There is some disagreement, according to the Times report, about how well-informed Vander Ark kept his board and whether it was a weak economy or weak leadership that caused the failure.? For the moment, it's a lot of bad blood and recrimination.
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
