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The Louisiana Connection And Wednesday’s FBI Raid One recurring theme in all Gulenist schools is their use of the H1-B visa program to import male teachers from Turkey to teach at the schools. This activity has gotten the movement accused of discrimination, and worse. In many cases American teachers have lost out on jobs, only to find out that the Turkish aliens brought in to teach in their place could barely speak English. Further, allegations have been made that what’s really going on with all the H1-B visa recipients brought in as teachers in Gulen schools is an intricate fleecing of taxpayers, which works like this: the going rate for charter school teachers in a given community might be, for example, $40,000 – and the state funding for a charter school would reflect salaries of that size. But in Turkey, a $40,000 salary would be considered a king’s ransom – per capita income in that country was just $15,200 last year. Therefore, the Gulen schools won’t encounter much resistance when it tells teachers it offers to import from Turkey that they’ll have to kick back a huge portion of their taxpayer-funded income to the Gulen movement – and thus that’s exactly, it’s alleged, what happens.
This caught the attention of State Representative Cameron Henry in the 2013 legislative session when he filed a bill that would have limited the number of employees hired by Louisiana state-funded charter schools who were in the country on H1-B visas. Henry’s legislation would have gotten right to the heart of the matter – with a very reasonable restriction that no more than 3.5 percent of the school’s employees be H1-B visa recipients (or 1 in 29), and that the people or groups submitting requests to start charter schools be American citizens. Unfortunately, Henry’s bill hit hard where it hurt for some powerful, politically connected people in Louisiana. It seems that the number one donor to the Louisiana Republican Party in 2012 was none other than a Gulenist organization out of Texas. Kemal Oksuz, president of the Turquoise Council, a Texas-based group closely related to the Gulenist movement and the Harmony charter schools in that state, donated $83,000 to the state GOP, making him its largest donor during 2012. I am not making an accusation that this donation bought the Gulen movement any special treatment by the state GOP, or the Jindal administration. In fact, members of that administration told supporters of the Henry bill that they were in favor of it. But the charter school industry itself, which has stood by silently as this foreign influence in US education spawns scandal after scandal, didn’t share that position.
In Louisiana the industry went even further, defending Kenilworth and Pelican despite the prior scandal involving Abramson. This took the form of hiring high-priced, politically-connected lobbyists to label Henry’s bill “racist” and “xenophobic.” And the bill was killed in the House Education Committee after a host of parents with children in charter schools testified against it. This followed an interesting bit of romance the Gulen movement attempted within the state legislature the Hayride was able to expose. It’s worth mentioning that the Executive Director of the Louisiana Charter Schools Association is Caroline Roemer Shirley, the daughter of the former governor. Shirley’s brother is Chas Roemer – the president of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Earlier this year, BESE granted a five-year extension of Kenilworth’s charter – a decision which, in light of the FBI’s visit to the school on Wednesday, doesn’t look like the wisest BESE could have made.
The question is, does the charter school industry know about all of these disturbing details surrounding the Gulenist movement and its charter schools and choose to look the other way, or are they simply ignorant as to the facts? With the FBI raid a new chapter in this saga has opened in Louisiana – and the charter school industry and lobbyists won’t be able to run interference for the Islamists any more. For many of us who are in favor of school choice and charter schools, the Kenilworth-Gulen debacle is a disaster on two levels: first, granting charters and dispensing taxpayer dollars to an Islamist movement with such a shady history is outrageous and dangerous in its own right. And second, there will be real damage from this scandal – damage those who are comfortable trapping disadvantaged children in lousy public schools will use to their advantage. - See more at: http://thehayride.com/2013/12/holton-maybe-now-theyll-pay-attention-to-the-gulen-schools/#sthash.J1olEoNy.dpuf
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