What Happens When You Run Government Like A Business Or A Cautionary Bruce Rauner Tale
By Kevin Robinson in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 5, 2014 10:40PM
GOP candidate for governor Bruce Rauner has made much of his business experience. As "a self-made businessman" who "makes no apologies for his success," Rauner has pledged to run the Illinois government “like a business.” And while Rauner has been traveling the state on his Hammer and Shake tour, one Chicago charter school operator has a cautionary tale of what happens when a business man like Rauner steps in to help.
Sarah Howard, one of the founders and former director of the Academy of Communications and Technology, a charter school on the city's West side, says that Rauner offered to help her struggling school, but then fired everyone, dumped the students and then turned control over to a national chain operator of charter schools. Howard and a business partner started their school in 1997, operating out of a defunct Catholic elementary school. Faced with a leaky roof that forced Howard to move her school inside of an existing CPS elementary school, and test scores that lagged behind much of the rest of CPS, Howard was desperately looking for someone to come forward and help finance needed repairs and help turn her school around. Enter Bruce Rauner.
“Bruce was coming to us, saying he was going to help us strengthen and improve our campus,” Howard told the Sun-Times. “And instead what happened is he approached it like it was a turnaround that needed to be wiped out, sort of like a venture capital deal — come in, put in new leadership and change everything around. We were a little bit at his mercy,” she says. “He indicated to us one thing, and then, two months later, he said, ‘Before I write a check, I’m going to want my own person.’ ”
For his part, Rauner says that “it probably didn’t end up the way that she (Howard) would like or, frankly, the way that I would like.” According to Howard, shortly after he took over as chairman of the ACT board in 2008, Rauner started talking about shutting down ACT. He eventually won permission from the Board of Education to suspend the school for two years. Rauner's board re-opened the school in 2012, not as a high school with hundreds of students that it was originally chartered to be, but as an elementary school with 80 fifth graders. Rauner then handed management of the school over to KIPP Charter Schools, which has 141 charter schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Rauner since has merged ACT with KIPP, which already has four charter schools in Chicago. Each KIPP school pays a management fee of about $30,000 a year to the KIPP foundation. As for Howard, she now works for the University of Chicago’s Network for College Success.