In 2003, Vladimir Putin ordered the arrest of Russia’s wealthiest citizen Mikhail Khodorkovsky. During the preceding decade, the oligarch had challenged Putin’s increasingly centralized authority. Those challenges included funding opposition political parties.
The charges against Khodorkovsky included fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. There is strong evidence that these charges were synthetic. After his conviction, Khodorkovsky’s companies were sold off to state agencies. With one trial Putin got rid of an opposition figure and gained control of valuable assets. (In the United States, when a company official is found guilty of a crime, the company itself is not nationalized. For example, Richard Smith, CEO of Mediacom Communications, was found guilty of embezzlement, but the company itself continues to run as a successful private entity.)
This chapter in Russian history is a backdrop for yet another vindictive attempt by MCPS to shut down the county’s only charter school.
As reported in Bethesda Today, MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor is recommending that the Mecca Business Learning Institute be shut down due to “violation of special education laws, failure to implement required corrective actions and the release of private student information to the media.”
Let’s say that these charges are true and unbiased. In that case, the obvious remediation is that those MBLI personnel involved be put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation—not shut down the entire school. MCPS has put its own employees on paid administrative leave for offenses far worse. Nobody shut down Paint Branch High School after its principal Joel Beadleman was outed for sexual harassment.
Furthermore, again assuming Taylor’s charges are true, the injured parties are the students. Neither Taylor nor MCPS are stakeholders in MBLI’s operations, so they have no standing regarding the school’s closure based on a violation that has nothing to do with them.
Regardless, the real story is MCPS’s continuous efforts to trash MoCo’s only charter school. In a petition filed with the Maryland Board of Education, MBLI listed pages upon pages of vindictive harassment by MCPS, including funding delays, fake facilities violations, enrollment interference, and enforcement overreach. MCPS (administrators and the entire Board of Education) do whatever they can to squash any opposition, and that includes a small charter school serving 200 Black and Brown elementary school students. If Taylor’s findings and recommendation were the only act against MBLI, then there is room for concern. However, MCPS and the teachers’ union has accrued more than 10 years of obstructing charter schools, so Taylor’s recommendation is nothing more than another effort to shut MBLI down.
Let’s hope Taylor rescinds his recommendation; if he doesn’t, let’s hope the Board of Education will reject his recommendation. Given the BoE’s history and its current progressive members, I fear those Black and Brown students attending MBLI will be forced back into schools and curricula that they have been trying to escape.
