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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Tom Vander Ark’s New York-Area Charter Schools Falter - NYTimes.com

Tom Vander Ark’s New York-Area Charter Schools Falter - NYTimes.com

Tom Vander Ark’s New York-Area Charter Schools Falter

A former top official with the Gates Foundation found that opening innovative schools in the New York area was harder than he had anticipated

After years spent directing the distribution of more than $1 billion from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into hundreds of schools across the nation, Tom Vander Ark set his sights on the New York area, with a plan to create a network of charter schools of his own.

Kim Kulish for The New York Times

Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director of education for the Gates Foundation, says a weak economy hurt efforts by City Prep Academies to start schools in New York and New Jersey.

Mr. Vander Ark, the foundation’s former executive director of education and a national leader in the online learning movement, was granted charters in 2010 to open a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two others in Newark. The New York school, Brooklyn City Prep, also got space in a public school building — a precious and controversial commodity — hired a principal, and welcomed applications from 150 eighth graders this spring.

But after spending more than $1.5 million of investors’ money on consultants and lawyers, Mr. Vander Ark, 52, has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.

“If we had plotted a worst-case scenario, no one could have