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Bush spurred charter schools to flourish in the state, including those operated by for-profit companies, which found a way to circumvent a 1996 law that forbids the practice. To get around the law, companies set up nonprofit boards to run the schools, which then contract out virtually all of the work to for-profit operators. Bush has been a supporter of for-profit operators. In emails, he suggested that his successor, Rick Scott, sell the massive state-run Florida Virtual School to a for-profit operator, where it could make “more [money]in the private sector.”
And he is embracing for-profit charters in his presidential campaign—even when the profits are on the sketchy side. In recent campaign videos, Molly Hensley-Clancy reports, Bush is shown in classrooms full of students wearing the uniforms of charter schools operated by the state's largest for-profit charter school management company, Academica.
A Miami Herald investigation in 2011 found Academica was embroiled in a complex and controversial real estate scheme. Its founder and president, Fernando Zulueta, owns a wide swath of real estate companies — firms that also lease tax-exempt space to many of Academica’s schools, acting as their landlords. Academica schools pay tens of thousands of dollars in rent, sometimes over 20% of their revenue, well above the area average, to Zulueta-connected real estate holdings, the Herald found, deals that are meted out by nonprofit governing boards with close ties to Academica.Academica also set up an unaccredited junior college using money that was supposed to go to K-12 education. The chief executive officer of that "college" is a state senator and former Jeb! Bush education adviser. This isn't just the kind of company Bush keeps. It's company he brags about keeping. It's a major part of his presidential campaign. Shady self-dealing leases and construction contracts are Bush's vision for American education, and he's not even bothering to hide it.In 2003, for example, Mater Academy, whose logos dot the polo shirts of students in Bush’s campaign ad, signed a $5.8 million construction contract to a company whose contractor also served on the school’s board. And Mater Academy High leased its land from a company owned in part by Zulueta’s brother, the Herald reported. [...]
Mater Academy was the focus of a federal investigation last year, the Herald reported. Academica’s founder and his family, a preliminary report found, had ties that constituted “a potential conflict of interest” to the companies that Mater Academy leased its space from, and to an architect that designed their buildings.