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 constructed the current situation,” said Mr. Vander Ark, saying the weak economy and the difficulty of establishing charters in New York and New Jersey “led to less success than we had hoped for.”
In an e-mail to the board members he had recruited, Mr. Vander Ark added, “I have a lot more sympathy for nonprofit leaders now that I’m on this side of the table.”
Those he has been working with had a harsher assessment.
“He’s flying 30,000 feet on the air, but can’t do it on the ground,” said Joshua Morales, a former official with the New York City Education Department who was hired by Mr. Vander Ark to develop the schools.
James Wiley, an educational technology consultant who has been serving as chairman of Brooklyn City Prep’s board of directors, said: “I’m from the Bronx, so you can imagine what language I used when I found out he was having these problems and we didn’t know anything about it. We just assumed that he was ticking along and things were going O.K.”
Mr. Vander Ark said he had kept his colleagues informed.
“So it’s ridiculous for them to claim that they were unaware,” he said. “They created these ideas. They helped pitch these ideas.”
While many new charter schools are asked to take a year for planning, it is relatively rare to require two, and unusual for a founder — in this case, a well-known figure in education reform — to walk away.
A former businessman and superintendent of a Washington State school district, Mr. Vander Ark doled out more than $1.6 billion in Gates Foundation money from 1999 to 2006, much of it to create and support small high schools. In 2008, he founded City Prep Academies, a for-profit organization intended to create and operate charter schools that combined traditional classroom teaching and online learning. He said the group was financed by $1.5 million from Revolution Learning, a venture fund where he is a managing partner.
But City Prep Academies immediately ran into problems. Its first application for a New York charter, made in summer 2009 as a close copy of the NYC iSchool that opened in SoHo the year before, received a tepid response from the city’s Education Department. Like the iSchool, Brooklyn City Prep promised to blend traditional classroom teaching with online learning, but many who read the application found it lacking in details.
“There was definitely the sense that they were not immediately ready to open the school,” said Michael Duffy, who was the director of the city’s charter school office at the time.
Dirk Tillotson, a charter-school consultant who read the application, agreed. “It didn’t seem like there was enough of a ‘there’ there,” he said, adding, “You didn’t know what the school was going to look like.”
The city and state approved the charter the next year, on the condition that Brooklyn Prep take an extra year to ready itself, with the opening scheduled for September 2011. At the same time, the first of the Newark schools, Vailsburg Prep, had its opening postponed to 2011 from the requested 2010, and the second, Spirit Prep, applied in 2010 for a 2011 opening but was also delayed a year.
After the initial $1.5 million investment from his own venture fund, Mr. Vander Ark found himself unable to raise the money — up to $500,000 per school — that he said he needed to open them. He switched strategies and asked the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit investment fund based in Colorado, to help him start a charter management organization, City Prep Academies Northeast. He also changed the name of his for-profit organization to Open Education Solutions.
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