The Learn4Life charter school network has been paid hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars a year to provide independent-study education, where students learn primarily on their own, for thousands of the state’s neediest students.
That model has produced mixed outcomes for students, The San Diego Union-Tribune found. It has also helped one private corporation accrue tens of millions of dollars in the span of a few years.
Some Learn4Life employees have raised concerns about the nonprofit, called Lifelong Learning Administration Corporation, that manages much of the schools’ operations under the Learn4Life brand name and reaps tens of millions from them each year by taking a cut of their revenue.
The corporation operates outside of state transparency laws, despite the outsize role it plays in running the Learn4Life public charter schools and being funded primarily with the public school dollars those schools pay it.
Lifelong Learning has used that money to pay its now-retired top executive $600,000 a year and hire senior executives’ family members for jobs with six-figure salaries. It also loans money to Learn4Life charter and private schools in other states, tax filings show.
Meanwhile Lifelong Learning’s wealth, as measured by its net assets, has doubled in just three years, from $18 million in 2021 to $36 million last year, according to its tax filings.
The Learn4Life schools’ relationship with a privately run corporation that runs much of their operations resembles arrangements used by other California charter networks, such as A3, Inspire and Elite.
As privately run, publicly funded schools, charter schools are subject to government transparency laws just like school districts are.
But when charter schools have much of their business run by private entities like Lifelong Learning, much of their public money gets spent behind closed doors — calling into question how independent the schools are, how transparent the whole network’s decision-making is and how taxpayer dollars are being spent.
Lifelong Learning executives did not respond to questions from the Union-Tribune about school operations or about Lifelong Learning’s corporate structure and practices.
Lifelong Learning’s attorney Greg Bordo said the Union-Tribune’s questions were based on “incorrect assumptions,” and he specifically objected to an inquiry about disparities between several schools’ enrollment and attendance records. He did not explain what was incorrect about the basis of the questions.
“Learn4Life is proud of its 25-year record of helping tens of thousands of at-risk students earn their high school diplomas and obtain the skills needed to pursue meaningful careers,” the nonprofit said in a one-sentence statement that Bordo sent.
The organization’s leaders did not respond to any of four email inquiries except to arrange a pair of visits to a San Diego school. They made only school administrators available for interviews.
Learn4Life area superintendent Lindsay Reese said Learn4Life schools do good work for students who have been failed by traditional schools. Despite this, she said that work has been misrepresented as “nefarious” and routinely targeted by legislation imposing new requirements on charter schools, oversight checks into Learn4Life operations and news reporting.
“It’s just a constant attack because of other bad players,” Reese said, without naming them. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”
A cut of schools’ revenue
With 18 schools, 70 learning centers and roughly 20,000 students across California, Learn4Life is one of the state’s largest charter school networks. During the 2023-24 school year, its California schools took in about $451 million in public funding.
But the network’s entire size and structure are not obvious to the public, nor to the auditors and school districts that oversee its schools.
Although its schools share the brand and education model, they don’t have Learn4Life in their names. Instead, they go by names like Crescent View West, Crescent View South II, Crescent Valley Public Charter II, Mission Academy, San Diego Mission Academy, San Diego Workforce Innovation High and Orange County Workforce Innovation High.
Each school is governed by one of more than a dozen corporations with names like Western Educational Corporation, Sierra Educational Advancement Corporation and Alta Vista Public Charter Inc. The common thread among them is that they pay and are largely managed by one entity: Lifelong Learning.
Lifelong Learning was created in 2015 with Dante Simi, the co-founder of the Learn4Life brand, as founding president. His son-in-law Skip Hansen, today Lifelong Learning’s president, was its founding secretary.
Neither Simi nor Hansen responded to questions from the Union-Tribune. Simi, who retired almost seven years ago, called the Union-Tribune’s reporting unfair and declined to comment, citing the recent death of his wife.
According to its website and tax filings, the nonprofit was created to streamline operations, improve efficiency and reduce overhead costs for schools.
Learn4Life schools did not provide copies of their contracts with Lifelong Learning in response to public record requests by the Union-Tribune. But a publicly posted contract signed in 2020 between Lifelong Learning and a Learn4Life charter school in Ohio, Flex High School of Cleveland, provides a glimpse of the services Lifelong Learning provides.
Lifelong Learning handles schools’ finances, public relations, marketing, facilities, state and financial reporting and long-term planning in relation to academics, funding, politics and legislation, the contract shows and San Diego Learn4Life school administrators say.
The corporation helps develop and implement schools’ educational model and curricula, administer state standardized testing, provide special education services, maintain student records and set the schools’ academic calendar. It also helps schedule school board meetings and prepare board meeting agendas and minutes.
In exchange for these services, schools pay Lifelong Learning a percentage of their revenue.
In an interview, Learn4Life area superintendent Reese and superintendent Shellie Hanes declined to say how much schools pay Lifelong Learning.
But in a 2019 deposition in a lawsuit concerning some of the network’s California schools, Hansen said all Learn4Life schools paid the corporation a 15% fee. The 2020 contract with Flex High of Cleveland required that school to pay Lifelong Learning 14% of its revenue, on top of charges for specific services like marketing.
In addition, at least half a dozen Learn4Life schools have paid Lifelong Learning rent, according to the schools’ state funding determination forms.
And Lifelong Learning’s contract with Flex High gave the corporation first right of refusal for any potential contract for administrative services, forbidding the school from contracting with any other entity without first letting Lifelong Learning object — meaning the school could not work with anyone else without its permission.
Altogether, from 2019 through 2024, California’s Learn4Life schools have paid $328 million to the corporation, tax filings show.
Common control
In a state where local control is the general rule for public schools, California charter schools are supposed to be independently operated and locally governed by their own boards.
Learn4Life says its schools are independently run and locally controlled by their school boards, and that Lifelong Learning does not operate them and is not a charter management organization. Reese said Lifelong Learning plays a supportive role for schools, not a prescriptive one.
But state authorities have identified Lifelong Learning as a management organization and said it does operate the Learn4Life charter schools.
“(Lifelong Learning) is considered an administrative management organization, which is comparable to a charter management organization,” California’s school auditing agency, called FCMAT, wrote in a 2019 audit of one Orange County Learn4Life school.
The California Learn4Life schools are led by the same executives. Learn4Life co-founder Jeff Brown is the CEO for all but one of them. Hanes is listed as superintendent and Jeri Vincent as CFO for every California school, according to the schools’ audits.
The schools share employees and reimburse each other for expenses, their tax filings show.
Public records also show that the vast majority of Learn4Life school boards are controlled by one obscure entity called Educational Advancement Corporation that is closely tied to Lifelong Learning.
Lifelong Learning’s attorney Bill Thompson created Educational Advancement Corporation, which shares the address of Thompson’s law firm. And Lifelong Learning’s top executives — including Simi, Hansen and Brown — were that corporation’s founding executive officers.
Educational Advancement was created to manage and operate California charter schools, according to its articles of incorporation. It has the power to appoint the trustees of Learn4Life school boards as the schools’ “sole member,” or sole controlling entity, according to the school corporations’ bylaws and tax filings. As sole member, it also has the power to amend the schools’ articles and bylaws and dissolve the schools.
As recently as 2019, Educational Advancement was also the sole member of Lifelong Learning, according to Lifelong Learning’s tax filings.
But the Learn4Life school corporations do not disclose their relationships with Educational Advancement or Lifelong Learning on their annual audits, even though accounting standards for nonprofit corporations say related parties must be disclosed. In the 2019 audit of the Orange County Learn4Life school, FCMAT also said it “found inconsistencies within the charter school audit reports that do not fully and transparently describe the organizations within the Learn4Life network.”
The same people serve on several Learn4Life school boards, a Union-Tribune analysis found — 19 people serve on at least two Learn4Life schools’ boards. Many trustees are businesspeople or former city officials.
Former Palmdale city clerk Victoria Hancock sits on eight Learn4Life boards, former Palmdale Water District official Claudette Beck sits on seven, and former Palmdale city housing manager Michael Adams sits on seven. Palmdale is close to Lancaster, where Lifelong Learning is based.
And the schools’ boards, under the control of Educational Advancement, have voted to contract with Lifelong Learning.
Several of those boards’ meeting agendas bear striking resemblances — they contain many of the same business items each month.
Government accountability watchdogs have said that such arrangements, in which the client is controlled by a party related to another that financially benefits, raise questions as to whether school boards are making decisions in the best interest of students or in the interest of the corporation that controls them.
In the cases of charter networks like Inspire, A3 and Elite, the founders created the charter schools, then went on to create the corporations that would provide the charters’ back-office services in exchange for significant, fixed percentages of the charters’ revenue.
These kinds of arrangements call for heightened transparency, accountability advocates say, because such corporations often exert significant influence or control over the charter schools they serve, which in turn provide them revenue. Schools have also often contracted these corporations’ services without soliciting bids, raising questions about whether the schools are getting the best deal on services.
High executive pay
A state law passed in 2019, SB 126, holds organizations that manage charter schools to the same transparency requirements that school districts and charter schools must follow — including the Brown Act, which requires open board meetings, and the Public Records Act.
Lifelong Learning has rejected the Union-Tribune’s requests for its board meeting and financial records, saying it is not subject to public records law because it is not a public entity. It maintains that it is not a charter management organization but rather a contracted vendor.
Still, Lifelong Learning’s nonprofit tax filings and other public records provide a partial window into how it has spent some of its money — including on executive salaries that have far exceeded what district superintendents typically make.
For instance, Lifelong Learning paid Learn4Life’s prior national superintendent, Caprice Young, $528,500 during the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the only year she worked at Learn4Life — not including retirement or health benefits. The corporation did not report compensation for a national superintendent in 2023 or 2024.
CEO Peter Faragia was paid more than $383,000 last year and Hansen more than $376,000. Hansen has been paid as much as $419,000 in one year and Faragia as much as $425,000. In 2019, Lifelong Learning paid four executives more than $400,000 each.
By comparison, the superintendent of San Diego Unified School District, which at the time served roughly five times as many students, was paid $273,000 that year. More recently, the superintendent made $442,000 in 2023. The superintendent of Vista Unified, which enrolls roughly the same number of students as Learn4Life, made $325,000 last year.
But nobody at Lifelong Learning was paid a higher salary than Simi, its co-founder.
Simi’s pay averaged $598,000 a year during his last four years at Lifelong Learning, according to its tax filings. The most Lifelong Learning paid him in a single year was $680,000, during the 2017-2018 fiscal year.
Simi retired from Learn4Life by 2019 after a claim was filed against him, according to Bordo, the corporation’s lawyer. He did not specify what type of claim.
Lifelong Learning has also hired multiple members of Simi’s family for high-paying executive jobs.
Simi’s son-in-law, Hansen, is Lifelong Learning’s president; his son, Dante M. “Tres” Simi, is vice president of facilities; and his late wife, Linda Simi, was an executive vice president.
Lifelong Learning has also spent millions to advocate for charter schools on the state level. This year, it has been among California’s top 10 spenders on education lobbying, according to secretary of state records.
Since its inception, the corporation has spent $2.3 million on lobbying state lawmakers, largely to push for charter school funding and oppose new oversight and regulation. It has spent $450,000 in the first two quarters of this year — more than any school district, charter school or charter management organization in the state, and more than the California Federation of Teachers union, according to the secretary of state.
Since the start of 2020, California has temporarily banned the opening of any new non-classroom-based charter schools — schools like Learn4Life that offer instruction outside of a typical daily classroom setting. That moratorium was spurred by lawmakers’ concerns about charter schools’ rapid expansion and what they said was inconsistent performance, and it was meant to give lawmakers time to make reforms.
But the moratorium hasn’t stopped Learn4Life’s growth. The network has kept expanding by opening schools in other states, launching charters in Michigan, South Carolina, Texas and Ohio, and it now also runs a private online school called Holston Academy.
Like the California Learn4Life schools, many of these schools’ boards are under the control of one central corporation that shares Learn4Life attorney Thompson’s address — this one called Educational Improvement Corporation, not to be confused with Educational Advancement Corporation — and that has the power to appoint their board members. The board members of Educational Improvement and Educational Advancement are identical, state filings show.
And Learn4Life’s out-of-state charters have four- and five-year graduation rates comparable to its California schools, which fall below those of most San Diego County district-run alternative schools that serve similar student populations.
The out-of-state schools generally graduate between 9% and 35% of their students within five years, according to the schools’ state report cards. Learn4Life has argued the metric doesn’t make sense for its population.
Kirsten Travis, who taught at Learn4Life’s Assurance Learning Academy in Los Angeles County for seven years, thinks Learn4Life’s model is failing students in California and shouldn’t be taken nationwide.
“I think it’s a huge mistake,” said Travis, who left Assurance in 2022, dissatisfied with its operations, to teach in a district school. “Their model doesn’t work, and it shouldn’t be used elsewhere until it works.”
Soon, the door will reopen for Learn4Life and other non-classroom-based charter networks to open more schools in California. The state’s moratorium on non-classroom-based charter schools will lift Jan. 1.
