attorney general won a groundbreaking $168.5 million settlement against the country’s largest operator of online charter schools.
Or, after a lengthy investigation, it managed to collect only $2.5 million from a business that pulled in almost $1 billion in revenue in 2015 — with no fines, penalties, or admission of wrongdoing.
Which one is true? It all depends on who you ask.
After a wide-ranging investigation into virtually every aspect of the controversial business model of online charter operator K12 Inc. — from how its schools advertise to how they record attendance and collect payments — California Attorney General Kamala Harris settled for $8.5 million in actual, real-world money, which will be paid by the company to the state. Her office also extracted $160 million in what Harris called “debt relief” for the California schools that the company manages — for a total, the attorney general’s office said, of $168.5 million.