Up North Progressive

We’ve all laughed about Fox News being duped by The Onion, America’s finest news source, and publishing the parody websites’ stories as if they were actual news. It’s happened to a few other legitimate news sources often enough people now read a headline and ask, “Is this real, or The Onion?”

Today, it happened to Up North Progressive. An interesting incoming referral link appeared on the stats page of the blog’s dashboard. The link belongs to a for-profit charter school in California known as Delta Charter School. The referral link specifically goes to the page about the elementary school.

See that first link in the first paragraph, the one about Steve Ingersoll and IVL? It’s a link to this story on Up North Progressive; part of a series of articles published here about the optometrist turned educator to community developer and ‘philanthropist’ to convicted felon. Certainly nothing written about Ingersoll on this blog could be construed as an endorsement for his shoddy curriculum or pseudoscience vision therapy, but it seems to be good enough for the people at Delta Charter School. Probably your first clue you may want to reconsider enrolling your child at Delta Charter School is the fact people running the school link to a blog dedicated to exposing Steve Ingersoll as the criminal fraud he is.

Perhaps a better link Delta Charter School could use is this one containing evidence offered by teachers who used to work for Ingersoll that IVL is a big pile of garbage that does nothing to improve student learning. Another Up North Progressive story the charter school would better serve the public with is where a parent gives an account of how their children’s academic progress suffered after one year at a Steve Ingersoll IVL charter school.

More importantly, it would be remiss to not read Miss Fortune’s excellent coverage of the Steve Ingersoll federal felony fraud trial to learn about his upcoming sentencing hearing in September.

Unlike The Onion, everything written here about Steve Ingersoll is true. His vision therapy is quackery and nonsense, he’s a convicted felon, and he embezzled millions from the for-profit charter school in Traverse City he founded while the hand-picked school board made up of his friends, business associates and extended family looked the other way and let him get away with it.

And finally, to the parents reading this while considering enrolling their child into Delta Charter School: Please don’t. If you want your children to receive a good education without ripping off your fellow taxpayers, send them to a real public school; where evidence-based curriculum is taught by professional teachers in a genuine learning environment. IVL is snake oil with the only purpose of shoveling money into the bank account of a snake oil salesman who will soon be in prison.

Perhaps the people at Delta Charter School linked to this blog because they know the truth and want to warn parents to stay away?