They have generic, forward-sounding names like Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science and Beehive Science & Technology Academy. Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns. The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade. But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania . Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and “contemporary Islam’s Billy Graham ,” Fethullah G?len has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society. Followers of the so-called G?len Movement operate an “education, media and business network” in more than 100 countries, says University of Oregon sociologist Joshua Hendrick. Top administrators say they have no official ties to G?len. And G?len himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of G?len-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes G?len’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” G?len is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders. Education officials who are familiar with them say the schools aren’t trying to proselytize for G?len’s vision of Turkey . While Turkish language and culture are often offered in the curriculum, there’s no evidence the schools teach Islam. Nelson Smith, former president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, sees no evidence of an “active network. What I do see is a really impressive group of educators.” The Turkish-affiliated schools focus on math and science and often appear as top scorers on standardized tests. Still, lawmakers, researchers and parents are beginning to put the schools under the microscope for hiring practices — they import hundreds of teachers from Turkey each year — and for steps they take to keep their academic profile high. The schools’ unacknowledged ties to G?len, they say, mock public schools’ spirit of transparency. “That’s what I was always asking for,” says Kelly Wayment, a former board member and parent at Beehive Science & Technology Academy in Holladay, Utah. He has pressed for more than a year to get the school to acknowledge ties to G?len. “I said, ‘Parents have a right to know.’ ” Wayment says Beehive removed him from the board last year after he began investigating the decision to fire a popular Spanish teacher, saying it was based on a single classroom visit by the Tustin, Calif.-based Accord Institute of Education Research, an education services company with ties to a chain of California charter schools inspired by G?len. He complained to Utah state Rep. Jim Dunnigan, a Republican lawmaker, who launched an audit of charter school governance — the audit is ongoing. But Beehive’s Karlene Welker says Wayment “removed himself (from the board) by pulling his students out of the school.” Utah’s State Charter School Board launched an investigation last year after American teachers complained that Turkish colleagues got hiring and promotion preferences. The charter school board looked into Beehive’s ties to Islam and found them “circumstantial,” but a financial probe found that the school was $337,000 in the red — and that Accord officials had loaned it thousands. The board last April revoked its charter, but in June voted to keep the school open on probation. Dunnigan, the state lawmaker who requested the legislative audit, says the financial details, such as personal loans and public funds spent recruiting overseas faculty, are what concern him. “When they’re in such financial difficulty, should they spend $53,000 to bring these people over from another country?” But questions about hiring and academics also have arisen in Arizona, where Daisy Education Corp. runs five schools and has received certifications for 120 H-1B visas for foreign teachers since 2002, records show. In Texas, the Cosmos Foundation has filed 1,157 H1-B applications since 2001. It operates 25 Harmony schools statewide. Since 2001, Harmony has imported 731 employees using H-1Bs, surpassing all other secondary education providers nationwide. Parents last year also accused one Harmony school of “pushing out” underperforming students — a charge the Texas Education Agency confirmed. Ed Fuller, a University of Texas-Austin researcher, found that Harmony schools throughout Texas had an “extraordinarily high” student attrition rate of about 50% for students in grades six through eight. “It’s not hard to be ‘exemplary’ if you lose all the kids who aren’t performing,” Fuller says. Crossing the line? At minimum, the rapid growth of the Turkish-affiliated schools shows how the freewheeling world of charter schools has changed the face of K-12 education in the USA. In most cases, charters are loosely regulated in exchange for improved performance. A few schools are affiliated with religious groups or offer programs that others can’t. But in several cases, a school’s orientation has forced it to show that it’s not crossing lines and endorsing religion. Examples: •Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a Minnesota charter school authorized by Islamic Relief USA, a Virginia-based aid group. In 2008, the school ran afoul of state officials who said having teachers take part in voluntary Friday prayers could give students the impression that the school endorsed Islam. •Sacramento City Unified School District in California, which for 12 years has fought a lawsuit that says the city’s Waldorf schools are based on the religious beliefs of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Whether such schools continue to grow is no small question, since President Obama has made charter school expansion a priority. While the Turkish-affiliated schools disavow any connection to the G?len Movement, G?len himself maintains in legal filings that he’s the inspiration behind their growth. But William Martin of Rice University in Houston says educators’ assertions of “no organic connection” to G?len are accurate. Nonetheless, he says their efforts to minimize ties to G?len, likely from fear of being branded Islamists, bring “unnecessary and probably counterproductive” suspicion. “I do not think they are a sinister organization.” In an e-mail interview, Mehmet Argin, principal of Tucson’s Sonoran Science Academy, says his school’s parent corporation, Daisy Education Corp., “has no legal or organic ties” with other schools. He cautions against linking charter schools founded by Turkish-Americans directly to the G?len Movement “just because Turkish-Americans may be inspired by Mr. G?len.” In an e-mail interview, G?len denied any direct connection to these schools, rejecting the notion that there is a “G?len Movement,” but acknowledging there may be educators now in U.S. schools who have listened to his philosophy. “I have no relation with any institution in the form of ownership, board membership or any similar kind,” he said. A ‘third force’ G?len has pushed for more dialogue between the Western and Muslim worlds, yet he is a controversial figure in Turkey. The University of Oregon’s Hendrick, whose writings explore the G?len Movement, calls him “Turkey’s most famous religious personality.” His movement is considered the nation’s “third force” alongside the military and Turkey’s ruling Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, or AKP Party. In 1999, after traveling to the USA for medical treatment, G?len was charged in Turkey with trying to create an Islamic state. Since then he has remained in Pennsylvania. After the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service in 2007 denied his bid for a visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability in education,” G?len sued, saying his followers “had established more than 600 educational institutions” worldwide. He eventually prevailed, earning a green card in 2008. But Turkish educators in the USA continue to disavow their ties. “G?len is both the reason behind his schools, and he has nothing whatsoever to do with them,” Hendrick says.

An estimated 2.6 million American college freshmen are about to head off to campus. USA TODAY book critic Deirdre Donahue examines four new books about this rite of passage for American teenagers and their parents. Excuse her if she’s a bit wistful: Her own son is part of the departing horde. The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up Are cellphones, Facebook and e-mail morphing into the campus equivalents of baby monitors? And are these digital tethers healthy for college students and their parents? That’s the question posed by The iConnected Parent , a thoughtful and accessible guide that examines a new reality in which going off to college no longer means a weekly phone call home on Sunday night. Thanks to technology, many parents and children are in constant, daily communication. (The authors, Middlebury professor Barbara Hofer and journalist Abigail Sullivan Moore, provide compelling statistics to back up their point.) They also offer sensible guidelines about how to navigate this unprecedented access to your child’s life in college. They point out why certain behaviors — providing a last-minute edit on a term paper, intervening with a dean because your child says her roommate is mean — can damage your college kid’s ability to solve problems without you, a key element in becoming an adult. Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It Don’t read this book the night before you drive the little darling to that pricey private college, because you might cancel the trip. Queens College sociology professor Andrew Hacker, author of the best-selling Two Nations , and New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus take no prisoners in their blistering attack on American colleges and universities, particularly the Ivy League. They compare the $420 billion per year higher education business to American health care, saying it’s a bloated bureaucracy that costs an astronomical amount of money yet fails to achieve its core mission: teaching undergraduates to think, to question, to be inspired. Their claim: This failure is going on at the nation’s 4,352 colleges and universities, from the biggest sports powerhouse to the most elite private enclave. Money doesn’t solve the problem. The authors argue provocatively that Ivy League students are among the least well-served in terms of teaching, despite parents writing those $37,000 tuition checks. Star professors have never had much interest in teaching undergrads, leaving it to overworked, underpaid grad students. But with that price tag? Ouch. The authors propose dramatic solutions: abolish tenure, stop paid sabbaticals, spin off medical schools. Most of all, they want parents, students, politicians, professors and taxpayers to ask themselves, what is the purpose of college? A real education isn’t about job training or establishing a “Best and the Brightest” elite. Because Higher E ducation? wrestles with all sorts of big-picture, philosophical questions, it’s a thought-provoking book. Perhaps a touch too intense for parents writing tuition checks. Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents At age 21, Zac Bissonnette, an AOL finance blogger and University of Massachusetts senior, delivers a real mule kick to the higher educational status quo with his impassioned Debt-Free U . In an admiring foreword, Andrew Tobias gets it right when he says the author is “Doogie Howser meets the boys from Facebook.” Mincing no words, Bissonnette argues that students and their parents must stop taking out loans to pay for college. In 2006-2007, he points out, the average student graduated owing almost $23,000 (with some owing as much as $120,000), while strapped parents took out home-equity loans. This debt will hurt parents approaching retirement and handicap kids entering adulthood. The author writes out of his own experience of growing up with financially improvident parents. (His father’s house is in foreclosure, and his mother lives with her mother.) His advice is old school. Consider community college. Live at home. Save money. Get a part-time job. And parents who want to help? Get a second job. The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) By Harlan Cohen Sourcebooks, 618 pp., $14.99, paperback original Taking a cue from the ever-popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting series, Harlan Cohen uses a similar perky approach in his user-friendly The Happiest Kid on Campus. The funny part, despite the “happiest kid” title, is Cohen gently reminding parents and kids that most college students probably won’t be happy at first. Most freshmen are painfully homesick their first semester, and often longer. Not to mention anxious, stressed-out, confused and lonely. But he has a lot of sensible ways to get to happy, if not happiest. Cohen, author of The Naked Roommate , offers advice on how parents should handle move-in day (remember, it’s the kid’s room, not yours), how much digital communication is too much (the roommate she-devil of yesterday’s text might be the BFF of tomorrow, so don’t intervene), and warns against contacting professors about a failed quiz. Some of his tips are stunningly sensible. If your child is shy, encourage him to get a job in the cafeteria or library so he has to leave his room and talk to people. The funniest advice? Mom, no cougar-ing, and Dad, quit leering.

The Texas State Board of Education was set to vote Friday on changes to social studies standards that have angered and, in some cases, baffled critics, including President George W. Bush ‘s first education secretary, who is protesting the politicization of the process. Among the proposed changes: calling the USA’s slave trade the “Atlantic triangular trade” and minimizing the role of Thomas Jefferson , who espoused a strict separation of church and state. The new standards set curriculum for millions of Texas school children and lay the groundwork for textbooks and standardized tests for a decade. But the changes could also carry outsized influence because Texas is a large state — textbooks sold to other states often carry content tailored to Texas specifications. On Thursday, former U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige , a one-time Houston superintendent, said the proposed standards are too detailed and “take away a lot of the latitude of the teachers” in designing curricula. He also worries that teachers, focused increasingly on getting their students to pass state skills tests, will be “very, very concerned about the standards” and ensure that students learn the content. Paige testified before the board on Wednesday about the growing politicization of education. In an interview Thursday, he said he understands the point of view of several state board members, who this week said they are simply bringing balance to a set of standards that skew leftward. But Paige said, “This political swaying between left and right is retarding our ability to have an effective educational delivery system in the United States of America.” Paige, who is African-American, said the proposed Texas standards “drastically understate the influence of slavery and the Civil Rights movement in our national story – it almost suggests that students will be learning that our liberties – and especially African-Americans’ freedoms – were kind of gently acquired. The liberty and freedoms that African-Americans enjoy were born out of struggle – deep struggle. {hellip} nobody just woke up in the morning and said, ‘O.K., you’re free.” NAACP President Ben Jealous said he was “stunned” to learn of the change in reference to slavery. “You can’t take slavery out of the slave trade,” he said. “Our children need to be taught the whole truth – not half of it.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Come fall, the ground beef used in school lunches will be as safe as ground beef sold to the nation’s fast food chains — a major improvement, critics say. The U.S. Agriculture Department announced Friday that it will require all ground beef purchased for the National School Lunch Program to adhere to new safety standards after July 1. The program supplies ground beef, chicken and other food for more than 31 million schoolchildren. The rules bring school lunches “right in line with contemporary standards,” says Dave Theno, a food safety consultant who developed a rigorous safety program for the Jack in the Box chain before retiring in 2008. “In fact, I’d make the case that the school lunch standards will now be above some of our major retail grocery chains. Not all, but some. They’ll be up there with the best.” LUNCH TROUBLE: See previous stories The department announced in February that it would raise standards for school lunches and has spelled those standards out in detail. The rules call for more stringent microbiological testing and say beef should be sampled every 15 minutes on production lines. Previously, ground beef bound for schools was sampled an average of eight times during an entire production day, and then those samples were combined and subjected to testing once a shift. The rules make suppliers with “a long-term poor safety record” ineligible to sell to the school lunch program without a complete analysis of why their products failed inspections, says Michael Jarvis, a spokesman for the USDA ‘s Agricultural Marketing Service, which purchases beef for the school lunch program. No currently eligible contractors would be ineligible under that requirement “if it were in effect,” he says. The standards “look very good,” says Carol Tucker-Foreman with the Consumer Federation of America. A former USDA administrator herself, she has long fought to raise the USDA’s meat safety requirements for school lunches. “The new standards announced today ensure our purchases are in line with major private-sector buyers of ground beef,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand , D-N.Y., who has pushed the USDA to raise its safety standards, said she was pleased with the announcement. “For too long, a McDonald ‘s hamburger has been safer for our kids than those served in some school cafeterias. I applaud the USDA for taking action today to protect millions of American schoolchildren,” she says. The standards come in the wake of a USA TODAY investigation in November and December that found failures in government programs meant to protect students from food-borne illnesses. The newspaper’s investigation showed that fast food companies such as McDonald’s and Jack in the Box had more rigorous programs for bacteria and pathogen testing than the USDA. The changes put the school lunch program back in the forefront of safety practices, a place it once held a decade ago. As the best companies in the industry continued to move forward, often in response to E. coli outbreaks at restaurants and the toll they took on sales, the school lunch program did not, USA TODAY found. The program will put pressure on the meat grinding companies supplying the school lunch program “to make absolutely certain that they have raw materials of the highest quality,” Theno says. “My guess is that most of the people that were supplying were already in compliance. But what this does is ensure that the products we’re supplying to our kids are as good as what’s available commercially.” The National Academy of Sciences , at the USDA’s request, is also reviewing AMS’ ground beef purchase requirements to provide recommendations on how the agency can best follow industry-recognized best practices. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest, says it’s “good that USDA isn’t waiting to implement new standards until the NAS completes its review. These steps will push the meat industry to implement tough new testing for all products going into the school lunch program.” The announcement comes a week before AMS’ annual conference for contractors, meat suppliers and processors on changes and updates to its purchasing requirements, just before the yearly purchasing cycle begins. The meeting, to open Thursday in Kansas City, Mo., is “where people get into the nitty-gritty” on what USDA wants, says Les Johnson of Les Johnson Associates, a consulting firm that works with companies that sell to the AMS program. The new requirements don’t come as a surprise to the meat industry. “After the series of articles, a number of industry people I talked with expected the standards would be strengthened and changed,” Johnson says. “It will require additional inspectors, and they’ve got to pay USDA more to get it done. But, since the new rules apply to all suppliers, it doesn’t give anyone an advantage over the rest.” There may be some complaints that the new standards could make the school lunch program more expensive. Theno doesn’t buy it. “How can a guy offer a quarter-pound, 99-cent hamburger commercially if that’s the case?”

WASHINGTON — Facing a recession and the coming end of billions of dollars in federal stimulus funding, school districts nationwide are handing teachers pink slips for the upcoming school year. The Obama administration estimates that as many as 300,000 teachers could lose their jobs unless Congress steps in with emergency money. The cuts may ultimately be milder than the dire predictions — and critics are already joking that school advocates should soften the “teacherpocalypse” rhetoric. But the grim predictions have already generated protests. Teachers in several states have rallied to keep school funding, and across the USA, teachers today will wear pink hearts as part of a national “Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips” campaign organized by the American Federation of Teachers , the nation’s second-largest teachers union. A Los Angeles-area PTA even persuaded actress Megan Fox to film a comedy short dramatizing the effects of school budget cuts — and mocking California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘s tough-guy image. The film, viewed nearly 1 million times on the Funny Or Die website, closes with Fox urging viewers to “call, write and annoy the governor until he cries for his mommy.” California hit hard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that the situation was serious. “I’m very, very concerned,” he said in an interview. “I can’t say that strongly enough.” Although most of the pink slips are conditional on final budget calculations — and in many cases warnings are required by teacher contracts — the teachers federation says there’s little good budget news in most of the hardest-hit states, which include California (36,000 pink slips), Illinois (20,000 jobs threatened), Michigan (4,000) and cities such as New York (8,500). ANALYSIS: Pension funds for teachers are short billions REVERSAL: Teacher shortage gives way to teacher glut FIRING TEACHERS: Useless or 1st step to reform? The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in March that state deficits “of a very large magnitude are likely to persist for another two or three years,” and that despite improvements in the economy, state budget pictures in 2011 and 2012 “look as bad, or nearly as bad, as those for 2009 and 2010.” It estimates that states will face total deficits as large as $260 billion beyond what the stimulus can provide. Sen. Tom Harkin , D-Iowa, has proposed $23 billion to help schools keep hundreds of thousands of teachers. Duncan hasn’t endorsed the bill but says Congress should act soon. “There are pink slips being sent out as we speak,” Duncan said, “so unless something changes, those are layoffs that are going to happen.” A few critics have pointed out that virtually all of the pink slips are based on preliminary budget estimates and that real job losses could be smaller. “This is a slightly larger than normal version of the nearly annual phenomenon in which school districts and teachers unions use the media to try and scare parents to scare lawmakers into funding education,” says education blogger Alexander Russo. The short Fox film dramatizes the effects of budget cuts on an L.A.-area elementary school. It was sponsored by the Wonderland Avenue Elementary School PTA in Laurel Canyon. Principal Don Wilson, who appears briefly in the film, says the project began as a letter-writing campaign for kids, but the PTA expanded it and asked Fox’s boyfriend, Brian Austin Green , a Wonderland Avenue parent, to pitch in. The duo and production staff worked free. Cuts are real for one principal Response to the film, Wilson says, has been “overwhelmingly positive.” Among other things, it earned the PTA president a trip to Sacramento to talk with Schwarzenegger’s staff. Wilson says most of the cuts at his school are real — since last May he has lost an assistant principal and special-education teacher; his nurse now shows up just once a week. This year, three of 21 teachers have been pink-slipped — he believes that two of the jobs will be saved. In one of the film’s more jarring moments, Fox looks on as a fifth-grader complains about school conditions — in Korean. No one can translate. Wilson says the exchange is fairly typical. Though most of the Korean-American children at Wonderland Avenue speak English, few Korean parents do. He has been trying to get a translator on staff “for years,” he says: “Almost half of our school is Korean, and nobody speaks Korean.”

USA TODAY’s Mary Beth Marklein asked four moms about being a student. See the full report here . Theola Moore, 40 Homestead, Fla., single mother of six. Earned bachelor’s online in January from KaplanUniversity. Biggest challenge: ?It wasn’t always easy being there for my kids’ extracurricular activities and maintaining my GPA. I consider myself a “supermom.” The secret to success: ?Motivation. I tell my kids that the word “can’t” is not in our family’s vocabulary. LaQuandria Blakley, 22 Moore’s daughter, and a single mother of one in Homestead. Earned associate’s degree online in January from Kaplan. Biggest challenge: ?Staying motivated. I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing this to better the future for myself and my daughter. Best part: ?My mother said, “If I can do it, you can do it.” I can tell my daughter I was able to raise her and go to school at the same time. Fraidel Phelps, 34 Married mother of six; graduates Saturday from the Community College of Philadelphia. Best part: ?The example I am setting. When my children see me doing homework, they are much more eager to do theirs. The secret: ?My husband and kids pitch in. I do whatever tasks come my way immediately. There is always something new. Shameka Sawyer, 32 Single mother of three; graduates Saturday from the Community College of Philadelphia. Best part: ? I can show my kids that anything is possible if they work hard and never give up. The secret: ?Believing in yourself. Also, family, friends, and mentors are the people who will encourage you to keep going.