It’s no secret that a flurry of charter schools in the United States have been accused of having ties with controversial Turkish preacher, Fethullah Gulen who has been in a self-imposed exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania since 1999.
Gulen is accused of leading a violent coup against Turkish leadership last summer but he is also accused of influencing over 100 charter schools in the United States for his own agenda.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating whether or not these charter schools are responsible for laundering money to support Gulen’s movement.
Reno, Nevada is home to one of these charter schools, the Coral Academy. Our team of student journalists decided to look into these allegations but from the get-go we hit dead end after dead end.
We talked to former students but none of them had heard about Gulen. We reached out to a lawyer who had been studying the case, but received no reply.
We emailed 20 professors, some from the University of Nevada, some from out-of-state, but only four replied. One had only a mysterious list of contacts affiliated with Gulen but was not willing to actually speak with us.
The woman who tipped us off to this story in the first place wouldn’t even return any of our emails when we asked for an interview.
I even called the school multiple times, left a voicemail but never received a call back. To their credit it was Spring Break but when I got ahold of an email address for the principal of the elementary school, I never received a response.
So I reached out to the vice principal and finally received a reply that said, “I am sorry but we are in the middle of testing and would not be able to meet.”
Why did no one want to talk to us about this?
Finally we received some answers from Sherif Elfass, a Coral Academy parent and UNR professor. He said that although teachers and faculty from the Coral Academy weren’t allowed to talk about Gulen on campus, they would meet off-campus to discuss the movement.
“My information is always second-hand,” Elfass stated. “But, the Turkish community was very active here, they had two different organizations, and they used to own a Turkish culture center, the Sierra Foundation. They used to own a building in downtown Reno where they would meet and offer to take people to Turkey as a gift.”
Elfass continued, “In the building [downtown], they discussed Gulen, and the ideology. It simply promoted dialogue.” However, he stated, “it has slowly stopped in the last three years, as the funding has been lost and there have been changes in Turkey. The Coral Academy is just a name, and now simply just a school.”
It is true that the Coral Academy has seen a decline in Turkish teachers and the school has also had to discontinue its regular trips to Turkey due to the country’s current political turmoil.
Murat Yuksel, who sits on the Coral Academy board, said that it’s just a coincidence that there is a Turkish influence at the Coral Academy because the two men who founded the academy were Turkish.
“Since these two fellas were originally Turkish, they had some influence and there are other schools with different influences,” Yuksel continues, “For example, in the Bay Area, there are Greek founded schools, in other areas of California there are Armenian origin people opening schools.
There were Turkish elective classes offered but that is the only main difference in terms of the curriculum, opposed from a normal public high school.”
However, he continued to say that he listens to Gulen’s sermons regularly and that Gulen is right in his understanding of how to be a, “good Muslim,” in modern society. He said a huge value of Islam is education, a value that Gulen has pushed for unrelentingly.
Yuksel said he talks to his colleagues about Gulen without shame while he’s in the United States but it’s something he would never do in his native country of Turkey.
“I’m sort of known in my local community among my relatives,” Yuksel said, “You know your siblings know who you are and how you live. So, they’re alarmed that something harmful can happen to them because of me.”
Indeed in the midst of our reporting, hundreds of people were detained in Turkey for reportedly being tied to Gulen.
In fact, over 47,000 people have been detained since the coup occurred in Turkey last summer.
It was time for us to talk to the school but we had to tread lightly.
The Academy
Feyzi Tandogan is the Executive Director of the Coral Academy. Bright and early on a Friday morning we met him in his office to discuss the school.
Tandogan has been a part of the school’s founding from the beginning. A teacher in L.A., his Reno colleagues reached out to him for his teaching expertise and asked him to join them in founding a charter school in Reno, Nevada.
Tandogan was not expecting the huge success that the school would become. It is currently listed as the second highest ranking high school in Nevada.
For over 45 minutes we talked about the Coral Academy its history all of its accomplishments and how the curriculum is created.
Until I asked Tandogan about previous trips to Turkey and about why those had been discontinued. He began to talk about Turkish politics and we got into talking about Gulen and the Hizmet movement.
He expressed that he felt as if the coup in Turkey was staged and how he felt about Gulen being blamed for the coup.
“I think the Gulen people said, ‘This is not correct,’” Tandogan said.
When we asked him about how charter schools in the United States had been criticized for allegedly being connected to Gulen he said that, “There’s no Gulen schools in the U.S.”
He said there’s a couple private institutions that are influenced by Gulen but that’s it.
So why is there so many allegations?
Tandogan blames teacher’s unions.
“Nationwide, I think, teacher, education unions -- they don’t like charter schools,” He said. “They are pro-public schools. In Nevada there’s no big union, but in California they hate charter schools.
But, since we’re from Turkey, they quickly label us as Gulen schools. It is in the media also. Our job is just to give good education for kids. It is a defamation.”
Conclusions
Investigations have been launched, articles have been written, 60 minutes has covered the topic multiple times revealing that there are indeed Gulen influenced charter schools in the United States.
Sources have come out and said that these schools require donations from faculty salaries to go toward the movement.
Sharon Higgins, a woman who has been studying the movement for over seven years, wrote an article for the Washington Post about the prevalence of Gulen influenced charter schools in the United States.
Higgins even told us that she’s never been able to locate the nonprofit 990 tax forms from the Coral Academy that are required of all federally-funded nonprofits.
However, there is no substantial evidence to back up allegations that the Coral Academy is allowing a Gulen-influence to dictate its decisions in a negative way.