Last April, College Achieve Public Schools, known as CAPS, marked its 10-year anniversary with a ritzy celebration at The Chateau Grande in East Brunswick.
The gathering at the ornate French-American style banquet center, set among 15 pastoral acres, was to toast a burgeoning charter school network that over a decade had swelled to nine schools and nearly 3,200 students across Plainfield, Paterson, Asbury Park and Neptune.
“Over these 10 years, we’ve shown that when we believe in our students, they will flourish,” Michael Piscal, the organization’s founder and CEO, said at the time.
The gala appeared to cement the public charter school network’s standing among New Jersey’s education system, and give credence to its mission —to help urban and disadvantaged students excel in schools funded by taxpayer dollars. And indeed, the network has shown progress: in the state’s most recent school performance data, CAPS Paterson ranked in the top 10 for growth in both Math and English/language arts test scores, and College Achieve Central Charter School had a solid 75.0 out of 100 rating.
But a closer examination of the CAPS network — built on an analysis of tax forms, public records and interviews with nearly a dozen school officials — reveals a more complex picture.
According to tax forms, the CAPS network has devoted nearly 20% of its revenue to paying the salaries of its seven highest paid officials, adding up to what a former New Jersey education commissioner called an “astonishing” amount of money.
One school in the network has raised ethics and nepotism concerns after the husband and mother of the executive director were hired as principal and an interventionist, according to documents obtained by NJ Advance Media.
And the network’s founder, Piscal, has been criticized for his past dealings with charter schools in Los Angeles. He resigned as that network’s head amid an ongoing financial crisis in 2010, according to news reports at the time.
The attention comes weeks after an NJ Advance Media report uncovered that College Achieve Asbury Park’s varsity basketball team — in its first season of existence — utilized a loophole that allows for students to attend a charter school outside the town in which they live if the charter school is not at full enrollment. College Achieve packed its roster with 11 elite transfers from across New Jersey, prompting the state athletic association and even lawmakers to propose an overhaul of state rules and regulations.
Now, focus has shifted to the CAPS salaries, which — as with most charter schools — are funded by way of taxpayer dollars. (Like some charter networks, CAPS operates as a Charter Management Organization, or CMO, collecting taxpayer-funded fees from the individual schools it oversees, and in turn using that money to pay its executives.)
Piscal, 57, appears to be the highest-paid charter school official in New Jersey — by far — according to tax forms filed by dozens of charter schools across the state. He earned a base salary of $444,714 and $252,814 in deferred compensation and retirement benefits, according to tax forms filed by the organization in 2023, the latest available data.
His total compensation of $697,528 is $270,000 more than Julie Jackson, the president of Uncommon Schools, a New York-based, multi-state charter network nearly six times larger than CAPS, according to tax forms. And his base compensation is $125,000 more than the highest-paid superintendent in New Jersey — Bergen County Vocational Technical School District superintendent Howard Lerner, who made $319,134 in 2023.
Piscal “does what few have the skills and mettle to do: build great school after great school out of nothing,” CAPS board chair Brian Taylor, a former NBA player turned educator, said in a statement provided to NJ Advance Media. “In our view, he’s worth every penny.”
Piscal was heralded as an education pioneer in the early 2000s, when he founded Inner City Education Foundation, the first charter school management organization in Los Angeles. But he resigned as head of ICEF in 2010 amid an ongoing financial crisis that resulted in slashing the organization’s payroll by about 25%. He then went to work for Andre Agassi’s troubled charter school network in Las Vegas, before returning to New Jersey and starting CAPS.
But Piscal is not alone when it comes to being handsomely compensated at CAPS. Gemar Mills, the executive director of College Achieve Paterson, a school of 1,288 students, appears to be the second highest-paid charter school official in New Jersey, behind only Piscal. He earned a base salary of $350,320 and $83,414 in deferred compensation and retirement benefits for a total of $433,734, according to tax forms filed by the organization in 2023.
Jodi McInerney, the executive director of College Achieve Asbury Park, earned $323,245 in total compensation, according to tax forms. Her school has 519 students, according to the latest school performance report. Three other CAPS officials earned more than $209,000 in total compensation, tax forms show.
Also on the CAPS payroll is David C. Hespe, the former New Jersey education commissioner. He works part-time, or “three to four days a week on average” as the network’s chief of staff, according to a public relations firm representing the network, and earned $158,892 in total compensation from CAPS, according to tax forms filed in 2023. He also earns an annual state pension of $72,393, per public data, and works as an attorney and executive director of the Educational Leadership Foundation.
Hespe served as education commissioner in 2015, when College Achieve was one of four charter schools granted final approval by the New Jersey Department of Education to open for the 2015-16 school year. In response to whether this presented a conflict of interest, the network said “there is no conflict of interest,” and said Hespe did not begin working for CAPS until fall 2020, about four years after he ceased his role as education commissioner.
All told, the seven highest paid officials at CAPS made nearly $2.4 million in combined total compensation, or about 19% of the network’s $12.4 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending in June 2022, most of which originated through publicly funded dollars, according to tax documents. Top paid executives listed in tax forms at high-profile networks such as Success Academy Charter School, Inc. and KIPP Foundation, though well compensated, accounted for less than 3% of their revenue, according to tax forms. Both networks are significantly larger than CAPS.
The network said that “a small percentage” of CAPS’ revenue comes from donations, but declined to specify how much.
Christopher Cerf, the former New Jersey education commissioner,described the salaries as “eye-popping” and “astonishing.”
“It certainly seems at minimal anomalous,” Cerf said. “The great majority of charter schools have salaries that are actually less than traditional public schools.”
And Harry Lee, president and CEO of the New Jersey Public Charter Schools Association, the state’s leading charter school advocacy group, told NJ Advance Media the compensation at CAPS “is clearly an outlier and not reflective of the New Jersey charter school sector as a whole.”
“Charter boards have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that public funds are used to drive academic success, operational compliance and fiscal viability,” Lee said, adding that charter school boards must “ensure compensation packages are in line with similar organizations.”
But Taylor staunchly defended the network’s salaries, saying CAPS cannot be compared to other public charter or traditional schools, but rather organizations such as the Liberty Science Center, Newark Museum, New Jersey Aquarium and NJPAC.
“In order to help students meet their potential, it is critical to hire and retain the right adults — and that requires competitive compensation,” Taylor said. “This is what excellent educators need to get paid.”
Piscal, Hespe, two public relations representatives and Elnardo Webster II, the CAPS general counsel, also pushed back on any notion the CAPS salaries are exorbitant in a video conference last Thursday with NJ Advance Media.
Piscal, Mills and McInerney are not traditional public school employees eligible for state pension and benefit packages, but rather employees of the CMO, College Achieve Public Schools, Inc. The CMO provides a “leadership, administrative, curricular, instructional, enrollment, and support services to individual charter schools in the CAPS network,” as well as “facilities acquisition and financing support for the charter schools,” Taylor said.
Because Piscal, Mills and McInerney are not eligible for the state pension or benefits, CAPS pays compensation they said is comparable to other senior public education employees in New Jersey.
“When we’re looking at comparable New Jersey educators in the market that we’re operating in, where our people could easily go and be superintendents, we think their salary and benefit package is equivalent,” Webster said.
After beginning work on CAPS in 2012, Piscal did not receive a salary for four years, and he cashed out his pension and retirement and accrued $200,000 in credit card debt in order to pay for start-up costs for the school, according to Taylor and Piscal.
To make up for Piscal not being eligible for the state pension and his initial investments, “once the organization was on stronger financial footing, the Board independently decided to address this by funding an annuity of approximately $50,000-60,000 for Michael once he retires,” Taylor said.
Piscal’s deferred compensation will be reduced once Piscal’s annuity is fully funded, Taylor added.
“The Board has and will continue to reward Michael’s commitment to the organization and his excellent job performance,” Taylor said.
Despite the progress in math and language arts scores in the most recent performance data, other markers of school performance show challenges. At CAPS Paterson, 23.8% of students were chronically absent, and at CAPS Asbury Park, students performed below grade level on statewide assessments in both English and math, according to the latest school performance data.
While the CAPS salaries are attracting scrutiny, so too are the operations in at least one of the institutions.
Jodi McInerney’s husband, Timothy McInerney, serves as principal of her school, CAPS Asbury Park, at a salary of $165,000 per year, according to board minutes. The school also employs Jodi McInerney’s mother, Maryellen Murphy, as an interventionist and at a rate of $10,500 per year, according to board minutes.
Jacob Waters, an account director from Larson Communications, a public relations firm, said “there are no nepotism concerns” and the principal job was posted publicly in June 2021.
Yet Waters acknowledged that Timothy McInerney was the only applicant for the job and the only person interviewed.
Interim Monmouth county superintendent Lester Richens signed off on the hiring decision of both Timothy McInerney and Maryellen Murphy, Waters said.
The basketball team’s enormous success this spring renewed intense debates that have raged for years in New Jersey around charter schools. Charter schools receive funding directly from the school districts that send children to the charter school. Proponents argue that they give children, especially those in historically underrepresented communities, greater educational opportunities; critics say they merely siphon public funds and further debilitate already struggling district school systems.
But critics say the state Department of Education should be asking more questions about CAPS.
“The fact that these executives are getting paid that much money, I guess I would just say that people aren’t paying attention,” said Julie Larrea Borst,executive director of Save Our Schools NJ Community Organizing. “These schools are in economically disadvantaged districts, and here’s this guy paying himself nearly $700,000 a year. That’s incredible. That’s really incredible.”
A new type of school
The man with the vision behind the CAPS network is Piscal, a New Jersey native who has spent almost his entire adult life working in charter schools.
Piscal grew up in Toms River, and graduated from Toms River East High in 1984. He went on to Wake Forest University, where he earned a history degree and played Division 1 football for the Demon Deacons, according to the bio from his 2007 induction into the Toms River Hall of Fame and a second bio.
Piscal, however, does not appear on Wake Forest’s historical list of football letterwinners, and the school said his name is not mentioned “as a letterwinner during his time here and he was not listed on any of the rosters or in our records overall.”
In response to this apparent discrepancy, Piscal said he did play one season of football at Wake Forest in 1985. He joked that he was “the only eighth-string tight end in the history of the program.”
After being asked to produce evidence he played football at Wake Forest, the network provided a letter from a former teammate who said he remembered Piscal on the team as a fellow walk-on.
In 1989, a year after graduating from Wake Forest, Piscal moved to California and took a job teaching English at the Harvard School, later named the Harvard-Westlake School, one of the most prominent private schools in the country. It was there that Piscal found himself troubled by the inequities he saw in the public schools in Los Angeles, one bio said.). So, in 1994, he left Harvard-Westlake and founded what became his first charter school venture, the Inner City Education Foundation. In 1996, ICEF opened a summer camp, an after-school program and a childcare program, and three years later, its first charter school, View Park Prep Elementary School. Over the next four years, the network expanded to include a middle and high school, according to reports.
Piscal was on the fast-track to educational stardom. In 2002, he was the surprise winner of Emeril Lagasse’s Breakfast in Bed Contest, and three years later he was named Charter School Leader of the Year for California. In 2009, Piscal was featured in a segment on Good Morning America, where Diane Sawyer crowed about how his network had swelled to 3,000 students and 13 schools.
“The success has been astonishing,” Sawyer said in the feature. “Virtually all of ICEF’s students go on to college. Education experts everywhere are sitting up and taking notice.”
But Piscal’s momentum masked growing issues with ICEF that came to a head just a year after Good Morning America. In October 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that Piscal had resigned from ICEF “amid an ongoing financial crisis.” The nonprofit faced a $2-million deficit. And the austerity measures undertaken included cutting the organization’s payroll by about 25% and midyear layoffs of an undetermined number of teachers, according to the Times.
Piscal said the problems ICEF encountered were the “perfect storm” of the Great Recession hitting, investors reneging on grants and the state of California deferring millions of dollars in revenue.
“That was brutal,” Piscal said.
In 2011, a year after his resignation, Piscal moved to Nevada and became executive director of Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, according to bios and news accounts. A 2012 feature story about the charter network described its 11 years of existence as “11 years of turnover, turmoil and some unmet expectations.”
Piscal became the sixth person to lead the school since it opened, according to the report.
Piscal remained in Nevada for two years before moving on.
Then, around 2012, he started a new charter school system. This time in New Jersey.
A rapid rise
In October 2014, College Achieve Central Charter School was approved to open by the state Department of Education. Piscal said the school would utilize “backwards mapping” to develop a curriculum that starts with the end result — graduation from college — then works its way back to kindergarten, according to reports at the time.
College Achieve Central in Plainfield planned to start in 2015 with about 345 students in kindergarten and grades 1, 2, 5 and 6, and then add a grade in each succeeding year. The goal was to have more than 1,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
But by that point, some people in New Jersey had started to hear about Piscal’s past dealings with charter schools in Los Angeles. David Rutherford, a member of the Plainfield Board of Education, argued in 2015 that giving a charter approval to someone with Piscal’s history was a significant risk.
He wrote about Piscal in an opinion piece titled, “A Plainfield Charter School Vulture,” arguing that “the most pervasive form of subversion occurs when states grant school charters in poorer, working class, Black and brown cities without the input of local populations, whose elected officials have no say on whether or not Mike Piscal and other fly-by-night education vultures can operate.”
College Achieve Asbury Park and College Achieve Paterson opened two years later.
Piscal was paid a salary of $228,369 for the 2016-17 tax year — nearly 15% of the organization’s $1.5 million in total revenue, according to tax forms. That year, College Achieve Central had 602 students. By the 2020-21 tax year, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, Piscal’s total compensation, including other compensation from the organization and related organizations, had increased to a total of $492,660.
And as the CAPS empire has grown, questions have repeatedly circled around the organization.
In 2017, CAPS Paterson hired Henry McNair to serve as the school’s principal, less than two years after the state Department of Education closed his charter school — Newark Prep Charter — for poor academic performance. McNair also was accused of sexually harassing a social worker at Newark Prep. He denied the allegations, and the case was dismissed seven months after it was filed.
A year after the McNair allegations, Manny Martinez, a vice principal at CAPS Paterson, was accused of sexually harassing a school social worker in a lawsuit filed in 2020, marking the second time in three years that Martinez had faced such allegations. CAPS Paterson paid out $275,000 to settle the claims against Martinez, according to news reports.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some also criticized College Achieve and other charter schools for receiving millions in federal aid that traditional districts couldn’t touch. College Achieve’s three charter school systems in Plainfield, Asbury Park and Paterson received a combined $1.7 million to $4 million in loans, and its Tinton Falls-based nonprofit got $150,000 to $350,000.
Piscal said at the time his schools employed more than 300 people, and the funds kept their jobs intact despite cuts to state aid that could only get worse.
Then, in 2020 and 2021, CAPS Asbury Park was twice denied requests to gain state approval for an expansion to grades K-12. A letter from acting Education Commissioner Kevin Dehmer claimed the school’s academic and financial standing was not at the proper level to allow for expansion.
“College Achieve Greater Asbury’s amendment request fails to articulate local assessment data that would bolster the Department’s confidence that College Achieve Asbury continues to make academic gains,” the letter said.
The state denial also referenced a letter it received from Neptune schools superintendent Tami Crader criticizing the charter school and arguing its expansion be denied.
“As the superintendent, I find it very concerning that the students who leave Neptune Township Schools to attend College Achieve School are receiving an inferior education,” Crader wrote.
“Students who return to Neptune report overcrowded conditions, lack of services, and limited supplies. Test scores are deplorable. Their administration of student enrollment is consistently weak, most likely due to consistent staff turnover, and not only is that a safety concern, it causes problems for us on an annual basis.”
The following year, on its third try and to the surprise of many, College Achieve Asbury Park received permission to grow from a K-9 school to a K-12 campus. School officials said it was academic improvement during COVID that helped secure the expansion.
Crader, meanwhile, has remained skeptical. She said she’s requested a tour of College Achieve Asbury Park on two occasions, but the school “never responded to me.”
“I asked for a visit with my director of curriculum just to see what was going on in there,” Crader said. “Because certainly if there is something they claim they’re doing that could benefit my students, I would do that also.”
Waters said the school “could only locate one request from Superintendent Crader asking to visit.” The request was sent to Jodi McInerney via email. McInerney was out of school at the time receiving medical treatment and “must have missed the email,” Waters said, adding that Crader is welcome to visit.
All of this comes on the heels of the network’s momentous foray into the world of elite high school basketball. Last year, CAPS lured away Dave Boff, the state’s most successful coach previously from Roselle Catholic, and paid him $125,000 as College Achieve’s Director of Recruitment and Development, on top of a $10,000 coaching stipend. Boff quickly put together an all-star squad that took the state by storm.
For the state championship game in March, Piscal was in the bleachers in Toms River, just behind one of the baskets. Mills and McInerney also sat nearby.
As the College Achieve players lit up the scoreboard and demolished another overmatched opponent — to the chagrin of much of the state — Piscal and company looked on intently. They smiled and clapped and cheered, soaking in the latest CAPS milestone.
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Matthew Stanmyre may be reached at mstanmyre@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X @MattStanmyre. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
