Alp Aslandoğan, executive director of the non-profit organisation Alliance for Shared Values has said that the schools are independent yet indirectly tied to the Islamic Gülen movement on the "intellectual or inspirational level.
"[1] In 2009, it was estimated that members of the Gülen movement ran schools that serve more than 2 million students, many with full scholarships.
Gülen schools in the United States, which provide solely secular education to children mostly from low-income households, receive federal financial support.
Gülen schools promote education in the local languages where they are located, including the controversial use of Kurdish in Turkey.
[citation needed] Gülen schools heavily emphasize instruction in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
"[9] The greatest majority of the teachers are drawn from members of the Gülen network, who reportedly encourage students in the direction of greater piety.
[16] Two American professors at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia and Temple University wrote that "these schools have consistently promoted good learning and citizenship, and the Hizmet movement is to date an evidently admirable civil society organization to build bridges between religious communities and to provide direct service on behalf of the common good".
Following the investigation, the Dutch government, concluding that the Gülen schools did indeed promote "anti-integrative behavior," reduced their public funding.
[20] In April 2009, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published a piece about the Gülen schools in Central Asia stating the "Turkish educational institutions have come under increasing scrutiny ...
Many charter schools founded or managed by members of the Gulen movement emphasize instruction in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
The schools had hired Atlas to do construction, the paper said, though other bidders claimed in lawsuits that they had submitted more economical bids.
Folwell Dunbar, an official at the Louisiana Department of Education, has accused Atlas's vice president, Inci Akpinar, of offering him a $25,000 bribe to keep mum about troubling conditions at the Abramson Science and Technology School in New Orleans.
[30] One of the Cosmos Foundation's school systems, Harmony Public Schools, was subject to a compliance review by the United States Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, examining whether the system was compliant with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability in education programs operated by recipients of federal financial assistance), and Title II of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability by public entities).
The OCR's investigation found that although HPS's admissions policies, procedures, and information provided to prospective students and their parents were prima facie non-discriminatory, the school systems' enrolments of disabled students and English-language learners were significantly lower than for public school districts covering the same geographical areas.
[30] A reporter for the magazine In These Times noted in 2010 that the Chicago Math and Science Academy obscured its relationship to Gülen.
Students who have learned Turkish from over a hundred countries compete in different titles such as: grammar, oral skills, writing essays, reciting poems, singing songs, theatre, general culture etc.