Saturday, November 26, 2016

NY Times Detrit charter schools + Trump businessman problems India conflicts + Brazil

A Sea of Charter Schools in Detroit Leaves Students Adrift

By KATE ZERNIKE
Students at Detroit Leadership Academy, a charter school, last month. Joshua Lott for The New York Times
DETROIT — On the face of it, Ana Rivera could have had almost any choice when it came to educating her two sons. For all the abandoned buildings and burned-down houses in her neighborhood in the southwest part of this city, national charter school companies had seen a market and were setting up shop within blocks of each other, making it easier to find a charter school than to buy a carton of milk.
But hers became the story of public education in a city grasping for its comeback: lots of choice, with no good choice.
She enrolled her older son, Damian, at the charter school across from her house, where she could watch him walk into the building. He got all A’s and said he wanted to be an engineer. But the summer before seventh grade, he found himself in the back of a classroom at a science program at the University of Michigan, struggling to keep up with students from Detroit Public Schools, known as the worst urban district in the nation. They knew the human body is made up of many cells; he had never learned that.
When his school stopped assigning homework, Ms. Rivera tried enrolling Damian at other charters, but the deadlines were past, the applications onerous. Finally, she found him a scholarship at a Catholic school, where he struggled to rise above D’s all year. “He doesn’t want to hear the word engineering,” she said.

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Charter Schools Suspend Black and Disabled Students More, Study Says 

Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.
Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.
While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.
Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.
“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”
The city has emerged almost miraculously fast from the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Downtown Detroit hums with development — a maze of detours around construction sites with luxury apartments, a new Nike store along a stretch of prime but empty storefronts. Even where blight resumes a few blocks out, farm-to-table restaurants and modern design stores sprout hopefully. Last year, the city had its smallest population decline since the 1950s.
But the city’s residents — many of them stranded here after whites and middle-class blacks fled in waves — will not share in any renaissance as long as only 10 percent of rising high school seniors score “college ready” on reading tests.
“We’ll either invest in our own children and prepare them to fill these jobs, or I suppose maybe people will migrate from other places in the country to fill them,” said Thomas F. Stallworth III, a former state representative who steered the passage of the 2014 legislation that paved Detroit’s way out of bankruptcy. “If that’s the case, we are still left with this underbelly of generational poverty with no clear path out.”
Ana Rivera with her son Omar, a fourth grader. He and his older brother have attended several charter schools. Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Creating Competition, and ‘Replicating Failure’

The 1993 state law permitting charter schools was not brought on by academic or financial crisis in Detroit — those would come later — but by a free-market-inclined governor, John Engler. An early warrior against public employee unions, he embraced the idea of creating schools that were publicly financed but independently run to force public schools to innovate.
To throw the competition wide open, Michigan allowed an unusually large number of institutions, more than any other state, to create charters: public school districts, community colleges and universities. It gave those institutions a financial incentive: a 3 percent share of the dollars that go to the charter schools. And only they — not the governor, not the state commissioner or board of education — could shut down failing schools.
For-profit companies seized on the opportunity; they now operate about 80 percent of charters in Michigan, far more than in any other state. The companies and those who grant the charters became major lobbying forces for unfettered growth of the schools, as did some of the state’s biggest Republican donors.
Sometimes, they were one and the same, as with J. C. Huizenga, a Grand Rapids entrepreneur who founded Michigan’s largest charter school operator, the for-profit National Heritage Academies. Two of the biggest players in Michigan politics, Betsy and Dick DeVos — she the former head of the state Republican Party, he the heir to the Amway fortune and a 2006 candidate for governor — established the Great Lakes Education Project, which became the state’s most pugnacious protector of the charter school prerogative.
Even as Michigan and Detroit continued to hemorrhage residents, the number of schools grew. The state has nearly 220,000 fewer students than it did in 2003, but more than 100 new charter schools.
As elsewhere across the country, charters concentrated in urban areas, particularly Detroit, where the public schools had been put under state control in 1999. In 2009, it was found to be the lowest-performing urban school district on national tests.
Operators were lining up to get into the city, and in 2011, after a conservative wave returned the governor’s office and the Legislature to Republican control for the first time in eight years, the Legislature abolished a cap that had limited the number of charter schools that universities could create to 150.
Some charter school backers pushed for a so-called smart cap that would allow only successful charters to expand. But they could not agree on what success should look like, and ultimately settled for assurances from lawmakers that they could add quality controls after the cap was lifted.
In fact, the law repealed a longstanding requirement that the State Department of Education issue yearly reports monitoring charter school performance.
At the same time, the law included a provision that seemed to benefit Mr. Huizenga, whose company profits from buying buildings and renting them back to the charters it operates. Earlier that year he had lost a tax appeal in which he argued that a for-profit company should not have to pay taxes on properties leased to schools. The new lawgranted for-profit charter companies the exemption he had sought.
Just as universities were allowed to charter more schools, Gov. Rick Snyder created a state-run district, with new charters, to try to turn around the city’s worst schools. Detroit was soon awash in choice, but not quality.
Twenty-four charter schools have opened in the city since the cap was lifted in 2011. Eighteen charters whose existing schools were at or below the district’s dismal performance expanded or opened new schools.
A creative writing class at the Academy of Public Leadership, part of Frank Cody High School. The academy’s principal has tried to foster a “college-going culture.” Joshua Lott for The New York Times
The charter school where Ana Rivera sent her two sons, Cesar Chavez Academy, added a second elementary school, even though its existing one fell below 98 percent of schools on the most recent state rankings, in 2014. The Leona Group, the Arizona-based for-profit operator that runs it, also runs some of the worst-performing schools in Detroit. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, considered the gold standard of measurement by charter school supporters across the country, found that students in the company’s schools grew less academically than students in the neighboring traditional public schools.
Ms. Rivera, herself the product of a failing Detroit public high school, knew none of that when she chose the school for her sons. “I had no idea of the education system,” she said. She presumed it was better because it was a charter; it did not get the bad press the public schools do about gangs and violence.
Saginaw Valley State University, which chartered Cesar Chavez Academy, defended its decision to allow the school to expand, arguing that many of the students come in without English as a first language, and do better as they move into high school.
“They trend positively academically throughout that system,” David Lewis, the director of the university’s charter school office, said. The Stanford data is national and “is not reflective,” he said, of Cesar Chavez.
With about $1.1 billion in state tax dollars going to charter schools, those that grant the charters get about $33 million. Those institutions are often far from the schools; one, Bay Mills Community College, is in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly 350 miles away — as far from Detroit as Portland, Me., is from New York City.
Nationally, some charter school groups praise Michigan for allowing so many institutions to grant charters. But the practice has also allowed bad schools to languish: When universities have threatened to close them, other universities have granted another charter.
By 2015, a federal review of a grant application for Michigan charter schools found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the worst-performing 5 percent of public schools statewide. The number of charters on the list had doubled from 2010 to 2014.
“People here had so much confidence in choice and choice alone to close the achievement gap,” said Amber Arellano, the executive director of the Education Trust Midwest, which advocates higher academic standards. “Instead, we’re replicating failure.”

A Daunting Landscape

Dawn Wilson’s four oldest children have attended between five and seven schools each — not uncommon in Detroit — moving among charter schools, traditional schools, private religious schools and suburban districts that take Detroit students, and the dollars that follow them.
She drives her children 130 miles a week to school — down from 200 last year, now that one daughter lives with another family in a suburb to attend private school. In between, she works as an entertainer for children’s parties. (“Kuddles the Klown,” she answers her cellphone.)
“Who else has time to take their kids to all these places to try to find quality education?” she asked.
Conflict with a teacher she found disrespectful prompted her to pull her children from one charter. One daughter spent six months at another, but returned to the Christian school she had attended earlier because there were so many fights.

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Deniqua Robinson, center, waited with two of her children at a bus stop early one morning in May. One of her children, in Catholic school, is fined when he arrives late. Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Then, at a bus stop for the private school, her daughter was recruited for a charter that promised college seminars and dual enrollment at local colleges — and rewarded her for enrolling with a raffle ticket for a $50 gift card.
With all the new schools, Detroit has roughly 30,000 more seats, charter and traditional public, than it needs. The competition to get students to school on count day — the days in October and February when the head count determines how much money the state sends each school — can resemble a political campaign. Schools buy radio ads and billboards, sponsor count day pizza parties and carnivals. They plant rows of lawn signs along city streets to recruit students, only to have other schools pull those up and stake their own.
A few weeks before the February count day two years ago, Detroit Public Schools sent a letter to families at a school in the state-run district, claiming, falsely, that their children had been reassigned to a public school. The state district cried foul — then copied the trick before the next count day.
It can be a forbidding landscape for families trying to enroll their children, particularly in a city where, historically, federal statistics show that nearly half the adults are not literate enough to function effectively in everyday life.
There are high-performing elite public schools that require entrance exams. A step below are some that require applications. Then come the neighborhood schools.
Then there are charter schools, which are supposed to accept students by lottery. But the most selective often have lengthy applications, requiring students to submit test results and official documents or give their history of disciplinary problems or special education.
Some schedule enrollment periods in January, even though most parents do not think about where to send their children until May. In a report commissioned by Excellent Schools Detroit, a nonprofit that has pushed for all schools to join a universal enrollment system, the director of one charter management company explained that his school published the required advertisement for its enrollment period in newspapers it knew would not be read by most Detroit families.
The more successful schools are those — charter or public — that are more selective. Detroit Public Schools, meanwhile, educates most of the city’s special education students, including Ms. Wilson’s youngest son, the only one of her children who has not changed schools several times.
Charter schools are concentrated downtown, with its boom in renovation and wealthier residents. With only 1,894 high school age students, there are 11 high schools. Meanwhile, northwest Detroit — where it seems every other house is boarded up, burned or abandoned — has nearly twice the number of high school age students, 3,742, and just three high schools. The northeastern part of the city is even more of an education desert: 6,018 high school age students and two high schools.
In a city of 140 square miles, transportation adds another layer to school selection. Few schools offer busing. And Detroit, long defined by the auto industry, never invested much in public transportation.
A mile and a half to school can become an hour-and-a-half journey, as it is for Deniqua Robinson and her three youngest children.
Morning is often still dark when they catch a 6:10 a.m. bus around the corner from their housing project near the MotorCity Casino Hotel. They wake by 5:30 a.m., because if they miss the 6:10, the next bus will not come for an hour, and the Catholic school her son attends fines him for being late. Some days her youngest daughter is lugging her cello. (“It’s like another person,” Ms. Robinson said.)
Deniqua Robinson, center, and two of her children rode a city bus to school. A mile and a half to school can become an hour-and-a-half trip for the family. Joshua Lott for The New York Times
They change buses once, waiting at a weedy lot across the street from the old Kronk Gym, once a training ground for boxers like Thomas Hearns — a Hall of Famer known as “the Hitman” — and now a concrete shell covered in graffiti. In a safer neighborhood, they could walk the last distance. But two years ago, Ms. Robinson’s two middle children watched a dog maul a teacher after it ran out of an abandoned house across from the charter they attended nearby.
“I can identify the engines of what’s behind me, because I’m so on guard,” Ms. Robinson said. “I have to know what’s going on around me so nobody’s behind me trying to hit me upside the head and rob us.”
Two Mondays a month, her son’s school requires him to participate in a work-study program after school — or pay $100 for every session he misses. He has been working at the city’s tourism bureau and loves the experience, but getting him there has disrupted the family’s bus routine. So Ms. Robinson has him on a waiting list for a charter school downtown that would not require him to work.
She estimates that her children miss 10 to 15 days a year because the buses do not come on time or it is too cold to wait. Some days she cannot afford the fare; a single mother, she supplements her child support payments by redeeming bottles for 10 cents each.
“I often describe this whole environment as ‘The Hunger Games’ for schools,” said Tonya Allen, president of the Skillman Foundation, which invests $17 million a year to try to improve the lives of Detroit’s poorest children. “You get these kids who are moving three or four times in the elementary school years. I did that, but it was because my mother couldn’t keep her rent together. Here, it’s being incentivized.”

‘A Caste System’ of Schools

That transience can prevent schools that want to be good from getting there. When there is always another option, families are inclined to take it.
Many left a state-run school after New Paradigm for Education, one of the city’s most successful charter school companies, took it over and raised academic demands, imposing requirements that are standard in suburban districts, like a parent’s signature on a nightly reading log.
“Parents have been victims for generations of failing schools,” said Machion Jackson, the company’s president and chief executive. “If you don’t know what high expectations look like, you become frustrated.”
After about 150 students left one of the charter schools that Dawn Wilson’s children attended, angry that the management company had changed, the school cut teacher salaries by 20 percent and combined grades in classrooms. Even then it did not meet its budget.
Renee Burgess, the president of the new management company, Equity Education, said that every year about 35 percent of students in the company’s three schools do not come back.
“Imagine if G.M. had to hire 35 percent of its work force again every year,” she said.
She employs a full-time recruiter and expects principals to spend most of their time from April to October raising enrollment. Every staff member must make at least one personal contact a week with students over the summer to encourage them to return.
“In a system that is more stable, you wouldn’t need to invest in that,” Ms. Burgess said. “You could invest those resources in another instructional coach, in more development and training for first-year teachers.”
The former Daniel J. Healy International Academy, which was part of Detroit Public Schools.Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Like others elsewhere, charter schools receive roughly the same per-pupil state dollars as public schools. But in Detroit, it is about $7,300 a year — roughly half what New York or Boston schools get, and about $3,500 less than charters in Denver or Milwaukee.
“We’re spreading the money across more and more schools; it’s no wonder that every school struggles,” said Dan Varner, the chief executive of Excellent Schools Detroit. “They’re all under-resourced.”
The hardest places to improve are the large urban public high schools like Frank Cody High School.
Just off the retail-starved stretch of Joy Road that gangs call the “Skudd Zone,” where the McDonald’s is known as the Murder Mac, Cody defines big city high schools in the worst way. Its concrete fortress occupies four square blocks, with metal detectors and security guards at the entrance and, inside, employees wearing boots in hot weather to keep mice from their ankles.
For a time, it seemed competition might work as it was intended at Cody.
Administrators visited charters in New York and Chicago to learn best practices and broke down the school into three smaller academies, each with about 100 students per grade.
The Academy of Public Leadership, on the second floor, copied practices many charters use to create what they call a “college-going culture.” College pennants line classroom walls; signs in hallways tally scholarship money students have won.
The academy’s principal, Johnathon Matthews, eliminated security guards in the hallways in favor of “cultural facilitators,” more like parents or older siblings. Every student, he pledged, would be able to identify three caring adults at the school and have a teacher’s cellphone number to call if the bus did not come or the electricity was turned off.
Graffiti stopped. Gang activity calmed down so much that the owner of the gas station next to the “Murder Mac” asked Mr. Matthews if the school had closed. ACT scores nudged up. And Mr. Matthews started thinking about adding counselors who would not just get students into college, but follow them through to completion.
Then came this year’s senior class.
Students needed 23 credits to graduate in June, but many had just 13 or 14 by January. One had just one and a half credits.
At age 19, they join the ranks of “overage, undercredited” students and have to transfer to alternative schools. The graduating class started in September with 87 students, but just 52 received diplomas.
Theirs was the class of students that started high school in the years of heavy churn — after the Legislature lifted the charter cap, the state created its new district and the city closed other public high schools as students fled to charters. By the time they arrived as sophomores or juniors, many students had three or four high schools on their transcripts and often gaps in their education: With no central record system, it takes time for schools or parents to track down the forms they need to re-enroll.
In the six weeks between February count day and the end of March this year, the school had 34 new students, some pushed from charter schools, some from suburban choice districts.
Teachers at the Academy of Public Leadership argue with Mr. Matthews about taking all comers, complaining that the school is judged for the performance of students who show up just weeks before state exams.
Students between classes at the Academy of Public Leadership. Joshua Lott for The New York Times
“We have the savior of Detroit here as our principal,” said Tracey Penick, the college counselor. “As admirable as it is, it’s very stressful. When you get a child at this stage in the game, it’s because they’re a problem.”
Lately, Mr. Matthews has been talking to a large bank about bringing a job training program to the school. The bank expressed concern about the low performance of students, and asked whether Cody might become an application school. It is hard for him not to be tempted.
“The hidden ways to control who you get, that’s where I really frown upon competition,” he said. “It’s created a caste system, and Cody has the untouchables. It’s separate and unequal.”

A Bipartisan Solution

This winter, as Detroit Public Schools ran out of money, Mayor Mike Duggan, a pro-charter Democrat now in his third year, argued that the traditional schools needed a solution that would address the problems posed, and faced, by charter schools.
He proposed an appointed Detroit Education Commission to determine which neighborhoods most needed new schools and set standards to close failing schools and ensure that only high performing or promising ones could replicate.
Political conditions seemed promising.
Backed by a coalition of philanthropies and civic leaders, the teachers’ union and some charter school operators, the mayor got a Republican senator from western Michigan to sponsor legislation, including the commission. Governor Snyder, distracted and shamed by the scandal over the lead poisoning in the water supply of the mostly black and state-controlled city of Flint, was in no position to defend the state control of majority-black Detroit Public Schools, and supported the proposal.
In February, four prominent Detroit Republican business executives, including two sons of former governors, testified in support of the plan before the Legislature, arguing that 20 years had proved that the free market alone is not enough to improve schools. One of them, Mr. Romney, likened schools to a public utility.
“This is a public service, this isn’t just a business,” he said in a recent interview. “I don’t believe in the free market for police or fire.”
But the Great Lakes Education Project and other charter school lobbying groups warned that the commission would favor public schools over charters and argued instead to kill off the Detroit Public Schools.
In the waning days of the legislative session, House Republicans offered a deal: $617 million to pay off the debt of the Detroit Public Schools, but no commission. Lawmakers were forced to take it to prevent the city school system from going bankrupt.
For parents, the search remains for good schools — charter or public.
After her experience with the failing charter school in southwest Detroit, Ms. Rivera moved her younger son, Omar, to another charter nearby. It has had three principals in the three years since it opened. Nearly 20 teachers have left, and in January, the Wisconsin-based company that operates the school announced it was leaving.
So for fifth grade she has enrolled him in a Detroit Public School, where instruction will be split between Spanish and English. “I’m a little fed up with the charters,” she said.
If this doesn’t work, she said, she will send him to a school outside the city. Sometimes, she thinks of moving the whole family to the suburbs, following her husband’s landscaping business. But like many in this striving city, she is rooting for its comeback. “We can still be part of this new Detroit.”
And Omar, though he made honor roll this year, fears a move. “The teachers teach good there,” he said. “I’d be so far behind.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Heralded Choice Fails to Fix Detroit’s Schools. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

RELATED COVERAGE

Crumbling, Destitute Schools Threaten Detroit’s Recovery 

Flint’s Former Manager Resigns as Head of Detroit Schools 

Teacher Protest Shuts Almost All Detroit Public Schools 

Charter Schools Suspend Black and Disabled Students More, Study Says 


Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President

By RICHARD C. PADDOCK, ERIC LIPTON, ELLEN BARRY, ROD NORDLAND, DANNY HAKIM and SIMON ROMERO
Trump Tower in the Makati City district of Manila is being developed by Donald J. Trump’s business partner Jose E.B. Antonio, who has just been named the Philippines’ special trade envoy to the United States. Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times
MANILA — On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for.
In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.
After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect’s children, who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr. Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works, including Trump-branded resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie Antonio said.
“We will continue to give you products that you can enjoy and be proud of,” the elder Mr. Antonio, one of the richest men in the Philippines, told the 500 friends, employees and customers gathered for his star-studded celebration in Manila.
Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its relationship with the United States and the president-elect — is hardly inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table.
Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a separation” from the United States and has called for American troops to exit the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting criticism from the Obama administration.
Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite.
“It is uncharted territory, really in the history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and before that at the Defense Department.

The Trump Brand Around the World

Donald J. Trump has business interests in at least 20 countries, in addition to extensive
hotel and real estate holdings in the United States, according to an analysis of his
financial disclosure report. Each dot represents a city where he has at least one enterprise.
U.A.E.ArgentinaAzerbaijanBermudaBrazilCanadaChinaDominican RepublicBritain (Scotland)IndonesiaIndiaIrelandSouth KoreaSt. MartinPanamaPhilippinesQatarSaudi ArabiaTurkeyUruguayU.S.
The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.
In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Mr. Trump boasted again about the global reach of his business — and his family’s ability to keep it running after he takes office.
“I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world,” Mr. Trump said, adding later: “I don’t care about my company. It doesn’t matter. My kids run it.”
In a written statement, his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said Mr. Trump and his family were committed to addressing any issues related to his financial holdings.
“Vetting of various structures and immediate transfer of the business remains a top priority for both President-elect Trump, his adult children and his executives,” she said.
But a review by The Times of these business dealings identified a menu of the kinds of complications that could create a running source of controversy for Mr. Trump, as well as tensions between his priorities as president and the needs and objectives of his companies.
In Brazil, for example, the beachfront Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro — one of Mr. Trump’s many branding deals, in which he does not have an equity stake — is part of a broad investigation by a federal prosecutor who is examining whether illicit commissions and bribes resulted in apparent favoritism by two pension funds that invested in the project.
Several of Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures in India — where he has more projects underway than in any location outside North America — are being built through companies with family ties to India’s most important political party. This makes it more likely that Indian government officials will do special favors benefiting Mr. Trump’s projects, including pressuring state-owned banks to extend favorable loans.
In Ireland and Scotland, executives from Mr. Trump’s golf courses have been waging two separate battles with local officials. The most recent centers on the Trump Organization’s plans to build a flood-prevention sea wall at the course on the Irish coast. Some environmentalists say the wall could destroy an endangered snail’s habitat — a dispute that will soon involve the president of the United States.
And in Turkey, officials including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a religiously conservative Muslim, demanded that Mr. Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. More recently, after Mr. Trump came to the defense of Mr. Erdogan — suggesting that he had the right to crack down harshly on dissidents after a failed coup — the calls for action against Trump Towers have stopped, fueling worries that Mr. Trump’s policies toward Turkey might be shaped by his commercial interests.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged a conflict of interest in Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” he said during a radio interview last year with Stephen K. Bannon, the Breitbart News executive who has since been designated his chief White House strategist. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one. It’s two.”
These tangled ties already have some members of Congress — including at least one Republican representative — calling on Mr. Trump to provide more information on his international operations, or perhaps for a congressional inquiry into them.
“You rightly criticized Hillary for Clinton Foundation,” Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, said in a Twitter message on Monday. “If you have contracts w/foreign govts, it’s certainly a big deal, too. #DrainTheSwamp”
David J. Kramer, who served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor during the Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s financial entanglements could undermine decades of efforts by Democratic and Republican presidents to promote government transparency — and to use the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to stop contractors from paying bribes to secure government work abroad.
“This will make it a little harder to be able to go out and proselytize around these things,” Mr. Kramer said.
Even if Mr. Trump and his family seek no special advantages from foreign governments, officials overseas may feel compelled to help the Trump family by, say, accelerating building permits or pushing more business to one of the new president’s hotels or golf courses, according to several former State Department officials.
“The working assumption on behalf of all these foreign government officials will be that there is an advantage to doing business with the Trump organization,” said Michael H. Fuchs, who was until recently deputy assistant secretary at the bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs. “They will think it will ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration. And this will significantly complicate United States foreign policy and our relationships around the world.”
At the same time, Mr. Fuchs said, American diplomats in countries where Mr. Trump’s companies operate, fearful of a rebuke from Washington, may be reluctant to take steps that could frustrate business partners or political allies.
Another question is, who will be responsible for security at the Trump Towers around the world, especially in the Middle East, which terrorism experts say may now become more appealing targets as symbols of American capitalism built in the name of the president?
What is clear is that there has been very little division, in the weeks since the election, between Mr. Trump’s business interests and his transition effort, with the president-elect or his family greeting real estate partners from India and the Philippines in his office and Mr. Trump raising concerns about his golf course in Scotland with a prominent British politician. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is in charge of planning and development of the Trump Organization’s global network of hotels, has joined in conversations with at least three world leaders — of Turkey, Argentina and Japan — having access that could help her expand the brand worldwide.
Mr. Trump, in the interview with The Times on Tuesday, acknowledged that his move to the Oval Office could help enrich his family. He cited his new hotel a few blocks from the White House, which the Trump Organization has urged diplomats to consider patronizing when in town to meet the president or his team.
Federal law does not prevent Mr. Trump from taking actions that could benefit him and his family financially; the president is exempt from most conflict-of-interest laws. But the Constitution, through what is called the emoluments clause, appears to prohibit him from taking payments or gifts from a foreign government entity, a standard that some legal experts say he may violate by renting space in Trump Tower in New York to the Bank of China or if he hosts foreign diplomats in one of his hotels.
“I mean it could be that occupancy at that hotel will be because, psychologically, occupancy at that hotel will be probably a more valuable asset now than it was before, O.K.? The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before. I can’t help that, but I don’t care,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “The only thing that matters to me is running our country.”
Robert D. Blackwill, a former National Security Council member who also served as ambassador to India during the Bush administration, said Mr. Trump still had a chance to demonstrate that he could manage these challenges once he was sworn in.
“Let’s listen and not prejudge,” said Mr. Blackwill, a Republican who was so critical of Mr. Trump that he endorsed Hillary Clinton. “I want to see what he does as president.”
Mr. Trump’s project in Rio de Janeiro. Anselmo Henrique Cordeiro Lopes, a Brazilian federal prosecutor, opened an investigation in the weeks before the American election into $40 million in investments made by two relatively small Brazilian pension funds in the Trump Hotel Rio.Lianne Milton for The New York Times

BRAZIL

Nation Under Pressure, Ventures Under Scrutiny
Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s oldest son, gushed with triumphalism when he announced a deal in 2014 to attach the family name to the Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro, a lavish 171-room beachfront project featuring cavernous suites with private plunge pools and a 4,000-square-foot nightclub.
“This is an exciting time to develop our first project in South America and the perfect location to do so,” the younger Mr. Trump (his brother Eric is also involved in the family business) said at the time.
But just two years later, the venture is embroiled in a criminal investigation in Brazil, pointing to unfulfilled promises that are casting a pall over both the Trump business empire and the president-elect in their dealings in Latin America’s largest country.
Anselmo Henrique Cordeiro Lopes, a crusading federal prosecutor in the capital, Brasília, opened an investigation in the weeks before the American election into $40 million in investments made by two relatively small Brazilian pension funds in the Trump Hotel Rio.
The Trump hotel inquiry is looking at why the funds — Serpro, which invests on behalf of retirees of a state-controlled information technology firm, and Igeprev, which manages the pensions of public employees of the sparsely populated Tocantins State — put so much of their capital into the venture, which is owned by Mr. Trump’s Brazilian partner, LSH Barra.
Back in 2014, the hotel might have seemed like a good deal. Brazil was about to host the World Cup soccer tournament that year, while Rio was preparing to be the venue for the 2016 Summer Olympics. At the same time, Rio, the nerve center of Brazil’s energy industry, had been bolstered by large offshore oil discoveries.
But Brazil’s economy began to weaken in 2014, undermined by falling commodities prices, colossal graft scandals and political instability that culminated in the ouster this year of President Dilma Rousseff, who was replaced by her vice president, Michel Temer. The result: Brazil is still grappling with its most severe economic crisis in decades.
The hotel officially opened for the Olympics, but months later remains unfinished. The top floors of the property, whose design evokes a futuristic pyramid, are closed. Parts of the hotel still resemble a construction site, including the second floor, where pleasure-seekers were supposed to mingle in a nightclub overlooking the Atlantic.
The examination of the project by Mr. Lopes, the federal prosecutor, has already found a series of “highly suspicious” potential irregularities warranting a criminal investigation, according to court documents. “It is necessary to verify if the favoritism shown by the pension funds to LSH and the Trump Organization was due to the payment of illicit commissions and bribes,” Mr. Lopes said in documents filed in October.
In his filings, Mr. Lopes said the size of the hotel investments relative to the overall holdings of the small pension funds reflected a highly unusual level of risk, especially for an unfinished venture that failed to capitalize fully on the demand for accommodations during the Olympics. Going further, Mr. Lopes positioned the inquiry within a broader investigation of public pension funds, pillars of the Brazilian economy that often work in tandem with large state-controlled banks and energy companies.
Mr. Trump first took interest in a Rio hotel venture in 2012, when Ivanka Trump was having lunch in Florida with Paulo Figueiredo Filho, a businessman who is a grandson of João Figueiredo, the last autocrat of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. The younger Mr. Figueiredo spearheaded the hotel venture until recently.
In a statement, Mr. Trump’s Brazilian partner, LSH, said it was innocent of any wrongdoing in connection with the investments by the pension funds, and was cooperating with the criminal inquiry.
Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, said in a statement issued Friday that the investigation was not targeting Mr. Trump or his company — given that it does not own the hotel — and “has no knowledge whatsoever regarding any governmental inquiry.”
The investigation of the Trump projects is unfolding at an awkward time for the Brazilian authorities. Foreign Minister José Serra, Brazil’s top diplomat, publicly declared in July that a Trump presidency would be a “nightmare.” Although President Temer has formally congratulated Mr. Trump on his victory in a letter, he is still among world leaders who have not yet spoken by telephone with the president-elect.
Even if Brazil’s executive branch actively tries to seek warmer relations with Mr. Trump, officials will face obstacles if they try to quell the investigation. Brazil differs from some other countries in Latin America where presidents can easily exert pressure on prosecutors and judges, with the judiciary steadily growing more independent.
“Brazilian diplomats could try to avoid the problem of referring to the investigation when dealing with the Trump administration, but that’s about all they can do,” said Maurício Santoro, a political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “This is something that could hang over relations between the two countries for years.”
Trump Tower Mumbai is one of five Trump Organization projects in India, a country where connections between developers and officials are common. Asmita Parelkar for The New York Times

INDIA

Potential Pitfalls in Dual Roles
On the other side of the world, Donald Trump Jr. had other projects he was pushing.
In 2012, he flew into Mumbai for a brief meeting with the state’s chief minister at that time, hoping to salvage a residential tower representing the Trump Organization’s first planned project there. He was hoping the chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, would intervene on his behalf to get the permission needed.
The participants recall the meeting differently: Mr. Trump’s partner, Harresh Mehta of Rohan Lifescapes, said development regulations had changed, leaving the project in limbo, and they hoped Mr. Chavan could formalize a policy so that the project could continue. Mr. Chavan said that in a 30-minute meeting, Mr. Trump and his partner were “requesting a concession that could not be given.”
By the end of the meeting, in any case, it was fairly clear that the younger Mr. Trump’s presence had not worked any magic. The project was shelved soon after.
“He thought the name was so big, we would bend backwards to satisfy him, but that was not the case,” Mr. Chavan said.
Kalpesh Mehta, managing partner of Tribeca Developers of Mumbai, the Trump Organization’s development partner in India, confirmed that Donald Trump Jr. had met with the chief minister, but disputed the claim by Mr. Chavan that he had sought a special favor.
“The notion that a request was made by Donald Jr. to waive any regulations is absolutely false,” Mr. Mehta said in the statement, which was issued Friday. “The Trump Organization does not get involved in the regulatory aspects and/or interacting with government officials related to its projects in India.”
This example, analysts here say, points to a potentially serious ethical hazard for a United States president who is also a real estate mogul in India, with five projects underway. Mr. Trump was operating much like other developers in India, who cozy up to politicians — officially or unofficially — to push projects through the bureaucracy.
Often, they must obtain as many as 60 permissions and building permits from government officials, including bureaucrats “whose main goal in life is to attract rent,” said Saurabh Mukherjea, the chief executive of institutional equities at Ambit Capital, a leading investment bank in India.
One of Mr. Trump’s projects, Trump Towers Pune, is in fact under investigation by local authorities after another builder alleged that one of its permits was fraudulent. Panchshil Realty has disputed that accusation, saying the permit in question was not required for the construction. The very nature of the country’s real estate business, however, underscores larger concerns about potential damage to American efforts to discourage corruption in business abroad.
In India, real estate is the main vehicle politicians and businessmen have used to invest so-called black money, on which taxes have not been paid. In cities, where land is scarce and extraordinarily valuable, special favors from top political leaders can lead to windfall profits, and negotiations between developers and officials are informal affairs.
It is so routine for developers to pay bribes at every step of the approval process that many bureaucrats have informal rate sheets showing exactly how much must be paid to each official.
Politicians not only pressure the bureaucracy to approve their pet projects, sometimes even when they are against local regulations, they also squeeze government banks to give out favorable loans.
Top officials might “think in some way the U.S. president will help them,” and “can put in a friendly word with the banks” to extend loans for around 8 percent interest, rather than the characteristic 15 percent, said Vikas S. Kasliwal, the chief executive officer and vice chairman of Shree Ram Urban Infrastructure.
“If the son goes himself, if the son is willing to go and meet the prime minister of India, or the urban development minister, that is a very big thing,” he said. “They will think the president is meeting them.”
Donald J. Trump’s real estate partners from India met with him in New York on Nov. 15 as the presidential transition was underway.
Another pitfall is that Donald Trump’s partners in major projects are, in some cases, politicians themselves. Most major Indian developers have some sort of alignment, direct or indirect, with regional political leaders, who can assist in acquiring the necessary permits.
Mr. Trump’s first projects in India, which are expected to increase in number over the next year, follow this pattern: His partner for Trump Towers Pune is Panchshil Realty,owned by a family that has a close and longstanding family relationship with one of the state’s most powerful politicians, Sharad Pawar, the head of the small but influential Nationalist Congress Party. (Mr. Trump was photographed — in an image distributed on Twitter but since taken down — with executives from Panchshil Realty on Nov. 15.) Mr. Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, a member of Parliament, holds a 2 percent share in Panchshil’s parent company, she said in an interview.
Mr. Trump’s partner in the Trump Tower Mumbai is the Lodha Group, founded by Mangal Prabhat Lodha, vice president of the Bharatiya Janata Party — currently the governing party in Parliament — in Maharashtra State. The Lodha Group has already negotiated with the United States government; it announced a landmark purchase of a property, known as the Washington House, on tony Altamount Road, from the American government for 3.75 billion rupees, almost $70 million.
His partner in an office complex in Gurgaon, near New Delhi, is IREO, whose managing director, Lalit Goyal, is the brother-in-law of a Bharatiya Janata member of Parliament, Sudhanshu Mittal. Mr. Mittal, in an interview, has denied having any connection with the real estate company.
Suraj Hegde, the secretary of the All India Congress Committee, a national body of Indian National Congress party members, said he was troubled by the dual roles Mr. Trump and his family would play in Indian affairs — particularly given real estate’s important role in India’s fast-growing economy, and the clout the United States has on the world stage.
“Basically this is the globalization of lobbying across countries, which then tries to establish monopoly over real estate,” Mr. Hegde said in an interview. He added that he was already calling for an independent parliamentary investigation of such maneuvers, including Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures in India.
“Establishing monopoly at the cost of small players by business connections to Mr. Trump is very worrisome,” he said. “This is not at all healthy for a democracy.”
The Trump Towers Istanbul. One contains offices, the other luxury apartments, with a shopping mall connecting them. Monique Jaques for The New York Times

TURKEY

Mixing Business, Politics and Islam
Mr. Trump’s business interests in Turkey are emblematic of two weighty contradictions for a businessman turned politician.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump railed against moving American jobs overseas and promised to do something about it. As a businessman, he invested in a partnership with a furniture company here, making luxury furniture in the firm’s factory in western Anatolia and selling it in the United States and worldwide — a partnership that apparently remains active.
Mr. Trump the candidate inveighed against Muslims and threatened at least a temporary ban on their entering the United States. Mr. Trump the businessman has in recent years had some of his biggest expansions overseas, including in Muslim countries like Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and even Azerbaijan.
One of the most visible Muslim-world symbols of that contradiction is in the bustling commercial district of Sisli, on the European side of Istanbul, where a pair of cantilevered modernist towers, nearly 40 stories high, bear Mr. Trump’s name.
Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan, visited Trump Towers Istanbul — one holds luxury apartments and one office space, with a shopping mall connecting the two — after their completion in 2012, with Mr. Trump and Ivanka Trump appearing as part of the celebration the next day.
“We look forward to this being the first of many world-class developments undertaken together in Istanbul and throughout Turkey,” Mr. Trump said in a statement issued during the visit.
Donald and Ivanka Trump visited Istanbul in 2012 after the completion of Trump Towers Istanbul.YouTube
Beyond real estate, there is the Trump Organization’s 2013 partnershipwith Dorya International, a luxury furniture maker with a factory in Manisa Province, near the city of Izmir, to build pieces sold under the Trump Home Collection.
But the presidential campaign demonstrated how the goals of his business and politics ventures can come into direct conflict, particularly once Mr. Trump in December proposed barring Muslims from entering the United States, implying that all Muslims might pose a terrorist threat.
“We regret and condemn Trump’s discriminatory remarks,” Bulent Kural, the manager of the Trump Towers Mall, wrote in an email to a reporter at the time, as he announced that the mall was considering removing Mr. Trump’s name. “Such statements bear no value and are products of a mind that does not understand Islam, a peace religion, at all. Our reaction has been directly expressed to the Trump family. We are reviewing the legal dimension of our relation with the Trump brand.”
Mr. Erdogan weighed in on the issue, too, saying, “The ones who put that brand on their building should immediately remove it.”
Mr. Trump’s next move helped re-establish his standing. After a failed coup in Turkey in July, he defended Mr. Erdogan’s crackdown on dissidents, saying in an interview with The Times that the United States has to “fix our own mess” before trying to alter the behavior of other nations.
“I don’t think we have a right to lecture,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “Look at what is happening in our country,” he added, referring to violence in the United States. “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?”
In between his two remarks — one infuriating the president of Turkey, the other comforting him — the calls for the renaming of the Trump Towers Mall ended. But much more is at stake in relations between the United States and Turkey than a shopping mall and two skyscrapers.
Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, Mr. Trump’s business associate at Trump Towers Istanbul, with Ivanka Trump and Mr. Trump. Trump Organization, via PR Newswire
Turkey is a key player in United States efforts to combat the Islamic State in the Middle East, and sits next door to Syria as the United States has armed rebel groups in an attempt to remove Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, from power.
The recent postelection telephone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan suggests that business and political roles will continue to be mixed.
According to a Turkish journalist, Amberin Zaman, writing in the independent online news outlet Diken, Mr. Trump told the Turkish leader that he and his daughter — who participated in the call — admired both Mr. Erdogan and Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, Mr. Trump’s business associate in the towers, whom he called “a close friend.”
Ms. Zaman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said no government officials had disputed her account of the conversation. “I’m of the opinion they were quite happy for this to be published,” she said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump declined to comment about the call.
Jennifer Harris, who served on the staff of the National Intelligence Council and on the State Department’s policy planning staff, said the twin hats that Mr. Trump and his family would be wearing in Turkey would almost certainly complicate the jobs of American diplomats there.
“It makes me wonder if the Trump administration will use the power of the state to help political or business allies and hurt political adversaries and business rivals,” she said.
Jose E.B. Antonio, Mr. Trump’s partner on a tower project in Manila, second from left, with his sons at a company celebration there on Thursday. Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times
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