New report blows the lid off of charter school fraud and mismanagement.

Courtesy of Salon:  

The report, co-authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, makes the point that the problem of charter school waste, fraud and abuse, which it focuses on, is just one symptom of the underlying problem: inadequate regulation of charter schools. But it’s a massive symptom, which has so far received only fragmentary coverage.

The report takes its title from a section of a report to Congress by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General, a report that took note of “a steady increase in the number of charter school complaints” and warned that state level agencies were failing “to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds [were] properly used and accounted for.” The report found that “charter operator fraud and mismanagement is endemic to the vast majority of states that have passed a charter school law.” It organized the abuse into six basic categories, each of which is treated in its own section: 

• Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; 
• Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; 
• Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; 
• Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, 
• Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, under the first category, crooked charter school officials displayed a wide range of lavish, compulsive or tawdry tastes. Examples include: 

• Joel Pourier, former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota, who embezzled $1.38 million from 2003 to 2008. He used the money on houses, cars, and trips to strip clubs. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Star Tribune, the school “lacked funds for field trips, supplies, computers and textbooks.” 

• Nicholas Trombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is accused of diverting funds from it for his private purchases. He allegedly bought houses, a Florida Condominium and a $300,000 plane, hid income from the IRS, formed businesses that billed even though they had done no work, and took $550,000 in kickbacks for a laptop computer contract. 

• A regular financial audit in 2009 of the Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans uncovered theft of $660,000 by Kelly Thompson, the school’s business manager. Thompson admitted that from shortly after she assumed the position until she was fired 15 months later, she diverted funds to herself in order to support her gambling in local casinos. 

Others spent their stolen money on everything from a pair of jet skis for $18,000 to combined receipts of $228 for cigarettes and beer, to over $30,000 on personal items from Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Coach and Tommy Hilfiger. But the real damage came from the theft of resources for children’s future. 

“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” said Sabrina Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education. “School funding is too scarce as it is; we can hardly afford to waste the resources we do have on people who would prioritize exotic vacations over school supplies or food for children. We also can’t continue to rely on the media or isolated whistle-blowers to identify these problems. We need to have rules in place that can systematically weed out incompetent or unscrupulous charter operators before they pose a risk to students and taxpayers.”

Republicans are always going on about how everything is better when done by the private sector, however if the purpose of providing a service is to make money, then the possibility that fraud will occur is virtually a guarantee. 

In the meantime these schools rob funds from public education, thereby undermining its ability to educate our children, and providing the evidence of failure that the conservatives then use to justify the further cutting of funding and the promotion of more charter and private schools.

 Do you see what the Republicans did here?

They attack education, offer reforms that make it much worse, insist on vouchers to send children to private and charter schools in response, which sends taxpayer money away from public schools and toward private ones, which eventually reduces the number of public school teachers, thereby draining money from the teacher's union (NEA), and removing the influence of an organization that often backs, and funds, progressive candidates.

Of course this in turn makes it easier for conservatives to win seats, and further cut funding from public education.

In other words NONE of this push by conservatives has anything to do with education, and EVERYTHING to do with political power and influence.