Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste
May 5, 2014
Students in a kindergarten classroom at North Valley Academy in Gooding, Idaho, wear red, white and blue shirts as part of their school uniform. The K-12 charter school is the first in Idaho to advertise itself as a patriotic choice for parents, with an emphasis on individual freedoms and free-market capitalism. (AP Photo/Jessie L. Bonner)
Charter school operators want to have it both ways. When they’re answering critics of school privatization, they say charter schools are public — they use public funds and provide students with a tuition-free education. But when it comes to transparency, they insist they have the same rights to privacy as any other private enterprise.
But a report released Monday by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy — two groups that oppose school privatization – presents evidence that inadequate oversight of the charter school industry hurts both kids and taxpayers.
Sabrina Joy Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education, told BillMoyers.com, “Our report shows that over $100 million has been lost to fraud and abuse in the charter industry, because there is virtually no proactive oversight system in place to thwart unscrupulous or incompetent charter operators before they cheat the public.” The actual amount of fraud and abuse the report uncovered totaled $136 million, and that was just in the 15 states they studied.
Diane Ravitch on school privatization.
According to the study, fraud and mismanagement of charter schools fall into six categories:
- Charter operators using public funds illegally — outright embezzlement
- Using tax dollars to illegally support other, non-educational businesses
- Mismanagement that put children in potential danger
- Charters illegally taking public dollars for services they didn’t provide
- Charter operators inflating their enrollment numbers to boost revenues
- General mismanagement of public funds
The report looks at problems in each of the 15 states it covers, with dozens of case studies. In some instances, charter operators used tax dollars to prop up Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste | Connecting the Dots | BillMoyers.com: