Hustlers Cash In On Charter School Craze
Colin McEnroe
If I showed you the headline "Weak Charter School Laws Enable Scams, Insider Dealing," you'd probably assume it's the latest shoe to drop in the unfurling scandal of FUSE, the punch-drunk charter school group attempting to run schools in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and — coming this fall! — Baton Rouge, where folks are getting nervous reading all those Connecticut stories.
But relax. It's not FUSE. That headline is from the Detroit Free Press, and it chronicles patterns of double-dealing by Michigan charter school companies, like the one where two insiders from one charter company bought a parcel of land and sold it to their own school for $50,000 more, pocketing the difference.
But it could just as easily have been from Pennsylvania, home of at least three massive charter school scandals including the story of two charter school executives who diverted $860,000 from the school to prop up other private projects while the school went without textbooks and paychecks bounced.
Or Minnesota, where a charter school executive embezzled $1.3 million over five years to pay for a lavish lifestyle while the school canceled field trips and ran out of supplies.
Or California, Ohio, Arizona. This stuff is happening everywhere. The best master document is "Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse," by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education — but the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a similar report, and the Free Press just published a multi-part series documenting rip-offs and under-performance in Michigan charter schools.
The message is always the same: The essential concept behind the charter school movement is that, freed from the three Rs — restraints, rules and regulations — these schools could innovate and get the kinds of results that calcified, logy public schools could only dream about. And they do … sometimes.
But handing out uncountable millions to operators who would be given a free hand was also like putting a big sign out by the highway that says "Welcome Charlatans, Grifters, Credential-Fakers, Cherry-Pickers, Stat-Jukers, Cult of Personality Freaks and People Who Have No Business Running a Dairy Queen, Fraud, embezzlement in charter schools nationally resonate with problems in Connecticut - Courant.com:
