We need some good old investigative journalism like this, courtesy of the Akron Beacon Journal, here in Arizona.
No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.
A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.
Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.
And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.
To be fair, we do get some good investigative journalism here in Arizona, especially given how shrinking budgets have stretched reporters to the breaking point — some of it looking at education in general and charters in particular — but this angle is begging to be explored.
The article is chock full of interesting facts.
When private firms audited the charters, they only found misspending in one half of one percent of those they audited. The state’s audits found problems in 17 percent.
[The private audits] aren’t designed to detect fraud. They merely check revenues against expenses, ensuring tax dollars going in match receipts and cash balances.
Often, though, the receipts are unavailable.
“You have a system in Ohio, and everywhere else, where every single year charter school operators are getting audited. And every single year, those audits come up clean. It’s because they are not set up to catch fraud waste and abuse,” [Kyle Serrette, director of Education at the Center for Popular Democracy] said.
[snip]
And the difference between state and private auditors was profound: For every $1 private auditors found to be misspent, state officials found $102 in their audits.
Arizona’s regular charter school audits, like Ohio’s, are conducted by private companies.
A recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school spending problems in 15 states including Ohio. The study “detailed $200 million in waste, fraud and abuse.”
This is an accountability issue. Lots of charters in Arizona and elsewhere are spending their money properly and working hard to give their students good educations. Charters that are cheating the state and their students need to be rooted out and closed.
ARIZONA CONNECTION NOTE: A few days ago, I wrote about a perfectly legal scam being run by some Arizona charters with multiple sites. They take advantage of the state’s small school funding supplements by pretending each school is an independent entity and keeping their schools’ student numbers below 600. One of the groups of charters I spotlighted was Imagine Schools. The Arizona schools are part of a national chain that has had no end of problems in many states, including schools closed for poor performance. Well, it turns out five out of six board members at Imagine Columbus Primary Academy in Ohio quit, and the school may be shut down.
[T]he previous board “explored” closing the school with 150 students attending after clashing with Imagine Schools over several issues, including the academy’s $58,000-a-month lease.
The lease is with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools Inc., raising questions about a possible conflict of interest.
Board members complained that the $700,000 annual lease consumes too much of the school’s $1.3 million annual budget. According to the Franklin County auditor’s office, the building, at 4656 Heaton Rd., is valued at $1,164,600.
Imagine schools are notorious for having disproportionately high rents, and that includes some of the Imagine schools in Arizona.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2015.
There is waste by our government everywhere we look:
Corner stores turned EBT cards into cash for drugs, wired profit to Yemen
Widespread welfare fraud, overpayments discovered…
Feds bust major Social Security fraud ring in Puerto Rico…
This is exactly why we need to cut taxes and reduce spending. We must get the fraud under control.
As a former charter school teacher, I can tell you that in a school that’s not on the up and up, it’s amazing what they get away with. And why not? Schools are already loosely regulated, as long as their test scores don’t warrant further scrutiny… add to that the fact that charter schools have bloomed much, much faster than the people’s sense of how to regulate them, not to mention the demand for them to be regulated differently than public schools (otherwise, what’s to distinguish between one and the other?) and it’s easy to see how there are schools out there that operate almost as the charter provider’s personal account. I was witness to a principal taking student lunch money, putting some of that money in his pocket in full view of the entire student body, then giving a little of the money to the school treasurer, telling him he can do with it however he pleased. I’ve had superintendents argue that a tenth grader caught beating up a sixth grader couldn’t be expelled, and the only reason was because if he went, he had eight brothers, sisters and cousins that could choose to leave, and the incident wasn’t worth the school losing state funding for nine students. There are many other stories to tell that would dizzy anyone with a conscience, but none of it matters, until parents start taking more accountability of knowing what their child’s education is becoming. On the other hand, there are very good charters out there that are precisely why we need a new branch in education, and they do not deserve to be weighed down by the dubious reputations other charters afford them. We live in a world where we analyze every word and sentiment of our public officials, but don’t give a thought about where we put our children to learn how to be a part of the world… is it any wonder, then, that the world is becoming more and more askew?
Joe, incidents like you describe, especially if they can be documented, are very important and need to be aired publicly. Accountability, along with regulations to make it clearer what is acceptable and unacceptable (no-bid contracts to friends and relatives? Really?) are essential in the Arizona charter school world. Our “Wild West of Charter Schools” was created purposely, to allow schools to operate with as few regulations and as little oversight as possible. The result has been bad actors opening charter schools and paying more attention to how they and their friends can benefit than to the best interests of the children they’re supposed to educate.
Thanks Joe. Great addition to our discussions.
I am posting a great article on charter schools for profit. Over the many, many years of public education, in general there has not been financial abuse because of the careful oversight of taxpayers money. Yes there are mistakes (That is all I have found in a lot of investigating of AZ public schools. Never fraud within the schools. I am not talking about test scores or money related to them. That is a whole new 9 years.) There is not too much money spent in Arizona by a long shot if we truly want to educate our people. It needs to have constant oversight like what is done in regular public schools. And of course more if the public have reasonable ideas of what else needs to be done based on a need.
Here is the most important paragraph in this article if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing:
“There is a good reason that public schools are run by state and local governments rather than for-profit businesses. As a society, we expect government programs to be tailored to serve the needs of citizens and create common standards for the betterment of all. If we blur the line between private businesses and public schools, we may wind up diverting public funds to support a company’s bottom line rather than our shared educational goals and values.”
:http://rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevel…
‘If we blur the line between private businesses and public schools, we may wind up diverting public funds to support a company’s bottom line rather than our shared educational goals and values”. That is exactly what is happening.
Sorry but the NEA and the left have completely blurred the lines. Education to them has become a political opportunity. Thus the opposition. They caused it.
Good article David, thanks. Now turn the same level of scrutiny on the swamp of waste, mismanagement and nepotism known as TUSD. I look forward to your expose on that group. Since they have gutted the independent audit committee you are the only hope for a good analysis.
Tell us David, how advocating for our profession is a political opportunity, but lobbying by corporations is not.
That is the simple mistake that low level supporters of education always make. They really have no control over content or discipline.
To fully understand my comment take a look at this:
http://www.pacificeducationalgroup.com/pages/about
The crux of what they have promoted through public schools and government is that discipline is different “based on race.”
This creates another unusable level of entitlement that, once out in the real world, will fail these children miserably. And then that pattern repeats itself over and over.
It would be interesting to know how much of the violence and looting is actually promoted by this theology.
Just want to post some hopefully good news!! http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2015/06/03/…
We don’t know what the proposal is yet but it sounds like progress!!!!
And for those of you who continue the myth that TUSD is abusing funds… absolutely no evidence. However please turn your education funding concerns to what is going on in our ‘for profit’ charter schools. You focus so much at finding a problem in TUSD and seem to ignore the funding abuse in charter schools. Interesting hypocrisy.
No evidence? Go check their warehouses.
David, David, David. Along comes a former teacher with his pros & cons about charters and you can only focus on the negative. How is any of this supposed to get better? We all know constant negativity by a teacher in the classroom contributes to poor student performance. I sometimes wonder how your own students fared.
More funding for public schools?
http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/arizona-gov-doug-ducey-to-roll-out-new-k-12-school-funding-proposal
Who has a recall petition? Let’s get rid of this governor. lol
@Pima Mujer I would love to agree with you but every time I read national news I find another one of these head scratchers that tells me the union will keep them from being fired because of some perverse agenda.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/06/03/selfie-with-parents-sex-toys-alameda-high-school-teacher-accused-of-assigning-bizarre-extra-credit-for-sophomores/
Guardians: I believe a few Safier articles back Rick Spanier gave a good example of TUSD waste / ineptitude in the application of funds. The AZ Daily Star article he referenced related to the procurement of a computer system that cost millions of dollars and that was never properly installed and utilized within the district:
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/tusd-to-dump-software-system/article_84cd9617-ad29-5811-ba4a-583784bb0ba1.html
Another commenter gave you a link to a videotape of a TUSD public meeting where a commenter (Lillian Fox) reported that a public records request had revealed that, at a time within the last two years when sites throughout the district were undergoing serious hardship because of recent budget cuts and teachers were continuing to subsist on shamefully low salaries, several $10K bonuses had been granted to central administrators in some sort of a process that did not involve reporting the granting of these bonuses to the TUSD board or to the general public.
http://threesonorans.com/2014/07/23/ht-sanchez-gets-caught-multiple-lies-tape-breaks-elders-hearts-video/
Yet, in the face of this, you assert, “And for those of you who continue the myth that TUSD is abusing funds… absolutely no evidence.”
And you go on to assert, with no grounds, “Over the many, many years of public education, in general there has not been financial abuse because of the careful oversight of taxpayers money.” How do you propose to justify such an easily contradicted — and inadvisably broad — statement?
TUSD has some amazing educators in it, and I can only hope that the competence of the central administration will someday do some small justice to the quality of many of the faculty who have taught and continue to teach in spite of the low pay and insupportable decades-long mismanagement of the district. People like you who persist in writing “whitewash” statements in these comment streams give the impression that you are unable to think critically and write carefully about the reality of the conditions in our schools. This does not help us to believe what you seem to want to convey: that children entrusted to this district will receive the sort of education we desperately need citizens in a democracy to receive.
In sum: yes, charters need better oversight, but so does TUSD. Constituents deserve greater transparency and better management of the district’s limited funds. This has not been on offer and it continues not to be on offer. Relentlessly asserting the contrary does not “make it so,” nor does it give you credibility in the eyes of those who must, day in and day out, year in and year out, look at the various forms of mismanagement and incompetence clearly visible on TUSD sites and at almost every board meeting.
To Harold, who loves my name so much he repeats it three times. You talk about my relentless negativity about charters. Let me point out one passage in my post:
“Lots of charters in Arizona and elsewhere are spending their money properly and working hard to give their students good educations. Charters that are cheating the state and their students need to be rooted out and closed.”
One thing I learned as a teacher is that positive reinforcement (“Some of the ideas in your essay are excellent”) combined with focused criticism (“But your organization makes it difficult to follow your argument”) is a good way to help students improve.
I guess I read Harolds criticism more as “why not accuse and root out the public schools?” Every day I come hear and see more attacks on charter and vouchers. It does seem too one sided. I used to enjoy news and current events when you could not see a bias.
I wish it hadn’t changed.
Well, Davey boy you saw something I didn’t write and quoted me on it. My criticism isn’t of the article but of you in relation to a credible commenter and focusing only on what he could provide to indict his former work place and nothing more. How can ANYONE be interested in participating if your focus is so narrow?