When does the Florida Legislature ignore fraud? When it's about charter schools

From the Miami herald with a nod to Scathing Purple Musings

By Fred Grimm
fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com

Unrestrained conflicts of interest. Little accountability. Slip-shod ethics. Lax oversight. Add landlords and developers and for-profit management companies to the formula. Tempt them with $400 million dollars of public money.

Who couldn’t see the charter school mess coming?

The Miami Herald’s series, Cashing in on Kids, wasn’t, as a few readers have complained, an attack on charter-school philosophy. Herald reporters Kathleen McGrory and Scott Hiaasen didn’t delve into esoteric questions about school competition and parental choice. They chronicled how public money disappears inside opaque enterprises. They wrote about for-profit management companies that double as landlords for the schools, sometimes with only tepid oversight from charter school boards, with some board members in a conflicted relationship with the companies.

Anyone who has spent time observing government entities knows what can happen when large amounts of taxpayer money gets disbursed without transparency or tough rules or real oversight. Predictable stuff. Anyone could see what’s coming.

Certainly, the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, the research arm of the Florida Legislature, foresaw the hazards. In 2000, back when the state had only 113 charters schools, OPPAGA issued a report concerned with unseemly expenditures and “business transactions between charter schools and its administrators, board members, and related family members that frequently caused potential conflicts of interest.”

OPPAGA tried again in 2008. “In recent years several examples of charter school board members encountering potential conflicts of interests have been noted. For example, the Auditor General has reported irregularities and instances of board members receiving personal gains,” the report state. “There have also been numerous news articles questioning alleged conflicts of interest between governing board members and charter school operations.” The OPPAGA report urged the Legislature to extend state ethic rules to the complex profit and non-profit entities behind the state’s 356 charters.

Now we’re up to 519 charter schools in Florida, about 200 of them in Broward and Miami-Dade. And no closer to accountability. Perhaps its that legislators are feeling a bit conflicted about charter school conflicts.

For instance, Sen. Anitere Flores, sponsor of a bill to expand the charter school movement to include the highly profitable (educationally questionable) online virtual schools, has been hired to run a new college in Miami-Dade by a charter school operation.

And Rep. Erik Fresen is a former lobbyist for Academica, a charter school operation in Miami-Dade, and is the brother-in-law of Academica’s CEO. Fresen works as a land-use consultant for the architectural firm that designs schools for Academica. Fresen, by the way, is pushing legislation to limit zoning restrictions that local governments can impose on charters.

With these kinds of conflicts, anyone could see what’s coming.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/14/2546711/charter-school-mess-is-no-surprise.html#ixzz1giQDAp84