Wisconsin voucher program’s latest instance of fraud

One of the many problems I have with publicly-funded private school vouchers is the idea of accountability. In every voucher program implemented in the United States, these private schools, most of which are operated by religious ministries, receive millions tax dollars with virtually no strings attached.

While public schools in many parts of the country are flawed, sometimes deeply, they are at least accountable to the state. School’s accounts can and are audited to ensure appropriate spending, school teachers face state review boards, and school administrators are ultimately accountable to the public.

Public schools are often disparaged for excessive levels of bureaucracy and “red tape,” yet these sometimes irritating regulations offer layers of protection for taxpayers. The alternative is simply handing over public money and hoping for the best.

Which is exactly what’s happened in too many instances with these voucher programs. Demagogue, a blogger I read regularly, mentioned one of these examples last week.

Alex’s Academics of Excellence in Milwaukee was recently evicted from the building it had rented after falling behind $50,000 in rent, despite receiving $2.8 million from the state of Wisconsin over the last three years. Checks cut for school employees have bounced. The school’s financial troubles are compounded by the fact that it owes the state over $111,000.

But that’s the least of the school’s troubles.

The school’s Chief Executive Officer is a convicted rapist, a school employee was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of first degree sexual assault of a child, and several former teachers have come forward to say that their colleagues at Alex’s Academics of Excellence drank alcohol and smoked marijuana on the job.

Despite these problems, the school continued to receive public funds from the state and enroll hundreds of local students. Even now, after having been evicted, there’s a voice mail phone number encouraging parents to sign up for the next academic year at Alex’s.

A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) noted that the state voucher law “does not provide the DPI with the authority to close down a school because the gentleman running it has a past criminal record, teachers may have records, or because they are not paying teachers.”

Keep in mind, Milwaukee got a voucher program because residents believed the public schools were bad.

As awful as this example is, there are many more examples just like it.

In the mid 1990s, the first two voucher “experiments” were created in Cleveland and Milwaukee. Local officials were faced with the quandary of how to regulate the schools receiving public assistance. Methods of accountability were viewed as excessive regulation, so few safeguards were created.

Not far from Alex’s Academics of Excellence, a voucher school called Exito High School was found to have been falsifying attendance records to receive overpayments from the state on teachers and students that didn’t exist. The founder of the school was found to have fraudulently created over 90 students as a way of stealing more money from the system.

Another voucher school, Milwaukee Prepatory, was charged with defrauding the state of thousands of dollars by lying about the age of 10 students so they would remain eligible for reimbursement from the state. (One parent told authorities she attended a meeting at which Hampton advised parents of 3-year-olds to misrepresent their children’s ages as 4 so the school could get the voucher aid.) As a result, authorities issued an arrest warrant for the school’s founder, who went into hiding for a year. His school closed mid-year, and his students were left without classrooms.

Unfortunately, Cleveland’s program hasn’t been much better, with financial mismanagement plaguing the system from the outset. Just three years after the program had been initiated, the city’s voucher experiment suffered from a $2.9 million overrun, which represented nearly half of the program’s entire $7.1 million budget.

When the system was eventually audited, the state discovered that the project was over billed $419,000 by taxicab companies that had been hired to transport students to the private schools, and then realized that some of the funds went for nonexistent rides for nonexistent students.

This isn’t to say private schools are all run by criminals or that these schools are always out to defraud the public. The point is that voucher advocates fail to appreciate the importance of holding publicly funded schools responsible for what happens with our money. They want the public schools that are having trouble to get less funding so that private schools — some better than their public counterparts, some worse — can get state aid on top of the money charged in tuition.

In short, they’re reaching into our wallet with one hand while cutting any attached strings with the other. States should either eliminate these voucher programs or ignore cries about burdensome regulations and institute some much-needed accountability.