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When Americans debate how much money we spend on public education, the conversation almost always focuses on whether there is enough. A new report from the transparency organization Open the Books asks a different question: where is the money actually going? The answer is disturbing.
Working in collaboration with the State Financial Officers Foundation, Open the Books documented more than two hundred and twenty-five million dollars in alleged fraud across K-12 schools since 2019. This comes from more than ninety cases spanning states from California to West Virginia, and even Puerto Rico. The fraud ranges from rigging bid and embezzlement to billing for supplies that were never delivered and enrolling ghost students in virtual schools to collect per-pupil funding for children who don’t even exist. Several of the specifics are worth naming.
In Los Angeles County, the executive director of a public charter school pleaded guilty to stealing more than three million dollars and spending it on Disney cruises, theme parks, personal shopping and private school tuition for her own children. That’s more than one third of this school’s federal and state funding! In West Virginia, a school district's maintenance director stole three and a half million dollars by billing for truckloads of hand soap and trash bags that were never delivered. He then used the cash to buy vehicles and renovate his home. In Alabama, five former school employees enrolled thousands of private school students in virtual public schools using fake report cards and falsified addresses. They collected ten million dollars in state and federal funding for children who never logged in once.
Open the Books CEO John Hart put it well: every dollar wasted on fraud is a dollar that never makes it into the classroom where reading and math proficiency are plummeting.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon responded directly to the report, promising that her department would sharpen its focus on K-12 fraud after already rooting out one billion dollars in FAFSA fraud at the higher education level. We pray she keeps on top of it. Open the Books says that these ninety-plus cases are almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg — many of the largest school districts in the country were barely represented in the fraud records they found.
Taxpayers deserve to know where the money is going!
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