Accountability for you, but not for me, seems to be a common policy in schools I've worked in. Now it's been exposed in the state superintendent's office in Indiana.
"Christel’s ninth- and 10th-grade students got brutally low scores on the English and math tests, with only 70 percent passing English and just a third passing math...
"Bennett’s staff swung loyally and swiftly into action; within a day they had found what they called a “loophole” in the state law that allowed them to change Christel’s grade."
The Case of the Missing Zeroes
An astonishing act of statistical chutzpah in the Indiana schools’ grade-changing scandal.
By Jordan Ellenberg
Slate.com
Aug. 2, 2013
Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett resigned Thursday amid claims that, in his former position as superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, he manipulated the state’s system for evaluating school performance.
Bennett, a Republican who created an A-to-F grading protocol for Indiana schools as a way to promote educational accountability, is accused of raising the mark for a school operated by a major GOP donor. Bennett calls that charge, which arose from emails among Bennett’s staff obtained by the AP, “malicious and unfounded” and “frankly so off base.” He offered a different explanation for why the grades for Indianapolis charter school Christel House Academy—whose mark soared from a C to an A—and 12 other schools were changed at the last minute. According to Bennett, he was just correcting a simple math mistake.
Bennett’s explanation is perfectly mathematically reasonable, and it would get him off the hook. The only problem is that the story he’s telling appears to be totally false.
Bennett told AEI’s Rick Hess, “As we were looking at the grades we were giving our schools, we realized that state law created an unfair penalty for schools that didn't have 11th and 12th grades. Statewide, there were 13 schools in question had unusual grade configurations. The data for grades 11 and 12 came in as zero. When we caught it, we fixed it.”
Bennett’s stated rationale makes sense. Here’s an analogy. You’re teaching a course with three exams, and each student’s overall exam grade for the class is computed as an average of her three individual exams
(1/3) * (exam 1) + (1/3) * (exam 2) + (1/3) * (exam 3)
But what happens if a student misses exam 3, with a justified absence, and the test can’t be made up? Then we have what’s called a “missing data” problem—we have to infer something about the student’s performance without the full complement of data we have for everybody else. One natural approach is to compute that student’s overall exam grade as the average of the exams she did take:
(1/2) * (exam 1) + (1/2) * (exam 2).
What you shouldn’t do is give the student a zero for the exam and average it into her grade.
Christel House had started out as a middle school and was adding one high school grade each year; for the 2011-12 school year, it served students through the 10th grade. High schools, according to Indiana statute, were to be graded on four metrics, averaged like so:
30% * (English scores) + 30% * (algebra scores) + 30% * (graduation rate) + 10% * (college and career readiness score)
But, as Bennett said in an official statement, “Christel House only served students in grades K-10, thus the graduation rate and college and career readiness measures could not be calculated because the school did not serve grades 11 and 12.” So it faced a missing data problem, like the student who had to miss an exam.
Indeed, it wouldn’t be fair to count those scores as zero! The obvious fix, just as with the student, is to grade such a school on the two scores that it does have:
50% * (English scores) + 50% * (Algebra scores)
Does that mean Bennett really did get railroaded, and he was just fixing an obvious error?
No—because the “fixed” version of the grade was what Indiana was already using before Bennett started tinkering with the gears. When you dig into the numbers, the story about the unfair zeroes looks like a complete fabrication.
Christel’s ninth- and 10th-grade students got brutally low scores on the English and math tests, with only 70 percent passing English and just a third passing math. Here’s how Jon Gubera, then the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, described Christel’s performance in one of the emails released by the AP:
“OK, here is their breakdown ...
They served grades K-10 in 2011-12 so they are a combined school but do not have any graduates. So their grade is a combination of the standard E/MS model and the HS 9&10 model which only counts ECA proficiency.
E/MS results: 3.00 on E/LA (no growth bonuses) and 4.00 on math (bottom 25% bonus) = 3.50 points (B)
HS results: 2.00 on E/LA (70% pass rate) and 0.00 on math (33% pass rate) = 1.00 points (D)
Final Combined results: E/MS 3.50 x .76 (76% of school is in grades 3.8) = 2.66 + HS 1.00 x .24 (24% of school is in high school) = .24. Thus overall grade is 2.66 + .24 = 2.9 (C).
Bottom line: their terrible 10th grade Algebra I results (33% passing) was the principal factor in earning a C grade."
Christel’s grade 3–8 scores came to a 3.50, or a B, and their high school scores, thanks to the algebra fiasco, were a 1.00, or a D. The school’s score is then an average of the grade 3–8 scores and the 9–10 scores, weighted according to the proportion of students in each group.
Where are the zeroes for the graduation rates and readiness score that got averaged into Christel’s score—the “unfair penalty” that Bennett claims he fixed? They’re not there, because that’s the part that Bennett, as far as I can tell, simply made up.
Gubera’s computation wasn’t satisfactory for Bennett, because it didn’t give Christel an A, and—judging by the emails obtained by the AP—he had already told Christel administrators they were getting an A. No mere numbers were going to make a liar out of him!
What’s more, Bennett wrote in one of the emails, the low grade for Christel meant “legislative leadership as well as our critics of A-F are going to use this against us to undo our accountability metrics through legislation.” He went on: “If you can’t tell, I am more than a little miffed about this. I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses and/or explanations for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the past 6 months.”
Bennett’s staff swung loyally and swiftly into action; within a day they had found what they called a “loophole” in the state law that allowed them to change Christel’s grade. The statute clearly states that high schools without 12th-graders get a score made up half of the English score and half of the algebra score. What’s more, the law said schools that combined high school grades and lower grades should use a weighted average of the elementary/middle school measures and the four high school measures.
Here’s where Bennett’s team found the loophole big enough to drive a charter school through. A normal person would do exactly what Chief Accountability Officer Jon Gubera did—give Christel the weighted average of its elementary/middle school score, according to the rules for elementary/middle schools, and its high school score, according to the rules for high schools.
But Bennett had a better idea. Christel was, technically speaking, not a high school, so the statutory formula for the high school grades didn’t apply. But it also didn’t have all four high school measures, so, he argued, the rules for combined schools didn’t apply either. There were just 13 schools in the state that had both middle school and high school grades but no seniors. For these schools, Bennett reasoned, the Indiana education poobahs should have a free hand to set the grades however they pleased. You can guess what happened next: Bennett ruled that the ninth- and 10th-graders in these schools didn’t count at all. So it was that the offending algebra grades vanished in a puff of bureaucratic smoke. (Anne Hyslop at Ed Money Watch has an even more detailed accounting of the process, if you like watching sausage get made.)
This was an act of astonishing statistical chutzpah. Suppose the syllabus for my math class said that the final grade would be determined by averaging the homework grade and the exam grade, and that the exam grade was itself the average of the grades on the three tests I gave. Now imagine a student gets a B on the homework, gets a D-minus on the first two tests, and misses the third. She then comes to me and says, “Professor, your syllabus says the exam component of the grade is the average of my grade on the three tests—but I only took two tests, so that line of the syllabus doesn’t apply to my special case, and the only fair thing is to drop the entire exam component and give me a B for the course.”
I would laugh her out of the office. Or maybe suggest that she apply for a job as a state superintendent of instruction.
The saddest part is that I’m guessing Bennett sincerely felt he was doing the right thing. In his mind, he knew Christel was a great school, so if the scores said otherwise, the scores had to be wrong. In this respect, ironically, he ends up echoing his policy opponents, adopting the position that a mechanistic testing and scoring procedure can’t be allowed to override firsthand knowledge about teachers and schools.
Saying this out loud wasn’t an option, so any test scores that seemed to indicate learning problems at Christel had to be eliminated from the spreadsheet with extreme prejudice. (I attempted to reach both Tony Bennett and Jon Gubera and have not received a reply from either man. If I do hear back, I will add an update to this story.)
Bennett told AEI’s Hess, “I'm a track and field guy. I run, I try to keep my weight down at about 190. Christel has been a track-performing school for a number of years. If I get on the scale one day, am doing everything the same, and am still wearing my same clothes and they fit, and the scale suddenly reads 215, I am going to question what's going on.”
But Christel wasn’t doing everything the same. It didn’t have a 10th grade before, and then it did, and whatever it was doing to teach those new 10th-graders math, it didn’t lead them to pass algebra.
Bennett could, and should, have faced up to that fact, given the school the C it earned, and delivered them some honest tough love: “You’re still doing well at the stuff you’ve always done well, but you obviously haven’t succeeded at the new stuff you’re trying to do. We believe you can do it, but until you do, your grade’s going to suffer.” Isn’t that what accountability in education means, if it still means anything at all?
Showing posts with label fraud in schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud in schools. Show all posts
Friday, August 02, 2013
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Fraud widespread among public employees in New Jersey free lunch program; some school board members also cheated
One unnamed school board member in Pleasantville, a city of nearly 21,000 people near the New Jersey shore, allegedly underreported her household income by about $59,000 each year. When confronted by Boxer's office, she said she didn't include her own salary because "she herself was not the person receiving the free student lunch," the report said. She also allegedly said that her income "is none of their damn business," according to the report.
Fraud widespread in New Jersey free lunch program: state official
Reuters
By Hilary Russ
Jan. 18, 2013
(Reuters) - New Jersey will refer 109 names to criminal investigators after a probe allegedly found pervasive fraud in the federal free and low-cost lunch program in the state's schools, a state official said on Wednesday.
The alleged fraudsters are all public employees, their spouses or members of their households, accused of lying about their income so that their children would qualify for federally subsidized reduced-price lunches, according to New Jersey Comptroller Matthew Boxer.
Six of the names, which were not released, are elected school board officials. The 109 people underreported their household income by more than $13 million altogether over the three years of records and 15 school districts that Boxer's office examined, according to his report.
If the state were to examine the more than 600 additional school districts in New Jersey, hundreds of additional cases could surface, the report said.
One unnamed school board member in Pleasantville, a city of nearly 21,000 people near the New Jersey shore, allegedly underreported her household income by about $59,000 each year. When confronted by Boxer's office, she said she didn't include her own salary because "she herself was not the person receiving the free student lunch," the report said.
She also allegedly said that her income "is none of damn business," according to the report.
The National School Lunch Program itself is partly to blame for the abuse, the report said. That's because the federal program only requires schools to verify 3 percent of the applications of people whose reported incomes are closest to eligibility limits.
School districts are not allowed to verify the remaining 97 percent of applications unless they suspect fraud, Boxer's report said.
New Jersey isn't the only state to find abuse of its school lunch program. A year ago, the inspector general of Chicago, Illinois' schools found 26 cases of current or former employees lying about their income to qualify.
The New Jersey investigation also found several instances of school districts failing to reject applicants who had submitted documents proving they were not eligible.
The U.S. government reimbursed New Jersey's schools for $212 million for the program during the 2011-2012 school year, while the state itself chipped in $5.5 million.
The federal program operates in more than 100,000 schools and residential child care institutions throughout the country. To qualify for free lunches, a family's income must be at 130 percent of the poverty level, or $29,965 for a family of four as of June 30. The program cost $11 billion in fiscal 2011.
(Reporting by Hilary Russ; Editing by Tiziana Barghini and Sofina Mirza-Reid)
Fraud widespread in New Jersey free lunch program: state official
Reuters
By Hilary Russ
Jan. 18, 2013
(Reuters) - New Jersey will refer 109 names to criminal investigators after a probe allegedly found pervasive fraud in the federal free and low-cost lunch program in the state's schools, a state official said on Wednesday.
The alleged fraudsters are all public employees, their spouses or members of their households, accused of lying about their income so that their children would qualify for federally subsidized reduced-price lunches, according to New Jersey Comptroller Matthew Boxer.
Six of the names, which were not released, are elected school board officials. The 109 people underreported their household income by more than $13 million altogether over the three years of records and 15 school districts that Boxer's office examined, according to his report.
If the state were to examine the more than 600 additional school districts in New Jersey, hundreds of additional cases could surface, the report said.
One unnamed school board member in Pleasantville, a city of nearly 21,000 people near the New Jersey shore, allegedly underreported her household income by about $59,000 each year. When confronted by Boxer's office, she said she didn't include her own salary because "she herself was not the person receiving the free student lunch," the report said.
She also allegedly said that her income "is none of damn business," according to the report.
The National School Lunch Program itself is partly to blame for the abuse, the report said. That's because the federal program only requires schools to verify 3 percent of the applications of people whose reported incomes are closest to eligibility limits.
School districts are not allowed to verify the remaining 97 percent of applications unless they suspect fraud, Boxer's report said.
New Jersey isn't the only state to find abuse of its school lunch program. A year ago, the inspector general of Chicago, Illinois' schools found 26 cases of current or former employees lying about their income to qualify.
The New Jersey investigation also found several instances of school districts failing to reject applicants who had submitted documents proving they were not eligible.
The U.S. government reimbursed New Jersey's schools for $212 million for the program during the 2011-2012 school year, while the state itself chipped in $5.5 million.
The federal program operates in more than 100,000 schools and residential child care institutions throughout the country. To qualify for free lunches, a family's income must be at 130 percent of the poverty level, or $29,965 for a family of four as of June 30. The program cost $11 billion in fiscal 2011.
(Reporting by Hilary Russ; Editing by Tiziana Barghini and Sofina Mirza-Reid)
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
America's Worst Educators
America’s worst colleges
How badly are for-profit schools serving young people? Corinthian Colleges embodies the industry's worst trends
BY ANDREW LEONARD
Salon.com
JUN 5, 2012
In the fall of 2010, three former students at Everest College, a for-profit career school in Salt Lake City, sued their school’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges...
A 13-page affidavit filed in the case by a former admissions officer, Shayler White, described a high-pressure recruitment process in which prospective students were barraged by phone calls multiple times a day and hustled through financial aid paperwork. With his employment contingent on meeting a strict enrollment quota, White made as many as 600 calls a month, and was, he said, instructed by his superiors to use bullying psychological tactics, to ask questions “designed at putting down the prospective student” and “making them feel hopeless.”
“The ultimate goal was to essentially make them wallow in their grief, feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their ‘reasons’ to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative.” ...Kent Jenkins, Corinthian’s current vice president for public affairs, deflected a question asking if White’s account accurately represented Corinthian’s recruitment process by noting that there has been no final disposition of the Utah suit. “There have been absolutely no court rulings that support any allegations” in the affidavit, he wrote in an email...
But generally speaking, there’s little question that an obsessive focus on constantly boosting enrollment is crucial to survival in the for-profit college world. Sky-high withdrawal rates plague the industry. It’s not uncommon for the biggest for-profits to enroll as many new students during the course of a single year as originally signed up for classes at the beginning of the year, a phenomenon referred to as “enrollment churn.” For example, Corinthian had 71,246 students in July 2008, enrolled 120,638 new students during the following year, but ended up with only 89,479 by June 30, 2009. Recruiting all those new bodies costs a lot of money. In 2009, Corinthian spent almost a quarter of its $1.3 billion in revenues on advertising and recruitment.
“They are, by and large, a marketing operation,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in a speech on the Senate floor last September. “Bring the students in, sign them up, bring in the federal dollars; bring in more students, sign them up, bring in more federal dollars.”
Corinthian Colleges, in that respect, is no different from any other career school. But in an industry where bottom-line considerations often trump devotion to educational achievement, Corinthian invites scrutiny. Over the course of its 17-year history, the company has attracted numerous lawsuits. Corinthian schools have recorded some of the highest default rates on student loans in the country, a worrisome fact for a company that derives nearly 90 percent of its revenues from government loans and grants. If you want to understand why the Obama administration has been so steadfast in its efforts to crack down on the for-profit industry, Corinthian is as good a place as any to start.
Founded in Irvine, Calif., in 1995 by five veterans of the vocational school business, Corinthian’s strategy from the beginning was to purchase already existing schools and aggressively boost enrollment. The business plan was simple: grow, grow, grow....
Corinthian generates almost as much bad press as profit.
In 2004 former students filed three separate lawsuits in Florida alleging credit transfer fraud, claiming that Corinthian misled students as to whether their credits would be accepted by other educational institutions.
In 2005, Corinthian paid the Department of Education $776,241 for violations of student aid procedures at California’s Bryman College.
In 2007, reported the O.C. Register, Corinthian paid the state of California $6.5 million to settle charges of false advertising relating to allegedly overstating “the percentage of its students who obtained employment via its courses.”
Just three weeks ago, Corinthian revealed in a regulatory filing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating the company to “determine whether for-profit postsecondary companies, student loan origination and servicing providers, or other unnamed persons, have engaged or are engaging in unlawful acts or practices relating to the advertising, marketing or origination of private student loans.”
But perhaps the most embarrassing twist in Corinthian’s recent history came earlier this year in California. In 2012, a new state law came into effect that denied colleges access to the state’s Cal Grants financial aid program if the three-year student loan default rate at an institution exceeded 24.6 percent. Of the state’s 165 for-profit schools, 67 failed the test. Eighteen of those 67 schools are owned by Corinthian. In fact, some of Corinthian’s schools exhibited default rates of over 40 percent. None of California’s public schools failed.
...The high costs, withdrawal and student loan default rates all help explain why the Obama administration pushed last year to institute new “gainful employment” rules that would require for-profit schools to prove that acceptable percentages of their graduates were paying down their debt after graduation. However, even those rules were extremely watered down, say higher education watchers, after extraordinary lobbying efforts from the for-profit sector, including Corinthian Colleges.
That’s right: Corinthian spent money generated from taxpayer-funded student loans to pay for lobbying efforts aimed to weaken rules designed to ensure that students get a good education and taxpayers get their money’s worth. If that doesn’t send you screaming to your nearest publicly funded community college, nothing will.
How badly are for-profit schools serving young people? Corinthian Colleges embodies the industry's worst trends
BY ANDREW LEONARD
Salon.com
JUN 5, 2012
In the fall of 2010, three former students at Everest College, a for-profit career school in Salt Lake City, sued their school’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges...
A 13-page affidavit filed in the case by a former admissions officer, Shayler White, described a high-pressure recruitment process in which prospective students were barraged by phone calls multiple times a day and hustled through financial aid paperwork. With his employment contingent on meeting a strict enrollment quota, White made as many as 600 calls a month, and was, he said, instructed by his superiors to use bullying psychological tactics, to ask questions “designed at putting down the prospective student” and “making them feel hopeless.”
“The ultimate goal was to essentially make them wallow in their grief, feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their ‘reasons’ to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative.” ...Kent Jenkins, Corinthian’s current vice president for public affairs, deflected a question asking if White’s account accurately represented Corinthian’s recruitment process by noting that there has been no final disposition of the Utah suit. “There have been absolutely no court rulings that support any allegations” in the affidavit, he wrote in an email...
But generally speaking, there’s little question that an obsessive focus on constantly boosting enrollment is crucial to survival in the for-profit college world. Sky-high withdrawal rates plague the industry. It’s not uncommon for the biggest for-profits to enroll as many new students during the course of a single year as originally signed up for classes at the beginning of the year, a phenomenon referred to as “enrollment churn.” For example, Corinthian had 71,246 students in July 2008, enrolled 120,638 new students during the following year, but ended up with only 89,479 by June 30, 2009. Recruiting all those new bodies costs a lot of money. In 2009, Corinthian spent almost a quarter of its $1.3 billion in revenues on advertising and recruitment.
“They are, by and large, a marketing operation,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in a speech on the Senate floor last September. “Bring the students in, sign them up, bring in the federal dollars; bring in more students, sign them up, bring in more federal dollars.”
Corinthian Colleges, in that respect, is no different from any other career school. But in an industry where bottom-line considerations often trump devotion to educational achievement, Corinthian invites scrutiny. Over the course of its 17-year history, the company has attracted numerous lawsuits. Corinthian schools have recorded some of the highest default rates on student loans in the country, a worrisome fact for a company that derives nearly 90 percent of its revenues from government loans and grants. If you want to understand why the Obama administration has been so steadfast in its efforts to crack down on the for-profit industry, Corinthian is as good a place as any to start.
Founded in Irvine, Calif., in 1995 by five veterans of the vocational school business, Corinthian’s strategy from the beginning was to purchase already existing schools and aggressively boost enrollment. The business plan was simple: grow, grow, grow....
Corinthian generates almost as much bad press as profit.
In 2004 former students filed three separate lawsuits in Florida alleging credit transfer fraud, claiming that Corinthian misled students as to whether their credits would be accepted by other educational institutions.
In 2005, Corinthian paid the Department of Education $776,241 for violations of student aid procedures at California’s Bryman College.
In 2007, reported the O.C. Register, Corinthian paid the state of California $6.5 million to settle charges of false advertising relating to allegedly overstating “the percentage of its students who obtained employment via its courses.”
Just three weeks ago, Corinthian revealed in a regulatory filing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating the company to “determine whether for-profit postsecondary companies, student loan origination and servicing providers, or other unnamed persons, have engaged or are engaging in unlawful acts or practices relating to the advertising, marketing or origination of private student loans.”
But perhaps the most embarrassing twist in Corinthian’s recent history came earlier this year in California. In 2012, a new state law came into effect that denied colleges access to the state’s Cal Grants financial aid program if the three-year student loan default rate at an institution exceeded 24.6 percent. Of the state’s 165 for-profit schools, 67 failed the test. Eighteen of those 67 schools are owned by Corinthian. In fact, some of Corinthian’s schools exhibited default rates of over 40 percent. None of California’s public schools failed.
...The high costs, withdrawal and student loan default rates all help explain why the Obama administration pushed last year to institute new “gainful employment” rules that would require for-profit schools to prove that acceptable percentages of their graduates were paying down their debt after graduation. However, even those rules were extremely watered down, say higher education watchers, after extraordinary lobbying efforts from the for-profit sector, including Corinthian Colleges.
That’s right: Corinthian spent money generated from taxpayer-funded student loans to pay for lobbying efforts aimed to weaken rules designed to ensure that students get a good education and taxpayers get their money’s worth. If that doesn’t send you screaming to your nearest publicly funded community college, nothing will.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Bob Watkins failed to report his conflicts of interest as airport authority chairman
This story makes me wonder if there is perhaps a whole lot of information, other than mere yearly updates, that Bob Watkins has failed to report. And it also makes me wonder if Watkins charged San Diego County Office of Education for Charger games or airplane tickets. What was the grand total of his expenses at SDCOE?
See all Bob Watkins posts.
Watkins' Interests Not Disclosed
Voice of San Diego
by Rob Davis
Sept.16, 2009
When Bob Watkins, the airport authority chairman, took office in 2006, he reported owning his consulting business, property near the airport and more than $100,000 in stock. He reported the investments on his annual conflict-of-interest report.
In the two years since, Watkins hasn't disclosed anything on the annual forms. He has ticked a box that says he has nothing to report. The airport authority's conflict of interest code requires board members such as Watkins to disclose "all investments, business positions, interests in real property and sources of income."
But county records show that Watkins still owns property near the airport as well as a home in Alpine. His business, R.J. Watkins & Co. is located at 2515 Brant St., eight blocks from Lindbergh Field. He listed its fair market value at being more than $1 million when he took office. He stopped reporting it in 2008.
The lack of disclosure is potentially problematic. The property sits in an area that the airport authority's board has land-use planning powers over, giving Watkins the power to influence future land uses there. And Watkins signed the annual disclosure forms under penalty of perjury. Such disclosures are made to alert the public about potential conflicts of interest. Officials who fail to fully report their interests can be fined up to $5,000 per violation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission...
East Side Union HSD gave over $80,000 to ex-San Jose councilwoman--and got little in return
Former San Jose councilwoman Cindy Chavez
East Side Union High School District hired ex-San Jose councilwoman to start an education foundation
By Dana Hull
dhull@mercurynews.com
Posted: 09/15/2009
When East Side Union High School District trustees wanted to start an education foundation to raise much-needed funds, they turned to Cindy Chavez, a former San Jose councilwoman with charisma as vast as her Rolodex.
The school district paid Chavez a total of $79,000 in consulting fees, plus an additional $5,572 to its law firm to establish the foundation's non-profit status.
But two years later, the foundation has no Web site, few board members and just $4,470 in its bank account.
The revelations come as the sprawling 26,000-student district endures an audit of its finances and an independent investigation into Superintendent Bob Nunez's spending habits. Paying an outside consultant sharply contrasts with how most school foundations get started — with parents and community leaders volunteering time and expertise. That's the grass-roots approach "Save Our Sports" used to raise $115,000; the East Side parent group bypassed the foundation altogether when it felt the foundation was too ineffective to rely on.
"I am very concerned that $85,000 has been spent on a foundation that is bogus as far as I'm concerned," said board president Patricia Martinez-Roach, who was not on the board when Chavez was hired in 2007. "This whole thing was a big mistake. The board should never have tried to set up a foundation by using district money. Maybe it was well intentioned, but it stinks."
Earlier this spring — as the district laid off teachers and staffers and scrambled to save sports —Martinez-Roach said she was shocked to discover the foundation did not even have a bank account. (A bank account was opened in June of this year.)...
Sunday, September 13, 2009
California Dept. of Education protected fraud, retaliated against whisteblower
Whistleblower Sues State Over School Fraud
Operators Of Language Schools Stole Millions, Man Says
KCRA.com
December 14, 2007
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Auditors found that some locally run language schools were fleecing the State Department of Education out of tens of millions of dollars.
Whistleblowers said top department officials not only looked the other way, but harassed and retaliated against them.
One of the whistleblowers sued the state, which twice appealed and has lost, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
Efforts to settle the case in Sacramento this week went nowhere, meaning taxpayers may have to foot the bill for a third trial against a former employee who says the state ruined his life.
There are dozens of adult education schools in California teaching recent immigrants to speak English.
They are funded by the state and operated by community-based organizations.
In an investigation that began 12 years ago and is still dragging through the courts today, auditors found widespread fraud involving some schools.
Whistleblower Robert Cervantes said they engaged in flat-out corruption, and yet the public does nothing.
Cervantes, a former high-ranking officer in the Department of Education, said some of the operators of these schools were ripping off millions of taxpayer dollars.
Cervantes said what he and colleagues found the sites of some alleged schools were boarded-up gas stations, empty fields, drug houses and warehouses that were locked. His group found very few facilities that indicated that in fact classes were being conducted.
Cervantes said he and department auditor James Linberg blew the whistle.
Lindberg said if they had stopped it right then, it would have been about $3 million to $4 million.
This tale of intrigue began in the mid-1990s when the state Department of Education directed more than $23 million in federal funding to community-based organizations in California to teach English as a second language to immigrants.
But when Cervantes and Lindberg took a closer look, they found that community-based organizations flat-out told them they didn't have a program. The community-based schools felt totally immune, Cervantes said.
Cervantes said if he had persisted in investigating them and didn't continue funding these operations, they said they would get him. And by getting him, meaning, trying to kill him.
Cervantes said then Superintendent of Education Delaine Eastin and other department supervisors told him it was still his job to get the money out the door. He pointed out to them that this was fraud. They said it didn't matter, then Cervantes indicated he simply wouldn't do that.
Cervantes and Lindberg said the department retaliated, sending them to dead-end jobs where they did nothing for months on end.
The stress took a toll on Lindberg. He suffered two heart attacks.
Lindberg said the first heart attack came shortly after meeting with Eastin when he confronted her with questions such as "Why are you retaliating against me?"
Unable to work, Lindberg sued the department and Eastin. The case went to trial five years ago. A Sacramento jury awarded him a $4.5 million judgement, finding the state and Eastin liable...
Operators Of Language Schools Stole Millions, Man Says
KCRA.com
December 14, 2007
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Auditors found that some locally run language schools were fleecing the State Department of Education out of tens of millions of dollars.
Whistleblowers said top department officials not only looked the other way, but harassed and retaliated against them.
One of the whistleblowers sued the state, which twice appealed and has lost, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
Efforts to settle the case in Sacramento this week went nowhere, meaning taxpayers may have to foot the bill for a third trial against a former employee who says the state ruined his life.
There are dozens of adult education schools in California teaching recent immigrants to speak English.
They are funded by the state and operated by community-based organizations.
In an investigation that began 12 years ago and is still dragging through the courts today, auditors found widespread fraud involving some schools.
Whistleblower Robert Cervantes said they engaged in flat-out corruption, and yet the public does nothing.
Cervantes, a former high-ranking officer in the Department of Education, said some of the operators of these schools were ripping off millions of taxpayer dollars.
Cervantes said what he and colleagues found the sites of some alleged schools were boarded-up gas stations, empty fields, drug houses and warehouses that were locked. His group found very few facilities that indicated that in fact classes were being conducted.
Cervantes said he and department auditor James Linberg blew the whistle.
Lindberg said if they had stopped it right then, it would have been about $3 million to $4 million.
This tale of intrigue began in the mid-1990s when the state Department of Education directed more than $23 million in federal funding to community-based organizations in California to teach English as a second language to immigrants.
But when Cervantes and Lindberg took a closer look, they found that community-based organizations flat-out told them they didn't have a program. The community-based schools felt totally immune, Cervantes said.
Cervantes said if he had persisted in investigating them and didn't continue funding these operations, they said they would get him. And by getting him, meaning, trying to kill him.
Cervantes said then Superintendent of Education Delaine Eastin and other department supervisors told him it was still his job to get the money out the door. He pointed out to them that this was fraud. They said it didn't matter, then Cervantes indicated he simply wouldn't do that.
Cervantes and Lindberg said the department retaliated, sending them to dead-end jobs where they did nothing for months on end.
The stress took a toll on Lindberg. He suffered two heart attacks.
Lindberg said the first heart attack came shortly after meeting with Eastin when he confronted her with questions such as "Why are you retaliating against me?"
Unable to work, Lindberg sued the department and Eastin. The case went to trial five years ago. A Sacramento jury awarded him a $4.5 million judgement, finding the state and Eastin liable...
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Another shocker: Dumanis ends one more college fraud probe without charges
Photo: District Attorney Bonnie DumanisDA ends probe of land sale to college
San Diego Union Tribune
By Jennifer Vigil
December 14, 2008
The District Attorney's Office has cleared everyone involved in a land sale to the San Diego Community College District that benefited two politically connected developers.
The investigation has been closed, and “no criminal charges are forthcoming against any individual or entity involved in this matter,” District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis wrote in a Thursday letter to the college district.
Dumanis' office looked into a September 2006 real estate deal in which the district paid $1.28 million for a 15th Street duplex for a campus expansion downtown.
Questions arose about the purchase after The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the developers, Mike Madigan and Paul Nieto, had bought the parcel eight months earlier for $750,000 and used a private trust held by Nieto's father-in-law to sell it to the college district.
Madigan was involved in San Diego's downtown redevelopment efforts, and Nieto is a former president of a Chula Vista homebuilding company and once sat on the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority Board.
In correspondence sent to the duplex owners in 2004 and 2005, a real estate broker indicated the developers were speaking on behalf of the college district, a link that investigators found had not been formalized.
Deputy District Attorney Mike Still, who investigated the land transactions, said Madigan, Nieto and their broker may have made misleading statements, but a one-year statute of limitations had expired on any possible misdemeanor charges.
Felony fraud charges also were considered but dismissed as too harsh, Still said.
“We found some misrepresentations on the front end, but they may have been misunderstandings as well,” he said.
Former City Attorney Michael Aguirre investigated the matter and filed a civil suit against the broker. Still said the case was delayed pending the outcome of his investigation...
The district continues to plan construction on 15th Street, part of a $1.5 billion bond-funded renovation and expansion campaign, but more properties must be acquired. Jennifer Vigil: (619) 718-5069; jennifer.vigil@uniontrib.com
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