Did You Know The FBI Has Been Raiding Charter Schools?

While the so-called “unbiased news” industry has been worshiping the likes of Michelle Rhee and others seeking to undermine the nation’s public school system, they have turned their back on a huge story: a pattern of charter school corruption so egregious that the FBI has had to intervene.

From Pittsburgh to Baton Rouge, from Hartford to Cincinnatti to Albuquerque, FBI agents have been busting into schools, carting off documents and making arrests leading to high-profile indictments.

“The troubled Hartford charter school operator FUSE was dealt another blow Friday when FBI agents served it with subpoenas to a grand jury that is examining the group’s operations. When two Courant reporters arrived at FUSE offices on Asylum Hill on Friday morning, minutes after the FBI’s visit, they saw a woman feeding sheaves of documents into a shredder.”—The Hartford Courant, July 18, 2014

“The FBI has raided an Albuquerque school just months after the state started peering into the school’s finances. KRQE News 13 learned federal agents were there because of allegations that someone may have been taking money that was meant for the classroom at the Southwest Secondary Learning Center on Candelaria, near Morris in northwest Albuquerque … “—KRQE News 13, August 1 2014

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“COLUMBUS, OH—A federal grand jury has indicted four people, alleging that they offered and accepted bribes and kickbacks as part of a public corruption conspiracy in their roles as managers and a consultant for Arise! Academy, a charter school in Dayton, Ohio.” —FBI Press Release, June 2014

What’s going on here?

That’s Ruth Conniff of In These Times asking the question, and while the rest of her article is worth reading, anybody who has been paying attention knows the answer: charter schools are the very sort of lucrative, fast-money racket that “free market” opportunists use to put your tax money in their pockets. Conniff links to an Atlantic article that goes into depth on a chain of schools run by a shadowy Turkish cleric:

In Western countries such as the United States, Germany, and France, there isn’t any evidence whatsoever that the nearly 120 Gülen charter schools in America include Islamic indoctrination in their curriculum. The schools are so secular that singling out the Gülen schools as particularly nefarious, simply for being run predominantly by Muslims, smacks of xenophobia.

However, these schools might be suspect for reasons that are completely unrelated to Islamic doctrine. One of their most troubling characteristics is that they don’t have a great track record when it comes to financial and legal transparency. In Utah, a financial probe launched by the Utah Schools Charter Board found the Beehive Science and Technology Academy, a Gülen-run charter school, to be nearly $350,000 in debt. Furthermore, as the Deseret News reported, the school’s administrators seemed to be reserving coveted jobs for their own countrymen and women: “In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey.”

The conservative clown car’s “intellect” simply adores those entrepreneurial charter schools, but their lizard brain reflexively hits 11 when the matter of Muslims is involved. Cognitive dissonance leading to cranial detonation in 3… 2… 1…

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