$2.7 Million Charter School Fraud Could be Ignored due to Improving Test Scores

Dr. Edward P Fiszer, the principal at a charter school in the L.A. Unified School District, allegedly stole and misused as much as $2.7 million, auditors have revealed. The L.A. Times reports that the Superintendent of L.A. schools is moving to shut down the school, but the school board is resisting.

In a twist that only modern education reform would permit, minimal gains on test scores may save the school. The school board chair explained that they were the victim of fraud and that the children should not suffer further. True, the school should remain open (while its charter is reconsidered), but L.A. schools need to take a long hard look at all of their charter schools and consider whether its a model that can continue to work without much tighter regulation and oversight.

Stephanie Farland, who studies charter school policy for the California School Boards Association,  told Southern California Public Radio "A lot of these little charter schools just don’t have sophisticated boards and they don’t have the proper training, quite frankly, in how to govern a school."

So let's heed her advise and rather than see this case as a single bad-apple, let's see it as a symbol of what happens when you allow schools to operate with minimal oversight and regulations, paying attention to small changes in test-scores rather than the overall effectiveness of those running the school.

But if you want other bad apples then we've got a barrel of them: This isn't the first time that a charter school on the West Coast has had money troubles, and it's unlikely to be the last. A husband and wife team who ran Ivy Academia in the West San Fernando Valley embezzled $200,000 and were charged with 38 crimes in June.

What's even more puzzling about the Fiszer case is that the principal fired for the missing $2.7 million has been highly praised by and education organization as a "Champion of Children" and has written a number of books, the lessons of which he didn't himself heed. One of his books was titled How Teachers Learn Best: An Ongoing Professional Development Model and another Daily Positives: Inspiring Greatness in the Next Generation.

Fiszer was fired when the money was found to have gone missing in November last year, but investigators have only just released the findings of their audit, and they suggest it'll be difficult to pin the crime on him. The audit of the school has yet to be referred to the L.A. County district attorney's office according to a spokeswoman, so he might just get away with it.

Photo credit: Eric E Castro