Administrative Corruption and Integrity Violations in the Charter School Sector

Abstract

Charter school legislation permits new actors to compete for public funds to provide education to K-12 students across the United States. Proponents of market-oriented policies predict that privatization cuts costs and improves service quality, by removing bureaucracy and boosting creativity. These schools were predicted to become laboratories of innovation that would use their flexibility from state and local requirements to improve public education. This study suggests that the less regulated service systems may have also propagated an environment susceptible to managerial and accountability inadequacies, if not outright integrity violations and corruption. Using systematic document review and the existing literature on corruption in education, a typology of integrity violations and corruption in the charter school sector is developed in this paper. A better understanding of the characteristics of the institutional environment that enable corrupt behavior is necessary to develop effective strategies to prevent corruption, protect children, and manage public funds effectively.

Keywords:

• accountability
• charter schools
• corruption
• education policy
• integrity violations
• public–private hybrids
• transparency

Notes

1 The estimations differ by source and method. For example, the education advocacy group The Network for Public Education (NPE) estimates around $1 billion of waste, considering schools that received grants and never opened, and schools that were closed due to mismanagement (see Burris and Bryant, 2019). Another way to think consider potential loss is to consider actual investigations and convictions. According to the Inspector General’s FY 2018 Management Challenges report, between 2011 and 2017, 19 charter school investigations lead to 24 convictions of charter school officials and returned about $7.1 million in restitution.

2 According to NAACP (2017), 15 states allow virtual schools and they are likely to be operated by for-profit organizations.

3 This opposition is often associated with the ambiguity of the legal status of charter schools and their affiliates as public or private entities. A review of state charter legislation has shown that state statutory requirements are often not clear on “whether charter schools and their officials are public entities under the law, and thus subject to the same rules governing the action of public officials” (Green, Baker, & Oluwole, 2015, p. 240). The ongoing legal disputes have important implications with regards to the application of governmental immunity, labor protection, and public accountability laws to the schools and their officials. To unionize, teachers apply to state labor boards, or to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) if there is no collective bargaining law for public school teachers in their state. Charter operators have challenged unionization efforts by contesting either that the school is a private institution, or that it is a “political subdivision of the state”—and therefore public—depending on which board their staff petitioned for the right to unionize (see Cohen, 2015a, 2015b, 2017 for examples).

4 Fethullah Gülen, who resides in Pennsylvania in the United States, is the transnational religious leader of the movement known as “Hizmet” (translated from Turkish as “service”). Despite the increasingly prominent role the movement has been playing in the charter school sector in the United States, this trend has largely been overlooked by the otherwise prolific charter school scholarly literature (for an exception, see Schneider, 2016). Most coverage of Gülen schools are in the printed and online press (e.g., Flaherty, 2018; Saul, 2011; Schneider, 2017; Strauss, 2018; Whyte, 2018).