$2.3 Million for Voucher Ghosts

Plus, charters take a sharp right turn

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Peter Greene reports on the ghosts receiving vouchers in North Carolina.

NC: Vouchers For Ghost Students

Those voucher dollars add up. Nordstrom figures about $2.3 million in fraudulent payments of taxpayer money to private schools.

Here’s a bit more on how private schools received state funds for students that didn’t show up in their count:

Riverside Christian Academy-- 16 students enrolled, and 55 vouchers! At $6492 per student, that's a heck of a windfall. Mitchener University Academy reported an enrollment of 72 and collected 149 vouchers-- so about $230,000 of taxpayer money handed over for non-existent students.

The accountability, it seems, is non-existent. It’s not exactly clear why schools received state voucher funds for students who were not enrolled or students that didn’t show up in attendance counts.

Vouchers for ghosts may be the latest in the right-wing attempt to direct public money to private schools.

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Charters Take a Sharp Right Turn

Jeff Bryant breaks down how the charter movement is turning sharply to the right:

The Network for Public Education’s (NPE) new report, A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda, exposes this expanding sector of the charter school industry. With the assistance of journalist Karen Francisco, NPE chronicled not only the growth of rightwing charter schools, but their ties to conservative politicians and the religious right. While the arch-conservative Christian Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School initiative has received the most attention, there are now hundreds of so-called “classical academies” and other charter schools whose websites are designed to attract conservative white families.  

Tennessee has definitely seen this effort with Hillsdale’s charters working tirelessly to open schools here - and ultimately, winning approval for a school in Rutherford County.