Carol Burris writes here about a charter scandal in South Carolina. Carol is the executive director of the Network for Public Education.
She writes:
Last week, an excellent investigative report on a for-profit-run charter chain appeared in South Carolina’s Post and Courier. Entitled How a Florida principal with a controversial history became a SC charter school kingpin, it was written by Hillary Flynn and Maura Turcotte. These reporters put extraordinary care and diligent research into the piece. I know because, over the course of a year, Flynn would call me from time to time for insight into the for-profit charter world. There is no transparency in South Carolina. You need FOIAs to determine which schools in the state are even run by for-profits. Here is a summary of what they found.
Pinnacle, a Florida for-profit corporation, has three charter schools in South Carolina.
Its creator and owner, Michael D’Angelo, is a former Florida charter school principal who was fired from a for-profit chain. He then moved to another charter, where he wrote himself reimbursement checks with no invoices and got fired again.
Undeterred by his previous failures, D’Angelo tried to open several charter schools in Florida. Despite being told he did “not have the competency to operate a charter school,” he found an accountant, created a for-profit charter management company, and headed to South Carolina to open Gray Collegiate Academy.
When Pinnacle’s school got into trouble with the South Carolina Public Charter School District for noncompliance, Pinnacle went shopping for a new authorizer for its charter school. A Christian college, Erskine College, stepped in. It later accused Pinnacle of fraud. Then, two Pinnacle Schools moved to another Christian College, Limestone College, for authorization. Authorizers receive substantial fees from the schools, a bonanza for cash-strapped colleges.
The process of authorizer shopping, a common practice in states like Ohio and Michigan with large for-profit sectors, is a glaring loophole in the system. The authorizer, who stands to gain substantial fees from the schools, can provide a new lease of life to a shady charter school. A South Carolina Senate bill aims to curb this practice, but it faces fierce opposition from the charter lobby. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools even lobbied to ensure that states with multiple authorizers are privileged when getting big CSP grants, further exacerbating the issue of authorizer shopping.
Meanwhile, Pinnacle plans to open two more schools, serving as additional cash cows for D’Angelo and his friends.
You can read the excellent investigative reporting on Pinnacle here. While you must register with the paper to see it, it is not behind a paywall. Kudos to Flynn and Turcotte.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would note that the “liberal media” that has almost ruined this country is all over this story, which is constant and ongoing. We need to quit hearing about this fraud thing and start hearing about how the libs are trying to steal our glorious past and convince all our children to be GHLBQ or whatever that is.
Unregulated, for profit entities lead to profiteering, self-dealing and fraud. The charter sector attracts grifter parasites that feed on public dollars at the expense of public schools and taxpayers. It is no accident that opportunists like Michael Milken, Sean Combs and Manny Diaz have flocked to charter schools to “wet their beaks” with public funds.
CHARTER SCHOOL FINANCIAL FRAUD: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate “school choice” charter school operators that the IG investigation declared: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.” It is billionaire hedge fund managers who are behind the charter school scam in order to get their hands on public school buildings and property — they are skimming hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools and are betraying America’s public schools and the children of America.
It just makes common sense to taxpayers to require charter schools to file the same exact public domain budget forms that genuine public schools are required to file — and to file them under penalty of perjury, just like public schools do to give taxpayers a full account of how every penny of their tax dollars are spent. Charter schools don’t do that. Why not?
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that is — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers, that is, THE PUBLIC. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties or are religious organizations. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
THE RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.” The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
INDOCTRINATION: Charter schools provide the perfect environment for subtly (or not so subtly) weaving a political and/or social view into every lesson. Instead of a nationally shared perspective, America ends up with a fragmented view of what our nation is all about.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64