Carol Burris writes in Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet about the growing number of charter school scandals. She concludes that what they love best–no supervision, no oversight, no regulation–will be their undoing.

She notes that John Oliver was apparently the first major media figure to react with astonishment to the fraud and graft that has become a recurring theme in the charter movement.

And she describes the major scandals that have occurred in the few days after John Oliver’s broadcast: the charter school in Detroit that abruptly closed, stranding its students; the flight of 500 students from the Livermore charter schools in California back to their public schools; the financial scandals at a Los Angeles charter school where the principal charged tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses to his school credit card; the guilty plea by the founder of a Pennsylvania cyber charter school who admitted stealing $8 million in public funds.

How could these things happen over a long period of time with no one noticing?

Burris writes:

In January 2016, four university researchers published a paper likening the proliferation of charters to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. At the time, the paper received scant attention. How ironic that it may be a late-night comedian who might finally alert the nation to the charter crisis. As Oliver noted, “the problem with letting the free market decide when it comes to kids is that kids change faster than the market. And by the time it’s obvious the school is failing, futures may have been ruined.”

The truth is, the deregulation that the high-scoring charter schools love so much, also produces dismal charter failures, taxpayer fleecing and fraud. And that, in the end, could cause the whole charter system to collapse.