It's hard to believe reports on improvements at DC's Nalle Elementary School because of past test fraud (that went unpunished)

The Post reports ("Report offers case study of turnaround at JC Nalle Elementary in the District") on improvements at Nalle School.  From the article:

J.C. Nalle Elementary School was at risk of closure in 2011 because of low academic performance and flagging enrollment. Two years later, the school had the biggest math test score gains in D.C. Public Schools, with a 27 percent increase in proficiency rates.

A report released Wednesday by Child Trends, a Bethesda-based research center, found the improvement to be a result of a series of interventions that could be replicated in other schools.

“If you look at the research, there are plenty of school turnaround efforts that don’t work,” said Daniel Princiotta, principal research scientist for the study. He said the advance in math scores at J.C. Nalle was rapid and substantial.

But because of rampant test fraud during the reign of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee, it becomes difficult to believe any statement about systematic improvement in the schools.

The story of DC test fraud was broken by USA Today ("When standardized test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real?"), not the Washington Post, which mostly shilled for Rhee during her tenure here.  For the most part, there was no serious effort to root out fraud or penalize people who took part ("How they cheated on D.C. tests: Excerpts from new report," Post).

By contrast, in Atlanta, teachers and administrators were charged with fraud, convicted and are going to be jailed ("Atlanta Cheating Case Educators Urged to Accept Sentencing Deals." Wall Street Journal).

How many DC charter schools are defrauding the citizens by enrolling non-residents?

Whenever I ride by charter schools when students are being dropped off or picked up from school, I am struck by a disproportionate number of out-of-state license plates on the cars.  Sure, some of the children are probably in divorced households, with split custodianship, but not that many.

Earlier in the month, the Washington Post reported ("Excel Academy Public Charter School under scrutiny for alleged residency fraud") that two-thirds of the students at Excel Academy haven't been certified as being DC residents. That's the equivalent of almost $7 million in instructional funds being paid to support non-residents.

From the article:

Because students at the city’s public charters and traditional public schools must live in the District to attend — and receive an education funded with thousands of dollars in taxpayer money — enrolling from outside the city’s borders could be considered residency fraud. ... 

A copy of the audit, obtained by The Post, showed that just 196 of the 618 students enrolled at the school were in compliance with OSSE guidelines for residency verification. No documentation to verify residency was provided for 356 students, and 65 student files had residency documents that were out of compliance with OSSE guidelines, such as pay stubs that showed tax withholding in Maryland or utility bills or lease agreements that were provided without a corresponding receipt or canceled check. 

On Monday night, the charter board asked Deborah Lockhart, chair of Excel’s board of trustees, to speak at the board’s meeting “to provide us with assurance that the school was going to be running a clean enrollment operation,” Pearson said.

Separately, apparently two schools have been declared ineligible for playing in the annual high school football Thanksgiving Day game because of having nonresidents on the team.

I presume this is a big problem across many of the schools in the charter "system."

And no one is doing much about it, not the Public Charter School Board. Assurances are not enough. The school should be have a temporary receivership appointed, and a full audit of student residency should be conducted.

2.  This kind of fraud could be a great item for the new elected DC Attorney General to start off investigating. Separately, the current AG (non-elected) has initiated lawsuits alleging fraud against Options Charter School and the Community Academy PCS system for officials creating separate for profit businesses to provide high priced services to their schools, to the pecuniary benefit of the self-interested officials.

Wall Street vs. Main Street (communities) literally: conspiracy to manipulate bond pricing

EE calls our attention to this Rolling Stone article, "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia: How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape," by Matt Taibbi.

It's about bid rigging, which lowered the return to municipalities and other local government entities from the sales of municipal bonds.

Of course, local governments have been getting nailed by similar kinds of financial shenanigans by Wall Street financiers for a long time, from San Diego's bankruptcy because of pension fund investment problems, to the bankruptcies of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Jefferson County, Alabama, because of funding fraud abetted by either contract fraud (Jefferson County) or product failure (Harrisburg) which triggered increasing costs and not enough money to rectify the problems.