Pa. cyberschool that once educated Santorum's kids now tied to FBI probe
Pa. cyberschool that once educated Santorum's kids now tied to FBI probe
If you're a political junkie, you've probably heard of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. It figured prominently in a scandal that helped end the Senate career of Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum. It was the thriving online learning center -- launched in a foundering ex-steel town on the Ohio border called Midland, Pa. -- that was taking $38,000 a year from taxpayers in the blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills for the home-schooling of five of Santorum's kids, who lived two states away in an affluent Virginia suburb.
The arrangement made Santorum look bad (for one thing, he'd been elected to Congress in 1990 by attacking an incumbent... for moving to Virginia) but it also gave some folks pause about the millions of dollars that Pennsylvania was beginning to hurl into cyber-charter schools -- schools that are getting the same public dollars as bricks-and-mortar charter schools, even through their cost of educating each child is much lower. But the flow of public cash to the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter empire founded by entreprenuer Nicholas Trombetta surged despite the bad publicity in the Santorum case, and despite news in 2007 that a state grand jury was probing the convoluted financial dealings of Trombetta, a GOP donor.
Nothing ever came of that 2007 probe. You may have heard of the state's attorney general back then, a chap by the name of Tom Corbett.
By 2010, the massive flow of money to the Trombetta cyber-empire -- which now included a baffling array of for-profit entities -- began to draw notice. According to a report in Sunday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the state....
.... pays tens of millions of dollars a year to a network of nonprofit and for-profit companies run by former executives of the state's largest online public school.
The relationships between the Beaver County-based school and those businesses were a concern to former Gov. Ed Rendell's administration, which late in its tenure asked PA Cyber for better accounting of its payments to spin-off entities. Gov. Corbett's Department of Education, though, opted early on to let the relationships continue without heightened accountability.
There's that Corbett guy again! Anyway, someone has finally stepped in. Not the state of Pennsylvania, of course. The job fell instead to the feds:
On Thursday agents from the FBI, the criminal investigations division of the IRS, and the U.S. Department of Education searched the school's headquarters in Midland, its accountants' office in Koppel, and properties rented by its spin-offs in Ohio.
The investigation appears to be aimed at current or former executives of the school. PA Cyber "as an entity, is not a current target," U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton's office said. Regardless of the direction of the investigation, PA Cyber demonstrates a consequence of the state's charter school revolution: the emergence from schools of profit-seeking spin-offs.
This news come as a) evidence mounts that cyber-charters, in spite of -- or maybe because of -- their ability to generate profits, do a poor job of actually educating children (PDF) and b) the state of Pennsylvania is thus racing to apporve more cyber-charters. All of which cuts to the deeper question that's been under discussion here at Attytood for more than a year. No one disputes that public schools in Philadelphia and some other distressed cities are a disaster. To address that, we can a) fix our public schools or b) create a system to demolish those schools completely and funnel the money to a network of new schools that includes some worthwhile educators but way too many charlatans looking to make a quick buck or teach kids faith-based pseudo-science.
What we saw six years ago -- that when a powerful politician could use Pennsylvania tax dollars to school his kids in Virginia -- should have set off all kinds of red flags. Instead, we threw tens of millions of dollars at this guy. Now, it's up to the FBI to sort this all out.
Let's clarify what schools in distressed cities means. These are cities that have been under the control of liberals for decades on end. The school children have been subject to liberal views on discipline, unionization, lowered expectations, and indoctrination into the leftist religion. This has translated to the decline of the cities, destruction of the family, drug and alcohol abuse, and crime. The inner city public schools are a wasteland created by liberalism, that keep people on the bottom rungs of the economic and social ladder. Those who run it, and have run it in the past should be held criminally liable.
— jmc- So, obviously you weren't subjected to the poison of the liberal curricula inflicted upon children living in distressed cities in the course of their public education.
This makes me wonder what courses of study you pursued in the course of becoming a the flaming paranoiac you've turned out to be. - Liberalism leads to the destruction of the family??? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
— F. Harry Stowe - You know, all during the Primary races I just couldn't put my finger on the problem but I kept thinking there's something lacking in Santorum's kid's.
Now I've got it - tainted education!— He Visto Todo - jmc hit right on the head..LuForemost get your head out of the union leaders arse— blombard
- jmc hit right on the head..LuForemost get your head out of the union leaders arse— blombard
- Hey Bunchie, Interesting headline. Here's another that you can try.... Philadelphia Newspaper that Once Employed Pedophile also Employs Will Bunch"— Frank S.
- @jmc: Yeah, keep tap dancing. Oh, and while your at it, you may want to address the issues raised in the article. The fact that tax payers are being sold a bill of goods about cyber charters with nearly non-existent oversight. And whose pockets are the operators of these cyber charters lining in order to stay open and keep the cash flow coming? Sound like good questions to ask.— nikki1231
- Last paragraph - "When we seen"....really? Looks like you were educated at a substandard cyber school.
And, no matter how much money you throw at Philly public schools, the parents are still animals. So, these poor kids just repeat the cycle. How about spending the money to eliminate teen pregnancy?— greatdogz - Oh yeah all of those Republican backed abstinence programs worked so well. Yeah let's flush some more money down the drain on that. — F. Harry Stowe
- Nikki, Another good question to ask is whose pockets are being lined with the taxpayer $$$ that Obama gave to his friends in the so called Green Energy sector?— Frank S.
- If you and some other people commenting here are suffering from acid reflux - just one of the many ailments that might cause you to be so nasty - the solution is simple:
Stop reading columnist's like Will Bunch - and don't even glance at the New York Times - and confine your information sources to those offered by Fox News and My Weekly Reader (quite popular with 3rd graders). - Ah, put the same people pushing for-profit charter schools are also demanding that we cut programs that provide birth control! Maybe a little consistency is in order here.— Susie from Philly
- blind faith in charter schools will result in more stories like this.— the lopez!
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