Michigan’s governor just signed a $49 million emergency funding bill, designed by legislators to keep Detroit’s public schools open.
Open for what?
Will any of that dough actually make it to the classroom, where children might possibly be educated?
Or, as I inquired at Townhall yesterday, is it merely another opening for . . . graft?
Less than a week after the rescue bill, U. S. Attorney Barbara McQuade brought criminal charges against more than a dozen DPS principals and administrators, as well as a vendor of school supplies. Their kickback scheme was simple: school officials received big, fat bribes from the vendor for school supplies that, as the Detroit Free Press put it, “were rarely ever delivered.”
The scam involved at least twelve separate Detroit schools over as long as 13 years. During that time, more than $900,000 was paid in bribes to DPS officials.
The newspaper highlighted how “shocked” teachers were that their principals had been indicted. “It’s pitiful that they’re going after principals who are probably just doing what they need to do even if it might be a little bit unethical in order to provide the students in their schools with the supplies and materials that they need that district and the state should be providing us,” was the excuse one teacher offered.
“A little bit unethical”?
Frankly, the fraud didn’t deliver, but deny “supplies and materials” to students — supplies taxpayers had sacrificed to provide.
This same teacher added that her indicted principal is “always putting students’ interests first. It’s not just rhetoric with her. It’s actual practice.”
Except for the graft.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “Schooled in Corruption”
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Schooled in Corruption ….
“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.” — Ayn Rand