Bad education: Why shocking public school corruption remains hidden

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Washington Examiner

Even by Hollywood standards, school district fraud can be dramatic.

 

As the new HBO film Bad Education chronicles, Roslyn, New York, School Superintendent Frank Tassone led an embezzlement scheme that siphoned off some $11 million meant for students. For more than six years, he and his assistant superintendent, Pamela Gluckin, lived the high life. Meanwhile, the school board remained blissfully ignorant of the criminal activity committed by its highest-paid employees. 

Roslyn is notable, but not unique. As political scientist Terry Moe chronicles in The Politics of Institutional Reform: Katrina, Education, and the Second Face of Power, before they were closed by Hurricane Katrina and then replaced by charter schools, New Orleans public schools were so corrupt that the FBI had an office in the district’s administration building. 

The bureau notched nearly 30 convictions, including that of a former school board president who pocketed over $140,000 in bribes. As Peter Burns and Matthew Thomas note in Reforming New Orleans, one enterprising administrator actually granted a large contract to repair fire damage to a school a month before the fire occurred.