I remember how it was -- JR
A Fraudulent Attack on Education Choice
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has indicted former government employees hired by a fellow Democrat, then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, for defrauding the government. Now she’s desperately trying to use the story as a cudgel against families benefitting from the state’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Account policy.
On Thursday, Mayes’ office announced the indictment of five people, including three former Arizona Department of Education employees, for “allegedly engaging in fraud, conspiracy, computer tampering, illegally conducting an enterprise, money laundering and forgery” related to the ESA.
“My overarching concern here is this is a program that is easy to target for fraud,” Mayes claimed.
But these were no ordinary scammers. This was an inside job.
According to the grand jury indictment, the three former ADE employees, “admitted minor students, real and fictitious into the ESA Program by using false, forged, or fraudulent documentation,” including falsified special-education evaluations from public schools, and “awarded said student funds from the ESA Program, and approved expenses for reimbursement or funds for distribution of behalf of said students for their own benefit.”
Had the scammers not been working at the Department of Education, this would not have been possible. As ESA director John Ward explained to the Arizona Capitol Times, the ESA program already has proper guardrails in place: “ADE employees are trained to review birth certificates and look for anything ‘strange’ or ‘unusual’ in assessing authenticity of disability evaluations.”
Unlike the Arizona’s Health Care Cost Containment System scandal—which has seen dozens of scammers indicted for stealing more than a billion dollars from the state’s Medicaid system—ordinary scammers could not have gotten away with this without help from inside.
Moreover, the scammers were caught. Contrary to Mayes’s telling, the Arizona Education Department was investigating its own employees before the AG’s office got involved. “The Attorney General is not telling the truth when she states that the alleged criminal activities of former ADE employees did not raise flags in the department,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne clarified in a press release. “In fact, the opposite is true. Our office did alert the Attorney General’s Office to concerns we discovered regarding” the former employees.
Mayes’s attempt to smear the ESA program as having a “lack of controls and regulations” is belied by the facts. The most recent review by the ESA by the Arizona Auditor General found an improper payment rate of nearly zero. During their “review of all 168,020 approved transactions identified in the Department’s Program account transaction data” over the prior fiscal year, they “found only 1 successful transaction at an unapproved merchant totaling $30.”
In other words, the rate of improper payments to unapproved merchants was only 0.001 percent.
That’s far better than other government programs. According to a 2021 analysis by the federal Office of Management and Budget, the improper payment rate across federal agencies is 7.2 percent. Some of the worst offenders are the federal school meals programs. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “the school meals programs have reported high improper payment error rates, as high as almost 16 percent for the National School Lunch Program and almost 23 percent for the School Breakfast Program over the past 4 years.”
Opponents of school choice like Mayes and Save Our Schools Arizona are predictably using the indictments to attack the popular ESA program. But anyone who is really concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse should start in the district school system.
As the Goldwater Institute documented, “just 10 percent of Arizona’s school districts have managed to accumulate almost $26 million in documented fraud” over two decades. If the attorney general is really concerned about fraud, perhaps she should investigate the 13 school districts that the Arizona Auditor General has reprimanded for failing to comply with the state’s financial reporting requirements.
The district schools aren’t immune from hiring people who commit fraud either. In just the last two years, employees at school districts in Glendale, Hyder, and Wilson have been indicted for theft, fraud, forgery, and misuse of public funds, while an Eloy School District employee pled guilty to theft and forgery.
Any fraud or theft should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But no one has proposed eliminating AHCCCS or the district schools over the financial misconduct of external or internal swindlers.
Politicians and special interests are exploiting the ESA indictments to push an agenda that would cheat children out of a quality education and punish parents for the misdeeds of bamboozling bureaucrats. The public should recognize their fraudulent smears for what they are.
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/fraudulent-attack-education-choice
************************************************Embattled Ivy League Professor Amy Wax Alleges School is Attempting to ‘Punish’ Her for Conservative Speech
She's a hero of straight talk
University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) law professor Amy Wax alleged that the university does not adhere to free speech standards and is targeting the scholar because of her conservative beliefs.
Wax, who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation, has made several controversial statements outside of the classroom, and the university has claimed that her speech created “a hostile campus environment.” Former UPenn President Liz Magill signed off on sanctions against Wax, which Wax said was an attempt to sanction her for extramural speech, which is speech outside the classroom, and said that the school is “flagrantly in violation of the principles of academic freedom.”
“Penn has zero interest in developing and adhering to principles of a consistent position on free expression, zero interest. They can protect the people they basically agree with or favor, like the pro-Palestinians, anti-Israeli, antisemitic, and they can punish people like me. They have never articulated a consistent position,” Wax told the DCNF.
“Everybody says after October 7, universities are on the run, they’re going to change the way they do things or after the affirmative action case, they’re going to change the way they do things. I don’t see any evidence of that. I hear people doubling down on their conviction that everything they’re doing is right and good,” Wax continued.
Universities are dominated by left-wing professors, with one 2018 review of over 60 top colleges in the U.S. revealing that the professoriate is over ten to one Democratic to Republican. Wax pointed to the left-wing dominance of the universities as a reason she was being targeted for her more conservative speech, while radical left-wing speech had largely gone unquestioned.
As recently as 2015, UPenn awarded Wax with the school’s top teaching prize, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, according to a UPenn news article. “Cancel culture really started accelerating around, I think, around 2015, 2016,” Wax told the DCNF.
The Penn Law Council of Student Representatives held a student body meeting with then-UPenn Law School Dean Theodore Ruger in September 2019 to discuss “issues regarding Professor Amy Wax,” according to an email obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech legal organization.
“The objections to me had nothing really to do with the quality of my teaching. It had to do with my openly expressing views and opinions and discussing facts that were forbidden and deviated from this very narrow catechism,” Wax told the DCNF. Wax said that many of the ideas and thoughts she had expressed were discussed in mainstream conservative circles but are forbidden at universities.
Wax previously made controversial statements, including saying that America should let fewer Asians immigrate to the country due to their “indifference to liberty,” and that different racial “groups have different levels of ability” and that unequal outcomes are “not due to racism,” according to a June 2023 UPenn memo obtained by The Washington Free Beacon. She also said that diversity, equity and inclusion officers “couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it,” and that they are “true believer bureaucrats.”
“People are afraid now to express a lot of this stuff in public because they will be censured or even lose their job or their livelihood,” Wax told the DCNF. “There is a myth, a fairy tale in the universities that all people are equal in their latent ability, whatever that means, and their achievement, and that is just completely contrary to fact.”
Wax said allegations that she made students uncomfortable in the classroom were unfounded and that Ruger targeted her for extramural speech. She pointed out that the recently leaked memo of the faculty senate didn’t list any speech in the classroom.
The memo recommends that Wax receive a public reprimand from university leadership, a loss of her named chair and a requirement to note when she publicly speaks, she is not speaking for the university. It also recommends a one-year suspension at half pay and a loss of summer pay in perpetuity. The memo claims that Wax’s speech should be treated as “major infractions of University behavioral standards.”
Magill, who signed off on the recommendation to sanction Wax in the leaked memo, argued at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing that the university had been lenient on antisemitic speech due to the school’s adherence to free speech principles. Magill also defended the Palestine Writes Festival at the school, which involved one speaker who likened Zionism to Nazism and one who said “most Jews” are “evil.”
“Liz Magill lied to Congress because it has never adhered to First Amendment standards,” Wax told the DCNF. “But the fact that they’re bringing this case against me is directly contrary to First Amendment standards.”
Free speech issues on college campuses have been a source of fierce debate since the Oct.7 terrorist attacks against Israel. Former Harvard President Claudine Gay wrote that students “had a right to speak” after over 30 student groups signed a letter blaming the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and also alluded to free speech at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing on antisemitism.
Harvard University previously rescinded an offer to a student in 2019 for alleged racist comments made when he was 16 years old, and disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from campus in 2022 because of her views on trans issues.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth allegedly told MIT Israel Alliance President Talia Khan that the university could not evenly apply the code of conduct due to fear of possibly “losing faculty support.” MIT previously disinvited speaker Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, due to his criticism of affirmative action.
“The far left holds power in the universities, and they are not about to relinquish it,” Wax told the DCNF.
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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin Signs Bill Banning Legacy Admissions
This will put a few noses out of joint
Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill Friday banning legacy admissions at public colleges in the state.
Several states have moved to eliminate legacy admissions, which are admissions based on prior familial attendance to a school, after the fall of race-based admissions at the Supreme Court in June 2023. The bill passed the Virginia Senate with bipartisan support, 39-0, and passed the state’s House of Delegates 99-0, and has now been signed by Youngkin.
“Governor Youngkin has consistently advocated for merit-based admissions to Virginia’s colleges and universities. In Virginia, students can be encouraged to know their hard work and academic career will be recognized on its merit,” a spokesperson for Youngkin told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“No public institution of higher education shall provide any manner of preferential treatment in the admissions decision to any student applicant on the basis of such student’s legacy status or such student’s familial relationship to any donor to such institution,” the bill reads.
“It’s about fairness. It’s about higher ed being available to everybody,” Virginia Democratic state Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, the bill’s sponsor, said in an interview before the Senate vote, according to The Associated Press.
The Connecticut legislature’s education committee said it plans to look into legacy admissions during this upcoming legislative session, according to the Connecticut Mirror. Federal legislation was also introduced in November to eliminate legacy admissions in Congress by Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young and Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.
Nearly 56% of the top 250 colleges and universities in the U.S. used legacy admissions in the enrollment process.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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