The Inspector General of the Chicago Board of Education released its audit of findings for fiscal year 2015. The report highlights numerous cases of corruption, including contract kickbacks, shakedowns of vendors, tax-exempt status abuse, political activities, thefts, employee-residency violations, and many examples of ethics violations and mismanagement. There were so many complaints of wrongdoing the Inspector General was able to investigate fewer than one in four cases.
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“The CPS Office of Inspector General just released a report addressing the known complaints of corruption and mismanagement at CPS. As usual, wrongdoing takes place at every level, from the Byrd-Bennett scandal to teacher misuse of tax-exempt status.
“The report illustrates the chaos of large districts in America. These government entities cannot properly educate their charges, but they excel at finding ways to whet their insatiable appetites for taxpayer dollars. It is time to start dismantling large districts. They are proven failures.”
Bruno Behrend
Senior Fellow, Education Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“We now know where Chicago public school teachers and administrators are spending their time instead of teaching the students. They are stealing from the taxpayers – buying PlayStations, big-screen televisions, and movies, smoking weed with students, shaking down vendors, watching porn, and soliciting sex from students.
“This behavior must be stopped. Students and parents must take the purse strings away from the corrupt education bureaucracy via education choice to hold the entire system accountable for stealing from our children and taxpayers.”
Lennie Jarratt
Project Manager, Education
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“The findings of the inspector general’s report are not surprising to anyone remotely familiar with Chicago Public Schools and how they operate. Instead of carrying out their stated goals of acting ‘in the highest ethical manner in order to preserve the public trust of residents and taxpayers’ and acting ‘in the best interest of Chicago Public School students,’ these Chicago Public School employees betrayed the trust placed in them by area parents.
“According to the audit, school teachers and officials took bribes, solicited sexual favors from students, and bought DVD boxed sets of The Three Stooges – all under the guise of education. In some cases, school officials almost literally stole money from their employers, and in turn, Chicago families.”
Jesse Hathaway
Managing Editor
Budget & Tax News
Research Fellow
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“It’s nice to know when Chicago teachers aren’t too busy robbing their students of a decent education, they still have the time to rob Illinois residents of their tax dollars. CPS teachers are the most highly compensated big city ‘educators’ in the country. They ‘earn’ those high salaries and fat pensions by getting only 24 to 30 percent of their students up to subject proficiency, depending on what test you believe.
“Still, another CTU strike over compensation is imminent. (I assume CTU’s argument will be that its members wouldn’t have to steal so much if they only were paid more.) Is it too much for Chicago residents to ask that the people in charge of educating their children spend less time finding ways to furnish their homes tax-free, and spend more time getting more than 66 percent of their kids to graduate high school in five years?”
Tim Benson
Policy Analyst
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
The Heartland Institute is a 32-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
Bruno Behrend, J.D., is a senior fellow for education policy at The Heartland Institute.
Lennie Jarratt is the former director of the Center for Education Opportunities at The Heartland Institute
Jesse Hathaway is a policy advisor for budget and tax issues at The Heartland Institute.
Tim Benson joined The Heartland Institute in September 2015 as a policy analyst in the Government Relations Department.
