Stewardship of Grants Too Lax

The news is long overdue: The state Department of Education has finally revoked grants to five nonprofit language schools that have failed to account for public subsidies over the past three years.

Two of the groups--the League of United Latin American Citizens and Hermandad Mexicana Nacional--must repay nearly $5 million in grants, the result of a multi-agency investigation into the fate of $15 million given to 10 such privately run nonprofits.

Among the alleged irregularities--all of which have been denied by the schools--is that public money was spent on nonexistent students, inflated rent and exorbitant salaries. Some schools are also suspected of violating payroll tax and voter registration laws.

Meanwhile, the crucial question remains: Why is public money being funneled into privately run adult schools that exist outside the reach of the otherwise omnipresent state Education Code?

The traditional, wrong-headed answer has been that nonprofit schools provide cheap English and citizenship classes to immigrant adults who otherwise could not afford them. After all, we’re told, an educated immigrant population can better ascend the economic ladder and contribute to the commonweal.

But while many of us in the private education sector must seriously disagree with the ideological assumptions that American citizens are morally obligated to subsidize the educational advancement of immigrants--needy or not--the fact is that hundreds of highly regulated, tax-subsidized adult programs already exist in the public sector.

To wit, California taxpayers currently fund 1,100 public school and community college districts, many of whose literally thousands of individual campuses provide adult language and citizenship classes to immigrants--at rates comparable to or even lower than the privately run nonprofits.

Hermandad Nacional has said in published reports that taxpayer grants allow it to charge its mainly low-income students a mere $50 for such classes. Yet Mission, Valley, Pierce and Glendale colleges as well as the Los Angeles Unified School District offer adult English as a Second Language and citizenship classes for free or less than $55.

The crucial difference is not cost, but the Education Code, which requires public sites to maintain nit-pickingly accurate, up-to-date records on instructor competence, student status, course work and the exact nature of expenditures--something public administrators and employees know and often complain about.

But if there is anything worse than the hyper-regulation of public education, it is the inverse lack of regulation of the 100 private, nonprofit adult schools thriving on the same lifeline of public money.

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Contrary to myth, privately run nonprofit schools can pay their directors and employees whatever they consider reasonable and necessary, collect fees, spend resources, hire instructors and create a curriculum at will--all without regard to the state Education Code that regulates every facet of public school sites.

For the purely private sector, that’s just fine. But when public assets are lost or abused by a private party trading on its quasi-governmental cachet, unsuspecting students can lose class credit, employees can lose jobs and hapless taxpayers pay for lost government funds, investigations, trials and incarceration of fraudulent operators.

Sacramento educrats--apparently thick of wallet but short of hindsight--seem oblivious to the fact that Southern California is fast becoming a virtual ghost town of private adult schools that have turned out to be either blatant frauds or merely incompetent--all at taxpayer expense.

Even with a state watchdog agency supposedly protecting consumers after numerous “diploma mill” scams during the 1980s, six local IADE American Schools--including a campus in North Hollywood--managed to thrive on $58 million in federal grants before fraud investigators shut down the campuses in 1995.

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A U.S. Senate investigatory report described the four-year IADE scam--earmarked by unqualified instructors, deficient course design and falsified student records--as a model for abusing public education grants, some of which were spent on cars, child support and Club Med vacations.

Amazingly, published reports indicate the state Department of Education knew of severe irregularities at Hermandad Nacional and other schools in 1995 but kept the California gold flowing until the FBI and the news media started inquiring in 1998.

Imagine, then, the potential for abuse created by Proposition 227: In lieu of K-12 bilingual classes, the law mandates that a whopping $100 million in public funds be allocated to community adult schools so that immigrant parents will tutor their children at home. That is just too much public money to entrust to unproven, underscrutinized private enterprises.

Rather than continue as a cash cow for those loosely regulated private schools, the Department of Education should seek to direct all required Proposition 227 adult education money--along with related future grants--to the hundreds of public K-12 school sites and community colleges where adult classes are subject to the more rigorous scrutiny that taxpayers expect and demand.