Charter schools in the District of Columbia may seek approval from an independent charter board or the District of Columbia Board of Education.  Seventeen of the city's 51 schools are under the school board's oversight.  The oversight office was headed by former grantwriter Brenda Belton.

As reported by Carol D. Leonig of the Washington Post, on August 9 Ms. Belton pled guilt to four counts of felony related to schemes to drefaud the system of just under $650,000 over three years.

Belton, 61, admitted... that she steered about $446,000 in seven no-bid contracts to friends and a cousin and stole $203,000 by paying school funds to a fictitious company she controlled. At the same time, she received $180,000 in illegal payments and kickbacks from friends she helped..... The crimes began almost immediately after Belton became chief executive of the board's Office of Charter School Oversight in March 2003....

She bypassed the city's competitive bidding process to select contractors to monitor the charter schools.... First, she created a bid-evaluation panel, court papers say, made up of Pearl Sandifer, who was Belton's maid of honor; Lynn Long, who later opened the Washington Academy Public Charter School; and Linda Butler, then director of reading at D.C. Head Start. ...[T]he panel favored Equal Access Inc., a company created a few months earlier by one of Belton's longtime friends, Brenda Williams, and a former tenant at Belton's home, Nadine Evans.... The next school year, in 2004-05, Belton began the scam, fraudulently using the employer number for Equal Access Inc. to create a dummy company with a similar name, Equal Access in Education....  The Board of Education was supposed to approve the use of Equal Access Inc. every year; tougher oversight could have revealed the dummy company.

Belton also authorized no-bid city school contracts to longtime friends Sandifer; Linda Scope; Wanda Gordon; Chonya Davis-Johnson, a former D.C. schools employee; and Verna Robinson, a cousin.... [I]t is unclear whether any work was done.

It would be comforting to say this is an isolated incident in the operation of America's school districts except that similar stories can be found across the country, for example Dallas - indeed  Texas; Yonkers and other districts in New York; California; and Prince Georges County, Maryland; Atlanta, Georgia; etc. etc. Your editor would like to see these reporters get together for a feature length article in a magazine like the New Yorker (or a book of these cases) to drive home the point that this is a systemic problem. Maybe an education policy wonk will take this up.

These are all classic examples of how political risk operates at the district level. Even in the age of NCLB, who you know is too often more important than what you know. The problem stems from the persistence of the old education industry - laws that permit great discretion in purchasing rather than real competition, a tradition of hiring friends and colleagues for consulting rather than the most qualified, a lack of professional training and status in the procurement office, and politicians failure to see a systemic problem rather than a series of one-offs.