Briefly Noted: Reparations For Teachers?

A story from Chicago that, I suspect, has been replicated in one form or another across the country:

Audit: Widespread fraud, abuse of 'extra pay' in Chicago Public Schools

Anyone with much experience working for government—especially Big Government—will sooner or later come to the realization that the point of many to most programs is simply to shovel money out the door: by creating jobs programs or continuing and expanding existing jobs, by enabling what is quaintly referred to as fraud by people who don’t ‘get it.’ Who don’t understand what it’s really all about. Of course these programs are always accompanied by fraud prevention measures, but those are also largely meant to create jobs rather than to actually prevent fraud. The easy way to actually prevent fraud is to not give money away in a wasteful manner, but that would mean canceling many to most of the jobs/programs.

All that Covid money? Yes, a case in point, but on a heretofore undreamt of scale:

Chicago Public Schools spent 77% of the $1.49 billion in federal COVID-19 relief money on employees' salaries and benefits and the district has seen "extra pay" skyrocket during the pandemic, according to a 2023 report from the district's Office of Inspector General.

The report provides many critical conclusions, including a concern over abuse of extra pay for employees in the form of overtime or stipends for taking on extra duties. The cost of extra pay for district employees increased from $42.5 million in 2017 to $73.9 million in 2021.

“Extra pay” for teachers may have “skyrocketed”, but student achievement—and even attendance—has gone through the bottom of the educational dumpster known as the Chicago Public Schools. It all reminds one of the Yes, Minister episode featuring the fully staffed hospital that won awards for administrative efficiency—but had no patients. The hapless minister was under the misapprehension that the purpose of hospitals was to heal the sick, not just serve as jobs programs.

The article documents the garden variety methods of doling the money out: chronic absenteeism, list non-existent students as transfers, teachers signing in their friends who took the day off, clerical staff using their superiors’ passwords to approve extra pay. All the usual stuff.

The exchange between the OIG bureaucrats and the CPS bureaucrats was choreographed straight out of a Yes, Minister episode:

The Office of Inspector General stated that on June 28, 2022, the OIG outlined 10 findings and 10 recommendations on how to address abuse of the Extra Pay Rules and requested a corrective action plan from Chicago Public Schools by August 9. On that date, Chicago Public Schools sent a memo "promising various actions, most of which it said would be explained in a November 30 Integrity Memo. However, the OIG later found that the November 30 Integrity Memo left several areas of concern unaddressed."

The district responded to the report.

“Chicago Public Schools greatly values our partnership with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and we support the work to investigate all issues of misconduct among our 40,000 team members," Chicago Public Schools' spokeswoman Mary Fergus told The Center Square in an email. "As a District, we take seriously our responsibility to serve our families with integrity and to address individuals who breach CPS policies and the public’s trust and hold them accountable. CPS will continue to ensure our District policies and procedures support the highest ethical standards to ensure our valued team members act in the best interest of our students.”

The district stated the Office of Inspector General report "also notes that the District has committed to making several policy improvements to help prevent future misconduct. CPS has informed the OIG that it is creating a team within the Office of Student Support and Engagement that will address the improper use of leave codes and the documentation of transfers and dropouts."

Government business as usual, in other words. It’s a matter of shifting blame via memos. Six months ago the NYPost noted:

Why the trillions in COVID-19 relief money led to billions in fraud

Raise your hand if you’re surprised that the trillions of dollars spent on COVID-19 relief gave way to billions of dollars in government waste, fraud and abuses. I’m not, but based on recent reporting, you might think this type of carelessness with taxpayers’ money has never before happened. Sadly, such waste and fraud are normal byproducts of most government programs.

Too much focus on waste and fraud misses a more important problem: Lots of the COVID-19 spending that doesn’t qualify as wasteful or fraudulent was nonetheless misspent.

…

The inconvenient truth behind all this fraud and waste is that these government programs never should have been designed as they were. …

Finally, billions of dollars went to state and local governments, including for schools that stayed closed, even though many of these governments’ revenue growth equaled or exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

Of course there was some fraud, but the malfeasance happened only because the programs were created in the first place and designed to go to everyone regardless of need. This reckless “design” is the true scandal.

Will Congress ever learn its lesson? I assume not, as it’s easier to complain about fraudsters than to acknowledge that the real scam is the entire process — a process that starts on Capitol Hill.

In a democracy the job of politicians is to allocate government money (i.e., taxpayer money), and the larger the pot the harder politicians have to work. The work is largely a matter of providing plausible (verbal) window dressing for what’s going on—gaslighting the people who still work and pay taxes.