Is this fraud?

[Grins]

I was reading the Washington Post this AM and saw this article. I have a legal question for any of you attorney's out there, especially Texas District Attorney's.

“And the Houston Independent School District -- showcase of the "Texas educational miracle" that President Bush has touted as a model for the rest of the nation -- is fending off accusations that it inflated its achievements through fuzzy math.

“Austin is one of more than a dozen Houston high schools caught up in a burgeoning scandal about the reliability of their dropout statistics…. routinely, as many as half of Austin students failed to graduate, the school's reported dropout rate fell from 14.4 percent to 0.3 percent. Even a Houston school board member calls the statistic "baloney."

“If this were any other school district in the nation, few people would pay much attention. But Houston is the political springboard for U.S. Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige….(who) formed a political alliance with Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who became an ardent advocate of accountability and high-stakes testing.”

Then, the article says this:

“…in 1996, …voters turned down a proposed $390 million education bond issue. Two years later, with the help of …public goodwill generated by steadily improving test scores, Paige secured voter approval for $678 million in new loans to rebuild many of the district's decrepit schools.”

I’m not a lawyer, but how is this different from a flim-flam operation? Paige used false data, and scammed the voter out of $678 million that they did not want to pay. The article is right when one comments, "It is all phony; it's just like Enron".

Don’t you go to jail for this?

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14117-2003Nov7.html>

[PunkinPi]

1. Absolutely fraud

There was a great segment on NOW with Bill Moyers talking about this exact thing a couple of weeks ago.

SNIP>
BRANCACCIO: In February of this year, local TV station KHOU broke the story of Sharpstown High. It wasn't long before state officials stepped in to investigate. It turned out that the problem wasn't just Sharpstown High. Almost all of the schools the state looked at had reported false dropout rates. Westside High School has 2300 students but, like Sharpstown, it claimed it didn't have any dropouts. Yates High School said it only had 26 dropouts. In reality, it had 373 — more than a quarter of its 1400 students.

Here's how these Houston schools were cooking the books. Texas investigators say school officials were simply coming up with reasons — like transferring or getting a GED — why students shouldn't be listed as dropouts. Imagine Jerroll Tyler's surprise when he found out Sharpstown officials claimed he transferred to another school he'd never even heard of — a claim he believes they knew wasn't true.

<SNIP

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript238_full.html

[DUreader]

2. So much fraud has been legalized

[AP]

3. Actually, that is pretty close to the legal definition of fraud.

If you tell someone something you know is false, and you know they'll rely on that information to make a decision, which they make, and then they suffer a loss from jusitifiable reliance on that false piece of informaition, it's fraud.

Now, do taxpayer's have standing to sue? Is Paige's department immune from suit?