Although charter schools are intended to offer students better educational opportunities, they also pose a danger of making inequities worse than they were. That’s according to a new study by Preston Green, professor of education and law at the University of Connecticut, and Joseph Oluwole, associate professor of counseling and educational leadership at Montclair State University.

“By [2019], rent could be taking up a very high percentage of the school’s budget,” said Preston Green III, a University of Connecticut education professor who has written extensively on charter schools. “And if so, the school is going to be cash poor. This is a problem that a number of charter schools have had to deal with. This is something that’s happening across the nation.”

“Trinity Lutheran opens the door because it states simply that if a religious entity is otherwise qualified to take part in a public benefit program, then it cannot be prohibited solely on the basis of its religious affiliation,” said the University of Connecticut professor Preston Green.

The lack of basic safeguards has opened up the charter school sector to “educational entrepreneurs,” says Preston C. Green, professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Connecticut. “These actors may also run businesses whose interests conflict with the charter schools that they are operating.”

As University of Connecticut professor Preston Green explains to me in an email, much of the malfeasance of charter schools comes from the entities that manage them. Called education management organizations (EMOs) or charter management organizations (CMOs), these outfits “create an agency issue with charter school governing boards that generally does not occur in traditional public schools,” Green explains.

Preston Green III, a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut, took his criticism of the burgeoning charter sector a step further, likening the industry to Enron and the subprime mortgage market.

As a scholar who studies the legal and policy issues pertaining to school choice, I’ve observed that the same type of fraud that occurred at Enron has been cropping up in the charter school sector. A handful of school officials have been caught using the Enron playbook to divert funding slated for these schools into their own pockets.

“In the case of Enron, the gatekeepers failed to consider the risks that Fortune 500 companies posed to the financial markets,” Preston Green explains. “They wrongly assumed that these entities would play by the rules. As a result, Enron was allowed to engage in its illegal activities for several years without detection. ”

Radio Dispatch with The Knefels (13:09 Neag School’s Preston Green is interviewed about how the charter school sector resembles the Enron crisis)

In 2001, Enron rocked the financial world by declaring bankruptcy in the wake of a now infamous accounting scandal. Within months, shares in the energy and commodities giant – the seventh-largest corporation in the country at the time – plunged to penny stock levels. Thousands of employees lost their jobs. Investors lost billions. The same type of fraud and mismanagement is happening in the charter school sector, says Professor Preston Green.