Arizona: Fort Wayne

by David Safier

Remember that wonderful 5 part investigation of tuition tax credits and STOs in the East Valley Trib? And remember how the Trib reporters as well as others at the Republic kept adding to the story? And remember how all this journalistic attention led to not one, but two legislative committees looking into tax credits and STOs?

Pretty neat how that works, isn't it? Power of the press and all that good stuff.

Well, a similar thing is beginning to happen in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the Journal Gazette published a series of articles about their local, non profit Imagine Schools being run by the for profit Imagine Schools corporation instead of by their local boards, in direct violation of IRS regulations.

by David Safier I've been out of town, so I haven't written about the second and third installments of the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Journal Gazette's series on Imagine Schools: Education Inc. This is about Part II, It's 'Our school, not...

by David Safier

Today's Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Indiana, began a 3 part series about the corporation, Imagine Schools, and the charters it runs in Indiana. Compared to these stories, the posts I've written have handled these folks with kid's gloves. The first day's articles are serious stuff.

The Sunday paper actually has two interlocking stories, Private company skirts public boards in running tax-funded charter schools and Company’s compliance to tax policy in question, as well as an editorial, Who’s minding the charters? If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same approach the East Valley Trib took in its investigative series on tuition tax credits and STOs.

by David Safier
In another example of the benefits that can come from good investigative journalism, Fort Wayne's Journal Gazette published an editorial today using the East Valley Trib's articles on Arizona's tuition tax credit abuses as a warning for Indiana.

Indiana just passed a tuition tax credit law. It's only $2.5 million, a drop in the bucket next to us, but of concern to the paper's editorial staff.

Indiana’s new program is modest compared to its Arizona counterpart, but it’s the proverbial foot in the door.

The piece calls Arizona "the Wild West of the school choice frontier" and says our tax credit problems are "an example of what to avoid.