Reclaiming Educational Fraud and Waste: A Conceptual Framework to Locate Sources of Resource Leakage and Harm in The U.S. K-12 System

The recent dismantling of federal educational institutions has been legitimated under the banner of “eliminating fraud and waste.” In this paper, we reclaim these terms to locate the sources of potential fraud and waste in the U.S. K-12 education system through a novel conceptual framework that centers both structural components and the actions of educational actors. We posit that over-diagnosing failure within the public educa tion system, coupled with a lack of regulation of private actors, is the true source of potential fraud and waste in the system. We apply this framework to the Arizona charter school market to illuminate how it can be used by policymakers and researchers to understand particular contexts in which fraud and waste are prevalent.