Milking Kids for Cash: Legislators Seek to Triple Funding Amidst Double-Dipping Scandal

Minneapolis Urban League under fire for potential double billing – Minneapolis Star Tribune: Minn… http://t.co/jlEuqw3RSV #minneapolis

— MinneapolisMinnesota (@MinneapolisM) April 13, 2015

The Minneapolis school board will vote Tuesday on whether to renew a contract with the Minneapolis Urban League, an organization at the center of scandal regarding double-dipping between state and local governments. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

The questions started after the Minneapolis School District awarded the Minneapolis Urban League as much as $800,000 a year for a program that never lived up to its promise of graduating the city’s most troubled high school students.

Then Minnesota legislators agreed to give the Urban League $300,000 a year for nearly identical work, paying some of the same staff to work with many of the same students the school district already was paying to help.

Now top state officials and Minneapolis school leaders are investigating whether the Urban League is getting paid twice for similar work.

“It’s alarming,” said Michael Goar, the Minneapolis School District’s interim superintendent. “When there is an issue that they are getting paid both [from the district and the state], then we have to look into it.”

That’s not stopping two Democrat state legislators from throwing even more taxpayer dollars at the group.

… Sens. Jeff Hayden and Bobby Joe Champion, DFL-Minneapolis, are seeking to triple funding for the program to $1.8 million over the next two years.

The senators defend the Urban League’s work as essential to closing the city’s achievement gap between white and minority students, which is among the worst in the country.

The only problem with that rationalization is its defiance of objective reality. The Urban League program, known as the 13th Grade, has failed to make significant progress toward closing the district’s troubling achievement gap.