NUMBERS DON’T LIE – THOUSANDS OF MARYLANDERS ARE RIPPING OFF D.C. SCHOOLS: Liars can use numbers, to be sure, but Luke Rosiak and Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group simply quote official data and draw the obvious conclusion.

“District of Columbia public and charter elementary schools have more students attending classes than the federal city’s entire population of such school-aged kids, indicating a fraud rate of at least 11 percent,” according to Rosiak and Watson. They previously documented in a  six-part series linked on their story posted today that the fraudsters are mainly from Maryland.

“The District of Columbia’s seemingly flippant attitude toward stopping Maryland parents from illegally enrolling students in D.C. public and charter schools not only robs thousands of children on waiting lists of the education they paid for, but it also cheats D.C. taxpayers out of benefits intended for local residents,” Tom Schatz, a Capitol Hill resident who leads the nonprofit activist group Citizens Against Government Waste, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Federal taxpayers have a huge stake in this problem, too, because Uncle Sam spends hundreds of millions of dollars on D.C. every year, much of it aiding the local public schools. “Annual per capita spending on D.C. is more than $16,000, compared to Alaska, which receives the second-highest amount of nearly $5,000, according to the Census Bureau,” Rosiak and Watson report.