Charter School Founder in Even Bigger Trouble Than We Thought

The five criminal charges the U.S. Attorney’s Office has filed against “charter school mogul” Dorothy June Brown, will go nicely with the 62 federal charges she’s already racked up this year. Brown’s been accused of defrauding several of her own charter schools out of nearly $7 million. She founded Laboratory, Al Prima, and Planet Abacus, all under investigation. She also founded the Agora Cyber Charter, which she had to step down from in 2009 after an earlier set of lawsuits.

Hold on, almost done: Agora is now also at the center of a Newsworks/Public School Notebook investigation that found the for-profit education company K12 Inc. masking shockingly high rates of turnover to extract extra funds from the state. K12 now runs Agora, one of them problem schools identified in the report. [Inquirer]