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

August 2025

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 overdiagnosing failure within the public education system, coupled with a lack of regulation of private actors, are the true sources 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.

Keywords

Education Funding, Privatization, Fraud, Waste, Conceptual Framework

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Policy, Politics, and Governance