The explosive growth of for-profit charter schools in Florida is diverting hundreds of millions of public dollars to businesses that pervert the program's intent.

Jonathan Hage, a former Heritage Foundation researcher and political protege of Gov. Jeb Bush, has turned Florida's charter school program into a growing for-profit business empire. Five years after borrowing $5,000 to start up Charter Schools USA, Hage took in $40-million last year -- almost all of it from the government. And Hage is not alone. In the past six years, the number of students approved for publicly funded charter schools in Florida has jumped from 574 to 76,156.

At that phenomenal rate of growth, charter schools could account for as much as $418-million of the state's education budget. But don't bother asking the state to account for results. Gov. Bush, the education accountability governor, is studiously avoiding comment.

In a compelling report in last Sunday's editions, St. Petersburg Times writer Kent Fischer revealed the ugly little truth about this enormous expansion of charter schools. These schools are not instruments of educational innovation or community service, as the state law intended. They are tools of profit and big business, which the law prohibits.

Lest there be any doubt, Ron Renna of ABS, an Arizona charter company, describes his Florida sales effort this way: "We're out here to make money. The more hamburgers you sell, the more money you make. If you bring more kids into a program, it makes the financiers in Arizona happy."

Charters were intended to spur innovation, to give nonprofit community groups or educators the chance to run a school freed from the normal regulations and bureaucracy. An example is Academie Da Vinci, a small elementary school started by a community group that felt children needed a specialized arts school in northern Pinellas County.

The schools being run by Charter Schools USA and other corporations are quite the opposite. They represent a big-business, standard-curriculum approach to education and usually have little to do with the communities in which they are located. The chairman of the foundation that landed a contract for the North Tampa Alternative School, for example, lives in Miami Springs. Asked how he got involved, he said: "I was contacted by a lawyer."

Even more disturbing, the charter businesses are now teaming up with developers of large, and typically higher-priced, subdivisions to build what amount to private schools on the public dime. Though the charter law requires that such schools accept any students, their locations make them convenient only to the homeowners or, in some cases, to company employees. A teacher at a Charter USA school in Miami was also unusually blunt about how discipline works: "We have ways of asking people not to come back. We really operate like a private school."

At $418-million and counting, the public policy questions here are urgent. Is Florida giving tax money to for-profit corporations that are using shell companies to hide their status? Are charter school dollars being used as an amenity for developers who build subdivisions? Is the law being used to create private schools that cater to the children of higher-income families and business employees? How much profit is being made off the charter school public subsidy? Are children learning in these schools?

The governor refused to answer questions from Fischer, which is particularly odd, given that this new charter school explosion is in large part Bush's creation. Hage himself said as much: "It was first Jeb Bush's idea, not mine, to promote charters in Florida. . . . Quite honestly, I wasn't that familiar with charter schools."

Bush is running for re-election on his educational record, which includes making Florida the most prolific state in the nation for school privatization. The trouble is that his Department of Education has shown no inclination to investigate alleged fraud in the voucher program for disabled students, or to oversee the escalating vouchers awarded through dollar-for-dollar state corporate tax credits. In this case, Bush's name was actually used as a reference on charter applications that might be contrary to state law.

Is this what the governor means by education accountability?

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