Fred Boeger of Davis CA, an unorthodox educator of bright potential dropouts, couldn't believe it when the state official responsible for research on kids' health had no information on the health problems Boeger's students were dealing with, despite his department's multi-million dollar budget.

Boeger wanted to know what they were doing with the money. He started asking hard questions that led him deeper and deeper into one of the largest bureaucracies in the country. Boeger says he discovered more than 25 different issues involving corruption.
Employees, he learned, were commonly threatened with pink slips if they dared speak out and Boeger, the "mysterious" questioner, got threats of unspecified mayhem. " People kept asking who was paying me," Boeger recounts. No one could believe he was just an outraged citizen who wanted a fair deal for kids.

For almost four years Boeger kept going as his health and as his bank account took a beating.

Federal investigators came into the picture when Boeger's research implicated the State's superintendent of education. The Superintendent was convicted on four counts of felony conflict of interest and sent to jail. The Justice Department credits Boeger's superhuman persistence with stopping a scam that took money out of classrooms and put it in greedy pockets.

The victorious but weary Boeger believes that the same type of corruption may be going on all over America and could be at the heart of many school systems' problems. Hoping that his book, Education Corruption in California, will help reformers clean up public schools in other parts of the country, he's dedicating the income from the book to a foundation to assist such reformers.