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Florida's charter-school laws were intended to spur innovation and provide academic freedom to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run. But a Sun Sentinel investigation found the state's loose laws also opened the door to abuses, allowing renegade operators to claim taxpayer dollars for schools that fail to serve students and quickly shut down, sometimes within weeks of opening. Charter Schools Unsupervised uniquely pieced together the rash of fly-by-night charter schools and recurring failures of unscrupulous operators, uncovering fundamental weaknesses in state and local oversight. The newspaper's reporting did what the state and school district vetting process failed to do: exposed troubled histories and questionable practices among charter-school operators in South Florida.