CHICAGO – A new report finds that one Chicago public high school is having a problem with ghosts.

More specifically, the school is being populated in part by “ghost students”— nonexistent kids that the school’s dishonest principal and her assistant have been using to pad the school’s enrollment numbers, and therefore, the school’s budget.

That’s just one of the revelations in Chicago Public Schools Inspector General Jim Sullivan’s new report on the wrongdoing that he uncovered in the nation’s fourth-largest school district during 2013, according to the Chicago Tribune.

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The falsification and manipulation of school data seems to be the theme of Sullivan’s report.

For instance, one Chicago elementary principal allegedly changed grades to allow children to graduate to the next level.

“We do have a concern about (Chicago Public Schools) data as evidenced by the cases we had this year,” Sullivan said, adding that much of the data “is created and can be manipulated at the school level.”

He believes the increase in fake data is due to the fact that “schools, teachers and principals (are) increasingly being tracked and evaluated based upon data on everything from student assessment scores to attendance,” the Tribune reports.

Education policy expert Rod Estvan agrees that school officials are feeling “enormous” pressure from the state to increase their performance.

In other words, school officials and employees aren’t used to having their performance tracked so closely and with so much specificity – and it’s apparently causing some of them to panic and engage in illegal behavior.

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While Americans with jobs in the private sector have always had to produce or get replaced, K-12 professionals have historically been immune from those type of consequences, thanks in large part to the job protections offered by school employee unions.

As a result, way too many U.S. school districts – such as Chicago Public Schools – retain inept and ineffective employees, which lead to mediocre or failing schools.

The Tribune reports that even with a team of 13 investigators, Sullivan’s office simply can’t look into each of the hundreds of tips it receives per year. In 2013, Sullivan’s team investigated just 22 percent of the 1,460 cases presented to it.

In many instances, the investigation results in the accused wrongdoer quietly resigning from the district with the understanding that he or she will never work for the district again. That seems too weak a punishment for some, though the decision about whether or not to pursue legal action against accused wrongdoers belongs to the Chicago school board, not the inspector general.

The Tribune reports that Sullivan “takes cases based on criteria that include whether the complainant is willing to talk, the reliability of the information and the potential return on the cost of an investigation.”

Sullivan explains: “In CPS, there’s 650 schools with clerks, business managers, principals and assistant principals who are all given the authority to record time for people, do payroll, open purchase orders and receive goods from vendors.

“There’s plenty of people handling money and spending money, which creates the risk that somebody’s going to do something wrong.”