CARTER WOOD: Attacking For-Profit Schools Threatens Training, Opportunity. But it defends a traditional Democratic constituency.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has chaired a series of hearings by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to pummel for-profit, private colleges as exploiters of students and the working class. The hearings reinforce the Obama Administration’s regulatory “crack down” on the institutions, which attempts to deny their students access to federal financial aid.

One of the primary documents used to justify these attacks was a report delivered last August to the Senate HELP Committee from the Government Accounting Agency. As Mark Hyman chronicles at The Washington Examiner, the report, which lambasted the colleges’ financial aid practices, proved to so flawed — a “fraud” — that the GAO withdrew it and quietly reissued a new report. Still, the continuing attacks and Obama Administration’s regulations caused the educational companies’ stocks to drop. And now we learn of serious allegations of insider trading at the Department of Education.

As Hyman calls it, it’s “the biggest GAO scandal you never heard about.”

It hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves.