These schools are sharing $5 billion in federal tax dollars in a massive, three-year rescue effort, but no one nationally is tracking how the money is spent and no one can say whether the influx of cash will end up helping kids.

In Colorado — one of the few states willing to tally such spending — consultants are taking home 35 percent.

The federal School Improvement Grant program "is likely to go down in the annals as one more pretty expensive, failed initiative," said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, an independent public-policy think tank. He called the amount spent on lightweight, seminar-leading consultants "ludicrous."

The Post reviewed Colorado school district budgets and consultant contracts to determine how they were spending their federal turnaround money. Among the findings:

• Pueblo City Schools has a three-year, $7.4 million contract with a New York-based school-turnaround company to fix six failing schools. After the first year, school performance scores went down at five of the six schools; the sixth school's performance score didn't change. Out of $8 million in federal turnaround funds the district has received the past two years, $4.2 million has gone to its contracted partner. The three-year contract includes a $510,000 annual management fee.

• Adams County School District 50 in Westminster plans to pay 29 percent of its grant award — $480,000 annually — to a private company tasked with rescuing five elementary schools, mostly through coaching but also for administrative support to meet state testing and paperwork requirements.

• Denver Public Schools, by comparison, spent 13 percent of its turnaround grant money so far on consulting and other help from private companies. A significant portion of the district's grant has gone toward new staff, including deans of instruction whose job is to evaluate teachers.

The portion of funds going to consultants, as well as the lack of accounting, has boggled some analysts. Education policy analyst Diane Ravitch, a former assistant U.S. secretary of education, called the federal program "a bonanza for entrepreneurs and testing companies."

Charles Barone, chief of federal policy at Democrats for Education Reform, said federal and state oversight of the program has been "too loose."

"The result is the waste of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of education-reform dollars that could be put to much better use," he said.

School districts that hired vendors this year did not have to select one from an approved list, but they had to make a case for their chosen vendor when they submitted their application for grant funds.

Among the vendor charges in Colorado:

• $185,748 per year for a "change leader" hired by Global Partnership Schools for six Pueblo city schools.

• $267,000 per year for two Pueblo leadership coaches to work with three principals apiece to "provide a sounding board for ideas" and "build their capacity as instructional leaders."

• $299,146 for 20 days of "intensive instructional coaching" in math for all six Pueblo city schools receiving grant funds.

• $31,850 annually for airline tickets for instructional coaches to make 49 flights to Colorado to visit Westminster schools, a charge separate from salary and expenses.

• $24,000 for 10 principal "instructional leadership team sessions" in Westminster.

Contracts typically don't come with money-back guarantees, and even companies that have been around for years make no promises.

"I wish there was a way to inoculate from failure," said Bernice Stafford, a vice president with Evans Newton Inc., a for-profit student-achievement company founded in 1973 that's now working with Westminster schools and Clifton Elementary in Mesa County. "It's we and they. How much effort are you going to put into it? We are not a silver bullet.

Education experts acknowledged just how huge a task that is.

"This is never going to be a resounding success because school turnaround is hard as hell to do," said Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners.