The Detroit Public Schools are pondering bankruptcy, swamped by (let me know if any of this sounds familiar) the combination of lowered demand for their product and mushrooming expenses, including pensions for long-retired employees:

A decision on whether to file for protection under federal bankruptcy laws will be by the end of the northern summer, according to Robert Bobb, Detroit Puablic Schools’ emergency financial manager. Such a filing would be unprecedented.But in Detroit — where US Education Secretary Arne Duncan dubbed the school system a “national disgrace” — politicians and bankruptcy experts see few alternatives, given the deep financial challenges confronting the district and the state.

“Am I optimistic that they can avoid it …? I am not,” said Ray Graves, a retired bankruptcy judge who has been advising Mr Bobb in recent weeks.

As with GM and Chrysler, bankruptcy may not be the worst thing for Detroit’s schools. A filing under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, which covers public entities such as school districts and municipalities, would allow the district to put major creditors, including textbook publishers, private bus operators and utility DTE Energy, in line for payment.

Some experts say the Detroit case could be the first in a string of Chapter 9 bankruptcies among school districts and other public entities battered by the economic crisis, and it could help shape that area of the law.

The various teachers’ unions – which long ago replaced the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers as the pre-eminent union political power in the United States – have been busy doing to the education industry what the UAW did for GM.  Indeed, the benefits – especially the pension – have long been always been the main economic reason to go into teaching.  But with inner-city public school district enrollments plummeting, both from demographic shifts and parents voting with their feet, the promises schools made to teachers in the sixties and seventies are going to prove to the untenable.

And it’s not just for Detroit anymore; it’s in Minnesota too:

Some Minnesota school districts may have to go into debt to pay for the rising cost of health care for their retired employees.Local Minnesota governments have until October to sell bonds — without a public referendum — to help pay for retired employees’ health care. But with the economy in the tank, some people are unhappy about paying higher property taxes to fund someone else’s health benefits.

The retirees’ health policy costs fall under something accountants call OPEB — Other than Pension Employee Benefits. OPEB obligations, especially for health care, are really starting to put the squeeze on school districts statewide.

So – ballooning obligations fobbed off on future generations, demand for product decreased by ruinous economic policies; future generations left holding the bag.  Sound familiar?

Last week, we noted that Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), an Islam-based charter school in Inver Grove Heights, was taking the state to court over the withholding of the school’s allotment of money.

A small tangent; while the state and some of the state education system’s apologists were griping about teachers’ “licensing”, it’d seem that the school is better off without ’em:

Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) public charter school serving more than 500 students on two campuses, announced today that it has received a Growth Achievement Award for student achievement during the school year 2008-2009 from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

…

In addition to the NWEA award, TiZA leads the state in math and reading achievement as measured with the state MCAII assessments and has been recognized for achieving the highest percentage of students scoring at grade level or better, despite having a high number of children living in poverty. TiZA serves a student population from over 20 countries. 80% of the students are from low-income households and about 70% are English language learners. TiZA has also received the Commissioner’s Finance Award for the past two years.

How many Twin Cities schools, much less schools with lower-than-average family incomes, can say that, charter or not?
While TIZA has faced allegations that it mixes religion and education in an unconstitutional manner, including lawsuits from the ACLU.  It’s worth noting that the first of the three ACLU suits has been dismissed.  From another press release from TIZA’s attorney, Erick Kaardal:

“Today, the U.S. District Court dismissed one of three of the ACLU’s claims against TiZA.  As to the remaining two claims, the ACLU now has the burden of proof to show that TiZA is in violation of the Establishment Clause. TiZA remains confident that there is no violation of the Establishment Clause.

“The ACLU must prove that TiZA, which has made religious accommodations for students and is compliant with the federal government’s official guidance on religion in public schools, has violated the Establishment Clause.

Anyway – regarding the licensing flap, the school won that one, too. From yet another press release:

Two days after it erroneously took almost $125,000 from Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA) and received negative media scrutiny, the Minnesota Department of Education reversed its original decision and has transferred the funds back to the charter school.

“While TiZA appreciates the Department’s decision to release the funds, this is just another example of the erratic behavior of the Department and, in particular, Commissioner Chas Anderson,” said Erick Kaardal , TiZA’s legal counsel. “It’s another example of a department that ignores requests, makes accusations without merit and fails to follow the rules it’s required to enforce.”

  As a result of the July 15 decision to take TiZA’s student aid, the school has requested the Department turnover all documents and communications regarding the instruction to apply penalties against TiZA.  The Department has not responded to this request.

TIZA is a controversy magnet, of course; leaving aside the Separation Clause issues, there’s the matter of it being Islamic.

Certainly, if a charter school with pseudo-Catholic roots (like, say, Eagle Ridge Academy in Eden Prairie), held a mass on school time, there’s be some squawking.

But when people see Islamic school, some of them think “wahhabi madrass”.

So here are some questions:

1. Presuming the separation clause exists, and provided that TIZA is not advocating radical wahabbism, what’s the problem?
2. Given that the school does do something that eludes most schools; it gets spectacular academic results with children that the conventional school district pays lip service to teaching, but largely warehouses anyway, isn’t it time to address the fraudulent notion that “separation of church and state” means “no money goes to religious schools?”  Because it is a fraud; all kinds of tax money goes to religious colleges and universities; student financial aid, arts and research grants, yadda yadda.

There’s a significant chance that TIZA, baggage notwithstanding, is an answer rather than a problem.

Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy – an Islam-based charter school in Inver Grove Heights – is  taking the state education bureaucracy to court over its curious penchant for choosing bureaucratic ticket-punching over children, education and results:

Officials at the Minnesota Department of Education told Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA) last month that they would recommend withholding $1.4 million in public funding from the school as a result of licensure violations, according to a lawsuit filed by the school Thursday in Ramsey County District Court.

But TiZA claims that state officials have refused to provide the school with public records related to the state’s investigation of the alleged violations, and that without them the school can’t properly defend itself as it appeals the decision.

About a dozen TIZA teachers are not, it is claimed, properly licensed.

Well, shut that place down.

Of course, in the last round of No Child Left Behind testing, 93% of TIZA’s kids passed the Math competency test – about double the rate at the Saint Paul or Minneapolis public schools – and 68% the reading test (compared to about half in Minneapolis and Saint Paul) – even though they’re all duly licensed, just like any good plumber or barber.

And yet 93% of TIZA’s students passed the Math test, and 68% the reading test – compared again to Saint Paul (46 and 52% for math and reading) and Minneapolis (48 and 51%).   And yet 80% of its students are low-income, and 68% speak English as a second language – vastly “worse” than both of the major metro school districts.

But who cares about results, when the big secret – teachers licensing is worthless – could be getting out?

Last week, the Strib came out with the official state No Child Left Behind rankings for state charter and “district” schools. 

While I haven’t seen any of the usual public school apologists crowing about the results yet, they will.  In the wake of MN2020’s hatchet job last month, it can only be a matter of time.

So let me head it off at the pass.  65% of state public school students were deemed “proficient” in math, and 73% in reading.

That compared to 49% and 57% for charter schools statewide.

That doesn’t officially look good for charter schools. 

But let’s remember – the bulk of the charter schools are in the metro area (along with many outstate charters that serve minorities, especially the Native American community).  51% of charter school students statewide are minorities; that average is even higher at inner city schools.  Many – most – of those charter school students in the inner city are there because their parents are dissatisfied – disgusted, even – with the education their children have gotten in the big inner-city schools. 

Of course, the question “does poverty cause poor education results, or do poor education results cause poverty” is a good one to ask – and plays into all possible interpretations of these results.  We can discuss that later.

For now, though, let’s endeavor to compare apples and apples. 

The inner city schools – Minneapolis and Saint Paul – have very similar test results, although Saint Paul’s demographics are much more turbulent.  Similar math scores (46 in Saint Paul, 48 in Minneapolis) and reading totals (52 and 51, respectively).  The numbers in special education are about the same (between 14 and 15%); about 38% of Saint Paul’s students spoke English as a second language, while of Minneapolis students, 6% of those taking the math test and 23% for the reading test were ESL. 

So let’s compare:  Math scores for Minneapolis, Saint Paul and charters statewide are 46,  52 and 49, respectively; for reading, 52, 51 and 57%). 

So as we see, while charter schools are coming in behind statewide school scores, they have a slight nod over the metro schools.

It gets even more interesting when you get into specifics.  Comparing the big city districts – which are between 60-73% low-income – with charters as a whole is interesting.  But how about with charters catering primarily to low-income students?

An excellent comparison is with the controversial Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, in Inver Grover Heights.   80% of their students are classifed as low-income, and 68% of the students taking the reading tests spoke English as a second language (double even Saint Paul’s very high number). 

And yet 93% of TIZA’s students passed the Math test, and 68% the reading test – compared again to Saint Paul (46 and 52% for math and reading) and Minneapolis (48 and 51%). 

Outstate?  Let’s compare two smaller schools:  Milroy Public, and Cologne Charter.

Milroy is 38% low income (state average is around 30%), 8% special ed (state average is 13%), and about 7% ESL (below the state average.  57% of Milroy’s students passed the Math test, 68% the reading exam.

The Cologne Academy charter is 27% low-income (a little below state average), and 16% special ed (a little above).  And 86% of its student body passed the Math test, 76% the reading standards.

Read the (uncommonly-informative) link from the Strib.  It’s well worth the read.

For whenever MN2020 wants to start yakking about “achievement gaps”, I mean.

So while the Saint Paul School Board undertakes the usual hideously expensive national search to find another $200K/year plus huge benefits superintendent who will basically enforce the status quo only more expensively, they’ve appointed an interim Superintendent.   Suzanne Kelly is a woman with plenty of experience – but who doesn’t have a “license” from the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

Speed Gibson – one of the two best edbloggers in Minnesota today – writes at True North and of course at Speed:

Well, she’s not a member of the Lodge. Kelly has relevant experience in three Districts, including St. Paul, where she has the full faith of the Board. She is not seeking the permanent position. But she lacks credentials, don’t you know?“She is not licensed, so there would be a question of the legality of any legal document she signed,” said Judith Lamp, executive director of the School Administrators Board.

If you recall, that was one of John Fitzgerald’s big squawks in his hit piece on charter schools; their administrators weren’t licensed through the state.

And – shut my mouth! – here the second biggest district in the state has gone and ignored the exact same credential!

Speed:

“I can’t recall one [case] where the variance was denied and they continued on,” Lamp added. “In my two and a half years here I do not know a district that has gone without a superintendent.”

And that’s the danger, isn’t it? We might find that all those high-falutin’ licensing requirements aren’t quite as necessary or valuable after all. What a revoltin’ development that would be!

The St. Paul Board has more faith in Kelly’s demonstrated experience, dare I say results than in some pedigreed stranger’s unknown potential. The State agencies have ruled, but St. Paul is standing firm behind their choice. Bravo!

The Saint Paul Public Schools don’t make many good decisions; the ones that happen must be treasured and protected.

But what does this say about Fitzgerald’s beef against charters?

I’m getting a few other responses to MN2020’s hatchet job on charter schools; I’ll have some results tomorrow.

But in the meantime, I got this email from a charter school director and teacher from Greater Minnesota who’s been reading this series.  The teacher notes:

It’s weird that I’m sending you this email, because most of the time (besides for the charter school issue), I pretty much disagree with you.  (Sorry, but true!)

Having had my kids in charter schools in the city, I’ve noticed that the vast majority of other parents would probably feel the same!  Which is why MN2020’s response to the criticiism of their report – chalking it up to a conservative attack on education – was so very dumb.

And the teacher asked:

Please feel free to use any of these examples if you wish, but PLEASE PLEASE do not say it’s from our school.   Please don’t list us or even mention [the region of the state the school is in].  (We’re the only one [in our area] and I don’t want any attention drawn to us.)  We have had to really struggle against the “powers that be” around here, and at the present time it’s best to just stay low, do our own thing, and continue growing.

I’ve heard this from not a few charter school teachers who’ve talked with me.

The teacher addresses the MN2020 report:
:

Hi Mr. Berg:

I am a teacher/director at a small charter school in [a part of, and town in, Greater Minnesota].

I grew up [in this region] taught in traditional public high school here, and saw a need for something different in our area.  We don’t have any private high schools [in this region] , and again, before us, there were no charters, either.  Our school is truly, truly public – our kids range academically just as in our local traditional districts.  We know we can’t, nor do we want to, limit enrollment to certain groups of kids.  We do have a considerably higher special education student percentage and a higher free/reduced lunch student population than the traditional local districts.  We also seem to get some of the “really, really smart” kids, too.   Overall, we’re just a mix of kids and families who were looking for something different – for many reasons.  We pride ourselves on really trying to meet the needs of the individual kid.

The teacher notes when the school started, and with how many kids; I will redact that to help conceal its identity, but suffice to say that at a time when traditional school districts’ enrollments are stagnang and dropping, the teacher’s charter school is booming.

I have been following your series as you discuss the recent MN2020 report about charter school audit findings.  We were listed in the report.

You said you are researching charters, and I would like to share with you the (4) audit findings we received during [the period covered in the audit].

Finding #1:  Segregation of Duties

During [the period audited], we had NO staff.  No employees.  All volunteer board members, start-up director (me) and parents.  We had NO payroll.  I had another full-time job in a local district (another story) and worked on charter school start-up stuff at night.  Yes, it was hard to segregate duties.  (To disclose, we did have this same audit finding [the following year] and may still have it in FY09, but we’re getting better.)

This is not at all uncommon among charters; there might be limited segregation of duties, but then there is also extremely limited staff and money.

Finding #2:  Preparation of Financial Statements

Our auditing firm prepared our official financial report.  We wrote less than 100 checks and spent less than $44,000 in the entire fiscal year!  We had sort of a lame business service provider (another story), and he just let the auditing firm put together the financials.  The next year, we put our own together.  (We did not have this finding in our FY08 audit.)

But the MN2020 report treats this as if it’s a big black mark pointing inevitably to embezzlement and the defrauding of taxpayers.

Finding #3:  Payment of Invoices

This finding occurred because we paid some bills more than 45 days after we received the invoice.  Again, we had no paid staff; I was teaching full time in another district and doing this part-time at night.  I realize it’s important to pay bills, which we did, but a few went more than 45 days.  We did pay them all, and all of our vendors still work with us.  (We did not have this finding in our FY08 audit.)

And if we closed down every non-profit that takes tax money and then pays a few bills late, we wouldn’t have many non-profits, would we?

Finding #4:  Claims declaration  (this is the most dumb)

Actual audit wording, “Minnesota Statute 471.6161 requires that each person claiming payment from the Academy make the following written declaration:  “I declare under penalties of law that this account claim  or demand is just and correct and that no part of it has been paid.”       Our last audit finding was because we didn’t stamp the back of our checks with that statement.   Who knew?   After that, we got a stamper.  (And, we did not have this finding in our FY08 audit.)

Whew.  I’m amazed the FBI hasn’t raided the place.

One of our [findings for one of the years] was that we didn’t have proper collateral on our money in the bank.  None of us have ever had over $100,000 in the bank, not even for one day ….   We just didn’t know we had to fill out anything if our school bank account ever held more than $100,000 (which, 95% of the time it doesn’t anyway ….)   Our auditor even told me that was more of an error by the local bank than by us.  Anyways, now we have more than the FDIC insurance – we had to fill out some paperwork.

And that’s it.  Four errors that don’t even rise to the level of “niggling” in the grand scheme of things.

The teacher concludes:

So those are the “big” findings we had in FY07…Yes, we have audit findings.  Yes, we learn from them.  No, no one is stealing money or being bad.  I just feel we didn’t all deserve to be labeled as such.

I’d love to hear from more charter school people who’ve run afoul of MN2020.  Write me at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”.
Still on tap for this series; a conversation with the State Auditor, some questions for MN2020, and some conclusions.

Let’s look back at the MN2020 report from a couple of weeks back.  The reports main allegations were that there is an epidemic of bad accounting; writer John Fitzgerald concluded that, because of this wave of fiscal malfeasance, Minnesota needed to end the Charter School experiment.

Let’s back up a bit.

Minnesota has 339 public school districts, serving over 800,000 K-12 students.

In contrast, there are (as of 2008) 143 charter schools in Minnesota, serving 28,034 students.

Want to see who does good accounting?

Go to this website.  It’s the MN Department of Education page displaying its annual “School Finance Award” winners.

Now, check out the 2009 awards [WARNING:  PDF File].   Of the just shy of 120 winners, at least 32 – over a quarter – are charter schools.

Are there surprises on the list?

But of course.

———-

Let’s recap:  In John Fitzgerald’s original report, his marquee claim was:

• 83 percent [of charters] were found to have at least one financial irregularity in their audit – five years earlier, that figure was 73 percent;

• 51 percent of those schools with problems identified on their 2007 financial audits had the same problems identified on their 2008 audits, according to the MDE;

• 29 percent did not respond to a request for board minutes – five years earlier, that figure was 33 percent;

• 55 percent were found to have “limited segregation of duties,” a requirement that ensures no single charter school official has control of the school’s funds;

• 26 percent didn’t have proper collateral for deposit insurance, a requirement that ensures the charter school can pay its bills.

In Part IV of this series, we took a high-level look at what the rules say these allegations mean.

But more importantly, we need to look at what these charges actually mean in terms of individual charges against individual schools.

———-

A business manager for a Saint Paul area charter school talked with me about the allegations against his school.  The school has reputation for academic excellence – and, more importantly, for turning around kids who’ve had a hard time in the traditional public schools.  Based in Saint Paul, it draws students from Forest Lake, Prior Lake and Hastings (and remember – charter parents have to provide transportation themselves).  But the MN2020 report tagged his school with four “violations”; Limited Segregation of Duties, Collateral Insurance, reporting of electronic deposits, and Cash Disbursements.

Regarding the Limited Segregation of Duties – which tripped up the majority of charter schools – the manager said “nobody wants to be accused of this – we did our best to deal with this”; it was a matter, in his school’s case, it was a simple matter of him, rather than someone else, having access to the school’s blank checks.  “But this was fixed before the 2008 audit”, the manager notes – as, indeed, were all of his school’s “violations”.  He added “This trips up a lot of small organizations”.

Eugene Piccolo of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools confirms this: “Every accountant will tell you that all small non-profits have trouble with this”.  Piccolo noted that not only to charter schools have trouble with this, but so does every other small-non-profit, as well as smaller public schools, and many small units of government.

As to the lack of collateral – in other words, insurance to cover bank deposits above the FDIC-insured limit, which at the time of the audit was $100,000 – the manager notes “it was an issue in 2008; we received more money than we spent.  It was immediately brought to our board’s attention.  But we were over the limit for a total of about twenty days.  The board decided it wsn’t worth getting insurance for a very brief overage”.

Don Vance – a former Army Sergeant-Major – is the director of the General John Vessey Charter School, on the far south end of Saint Paul’s West Side.  Vessey’s program is based on the Junior ROTC program, and draws students from as far afield as Taylors Falls, Forest Lake, and even Monticello, on the far northwest corner of the metro area.  The school had 22 seniors graduate (from among 30 seniors) two weeks ago; among students that started at the school in Grade 9, 100% graduated on time – a little over double the graduation rate at the Saint Paul Public Schools.

Vessey was tagged for collateral insurance.  “We had an issue with too much money in our account.  We moved the extra money into a different account!”.

Vance points out that his school – like all of the schools I spoke with – corrected the problem, and that Vessey is listed in the Department of Education’s  “School Finance Award” winners.

Let’s go back to our original manager, to discuss his school’s third allegation, failure to report Electronic Fund Transfers.  “We’re required by statute to report EFTs”, said the manager.  “There was a brief stretch of time when these transfers were not noted in the school board meeting minutes“.  Not that the transfers weren’t legal, or otherwise undocumented, but that they didn’t get entered in the board minutes as electronic transfers.  “It was nothing out of the ordinary; it’s just that the medium of exchange was omitted from the minutes”.  In other words, the minutes noted “Staffer X got $x hundred dollars”, rather than “Staffer X got $x hundred dollars via an EFT”.  That was the “violation”.  And, the manager notes, “it was corrected, and has been consistently correct since then”.

The manager’s school’s fourth “violation” regarded documentation of cash disbursements.  “Being the finance manager ,I need to have another person to sign the records for cash disbursements”, the manager notes.  There was a brief issue with proper signatures  in 2008, but – this is important – the “violation” had nothing to do with misappropriation of actual money.  “I don’t know the school’s safe combination, I can’t get to the blank checks”, and the issue, such as it was was corrected by 2008.

Judy Ingisson, director of Saint Paul’s German Immersion School, a charter on University Avenue, had the same problem.  “If I recall correctly there was a time sheet and purchase order that hadn’t been signed by the director but she has verbally or in email approved the expenditures. Also, I don’t think the school did have a regular schedule for deposits but the only money that was collected regularly was milk money which in total was around $2,200 for the year. The money came is sporadically after parents were billed and I don’t think exceeded $62 in a week!”

Hardly seems to be the kind of thing that bears much taxpayer scrutiny, much less John Fitzgerald’s call for shutting down the charter system.  Oh, and Ingisson notes, as did Vance and the other manager, “Both of these problems were addressed in the 2008-2009 school year by implementing new procedures and I have emphasized to office staff that need for making sure everything is signed even if there was verbal or email approval.”
While it’s an infraction that must be reported to an auditor – as it was – it’s not a sign of irresponsibility with taxpayers money.

So the great bulk of the “violations” in the MN2020 report were trifling in the extreme, but they are the same precise problems faced by most smaller non-profits, and indeed units of government.

So why do the report at all?

Good question.  “Matt Entenza’s MN 2020 report does nothing to advance the discussion of how to improve the academic quality of charter schools in MN”, says Al Fan of Charter School Partners, a non-profit advocacy group.   “It is simply an attempt to bully the charter school community.  Making the assertion that all audit infractions are equal and that any infraction should lead to the charter application being revoked is ludicrous and a waste of taxpayer dollars.  The report does nothing to show how audit infractions impact student learning or overall performance.”

Indeed.

But the report does raise some interesting questions.  Fitzgerald’s report lists five “Worst Offenders” at financial management:  In addition to the scandal-riven Heart Of The Earth Charter, whose director allegedly embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars, it lists Aurora Charter School of Minneapolis, the Recovery School of Owatonna, the E.C.H.O Charter in Echo, and the Duluth School Academy charter.

And on the Department of Education’s “School Finance Award Winners” list?  Along with Vessey, and thirty-odd other charters?

The E.C.H.O Charter School.

So – is the E.C.H.O. Charter School a Public (Accounting) Enemy Number One?  Is the Minnesota Department of Education wrong?  Or do MN2020’s shopping list of petty violations have a purpose very different from actually holding charter schools accountable for taxes spend on charter schools?

More on Wednesday.

I’ve gotten in a few good interviews with people at charter schools, advocates, and some state legislators.  I’ve got a TON of stuff to cobble together into a few more good posts ont he subject.  And while I’m normally a very fast writer when it comes to dashing off these little screeds of mine, when I’m trying to get sources and facts and quotes straight, I am a tad more deliberate.

I also wrote a condensed (very condensed) version of this series for the St. Paul Legal Ledger, which should be coming out fairly shortly; I’ll keep you posted.

I hope to have the next part of the Charter series out tomorrow; otherwise, Friday.

I’m currently interviewing people from some of the charter schools mentioned in John Fitzgerald’s MN2020 report slagging the financial management of public schools.

While I’m working on that, though, I thought I’d check into the media’s coverage of this “story”.  Remember: MN2020 is a “non-partisan” “progressive” think tank that employs a number of former Twin Cities media figures – partly for their obvious skills, and partly because nobody can get placement from news media people like other news media people.

It’s probably not a surprise that the “progressive” Daily Planet ran the entire report verbatim. I don’t know that MN2020 and the Daily Planet get their money from the same place, but their sources are certainly cousins.

It’s not “Media”, but on the “Parents United for Public Schools” website (PUfPS is an astroturf group that, I’ll bank dimes to dollars, gets its money from the same non-profit trough as MN2020), in a piece slugged “critics can’t answer the reports allegations!”, the author of a piece citing the MN2020 report writes:

Some wondered why we didn’t separate severe findings (called material deficiencies) from less severe findings (called significant deficiencies). We didn’t separate them because significant deficiencies can become material deficiencies, and when they do, the taxpayer loses.

It’s John Fitzgerald, of course, writing about his own report.  And he tries to answer one of the criticisms I, among others, raise; why did he count hundreds of tiny, niggling, piddling infractions (more tomorrow) in the same category as the real, severe problems?:

Significant deficiencies are like a benign melanoma – checking it early can help avoid disastrous problems later. We determined both levels were important enough to note in each school’s tally.

Which would be an honest answer, but for the fact that Fitzgerald did not distinguish between trivial and serious issues when he concluded that Minnesota should abandon charter schools.

EdWeek links the report without any actual fact-checking.

The Saint Paul Public Schools’ blog linked the report, as well as the St. Paul “Network of Education Action Teams“, without comment.

On the other hand, Minnesota Public Radio ran the report’s marquee point – the percentages of schools that had issues – pretty much verbatim.  But reporter Elizabeth Baier also dug beneath the numbers to the real issue (emphasis added):

In a statement, the Minnesota Department of Education said both school districts and charter schools frequently have “findings” in the financial audits they submit to the state. Districts and charter schools are required to submit plans to the Education Department to correct their financial shortcomings, but the department said it’s up to the local school districts and charter school boards to make sure corrective action is taken.

The think tank report follows a 2008 report by the state auditor which also raised questions about financial management at charter schools. In that report, the auditor’s office recommended that charter school board members be required to attend financial management training. It also found that charters were roughly comparable to district schools in terms of financial health.

Er – how’s that?

“Roughly comparable”?

But John Fitzgerald’s report looked at the same findings that the Legislative Auditor looked at and used it to launch a call to shut down schools that had issues!  And yet the Legislative Auditor merely suggested better finance training?

Question, John Fitzgerald: does this mean we should shut down public schools, too?

(KSTP-TV , the Pioneer Press, WCCO, the Winona Daily News, the Worthington Post carried roughly the same report, both of which credited the AP, and included a shorter mention of the Auditor’s actual conclusions).The Duluth News Tribune did the same, but added material related to a Duluth charter which was found to be among the “worst offenders” in the report.

Among bloggers?  “Phoenix Woman” at Mercury Rising dives into the deep end of the “Racism” pool in a comment to her own post (which brought us nothing otherwise but ad-homina against charter school organizer Al Fan and the sense that she thinks charter schools are a conservative phenomenon, just as MN2020 told her they are):

The problem in Minnesota is that a lot of folks got bamboozled, especially in the Native American community, early on about charter schools. That’s why we have so many of the danged things. (It was a school targeting Native American kids whose director just got caught taking $1.4 million from the till.) If there’s a pedagogical equivalent of “greenwashing”, the buying off of the local Native American and African-American communities WRT charter schools is definitely it.

Really?

I’d like to take that question to the parents of Native American students – who have the lowest gradation rates of any ethnic group in the public system, and who are closely involved in the many Native American charter schools around Minnesota – and get their reactions.

Heck, I’d like to get yours.

Tomorrow (or, possibly, Wednesday): A look at the “infractions”.

And here I thought I was going to get a day off.

Well, not a “day off”, so much as a day of behind-the-scenes stuff.  I’m getting hold of charter school representatives and getting their responses to specific allegations in the MN2020 report.

But MN2020 came out with a response to the response that their report has gotten.

And I gotta tell you – it’s as rhetorically target-rich an environment as the original report.

The piece – by John Van Hecke – ends with an invocation of early-20th-century Brit poet Rupert Brooke:

The English poet Rupert Brooke wonderfully expressed Great Britain’s romantic embrace of the unfolding 1913 European war.  “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England…Brooke, despite his poet’s skill, did not write from firsthand combat experience. He served, joining the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve shortly after hostilities commenced. He died in 1915, off Gallipoli, of a septic infection caused by a mosquito bite.

“The Soldier” is a marvelous sonnet. It carries a haunting quality precisely because of Brooke’s wartime death. His contemporaries, the “war poets,” however, quickly abandoned their early romanticism, writing, instead, somber themes of frustration, loss and absurdity.

Like Brooke and an increasingly war weary United Kingdom during WWI, early charter school romanticism is yielding to a larger educational reality. Charter schools are neither as great as their champions suggest nor as horrible as their critics insist.

Right – and I’m not aware of any charter school proponents claiming that charter schools are a panacaea.  They are an effort to bring some level of parental and educational choice to a segement of the population that couldn’t afford the traditional route to such choice, private or parochial schools.

And the fact that they are needed – desperately – in that role is proved by their success in the “market”, especially in the city.

But we’ll get back to that.  Because Van Hecke betrays an essential myopia and conceit next:

The difficult, rewarding business of teaching children must be improved by the charter school movement. If charter schools can’t deliver on their promises, they don’t merit public funds and, most critically, they don’t merit parents’ investment of their children’s futures.

Conceit:  So does MN2020 in its infinite (and self-declared) wisdom think we charter parents haven’t thoroughly considered what merits our investment?  Moreso than the imponderably vast majority of other parents?

Myopia: And if we need to make that decision, cutting loose public funds from institutions that don’t deliver on their promise, then why not take that same standard to public schools?

Let’s take Van Hecke’s piece from the top:

In the week and a half following Minnesota 2020’s report, Checking in on Charter Schools, conservative educational policy advocates attacking us barely paused between breaths.

Didja catch that?  “Conservative educational policy advocates”?

I don’t know who he’s referring to; besides myself, I know charter school advocate Al Fan has spoken out on the MN2020 report (and I’m in the process of interviewing Mr. Fan as I write this).

But does MN2020 believe that supporting charter schools is a “conservative” issue?

Tell it to the parents at Avalon, which both of my kids have attended; I can count maybe one other Republican among the parents there; you could wallpaper the classrooms with the Obama stickers in the parking lot with a few left over.

Is he referring to the parents at Skills for Tomorrow charter, or City Academy, whose parents are largely Afro-American and, if they care about politics at all, statistically vote 90+% DFL?

What exactly is the point to trying to polarize the charter school issue into  a conservative vs. liberal issue?

I was about to write something like “…other than to placate MN2020’s political masters, who want to see charters shown as an inferior product compared to public schools to further their Teachers-Union-driven agenda”, but I thought that might be inflammatory, so I’ll change it to “I’d really like to know, given that the political label doesn’t really match the constituency”.

But OK.  Politicization is one thing.  Trying to drop things down the memory hole is quite another:

Our rather limited financial accountability research scope, examining Minnesota charter school’s public audits, has drawn greater ire than I thought possible. We clearly swatted a hornet’s nest.

We totted auditor flags and concluded that, with four of five charter schools reporting at least one financial irregularity, greater financial oversight and accountability was overdue.

Well, no.  In John Fitzgerald’s original piece, after “totting” the auditor “flags” (of which much, much more next week), he concluded:

 The state should reconsider its agreements with the 121 charter schools that cannot successfully pass a financial audit. Further, taxpayers should not continue to fund the 50 percent of charter schools that do not resolve financial problems…Schools with finances that have been stunningly mismanaged for years should be cut off from public funds and closed.If charter schools can’t run their schools in a financially competent manner, Minnesota should reconsider whether charter schools are worthy of public funding at all

That was a clear call to shut down the 50% of schools that have had sequential problems with audits (of which much more next week), and to consider abandoning the entire charter school experiement, after declaring these audits to be a dispositive indicator of a school’s financial ethicality.

Read the paragraphs above – the italicized ones – and show me a different interpretation of MN2020’s original conclusion?

Now, if John Van Hecke is saying MN2020 is rolling back from its original point, that’d be fine, but it’d be even better if they were clear about it one way or the other.

We didn’t examine graduation rates, standardized test performance or curriculum.

True.  But in the same series of audits that jump-started MN2020’s “investigation”, the Minnesota Legislative Auditor did.  Oddly, that part of the Auditor’s report didn’t make it into John Fitzgerald’s report.

We’ll touch on that next week, too.

Van Hecke, with emphasis added by me:

We purposefully engaged a touchy public policy issue. While our report raises important questions, the harsh conservative attacks against us, mostly ad hominem, suggest that we’re examining public investments that some conservatives don’t wish examined.

I have to presume Van Hecke is referring to someone else; I have kept my reporting pretty scrupulously factual.  I do know that Van Hecke referred to a series of “ad-homina” in an op-ed by Al Fan in the Winona newspaper this past week.

Again – we’ll examine that  next week as well.

Van Hecke:

I would rather engage strident advocates than indifferent citizens. That being said, let me suggest to anyone contemplating entering this debate, finish your second cup of coffee first. This experience is not for the faint of heart.

Parents?  Especially charter school parents?  All together now:

Either is raising children.  I think we’re up to it.

Conservatives may raise legitimate traditional school system concerns but underfunding public schools only to prove their shortcomings is wrong.

Maybe, maybe not.  It’s not really at issue in this discussion – although inasmuch as charter schools spend less public money per student (counting district levies and bonding) than public schools do, and MN2020 seems not to have deigned to have examined their fiscal accountability, perhaps it should be.

A public school district must serve every enrolled child, sometimes at great expense.  Pedagogical experimenting is as old as learning but innovation is not cheap. Scaling up small or modestly sized systems doesn’t always work. In other words, the best parts of charter school education appear to fundamentally be their smallness.

That, again, is a tangent – but an interesting one.  If the public schools can learn one lesson from charters, perhaps it’s that smaller is better.  The industrial-age mania for consolidating public schools into bigger and bigger buildings (and into fewer and fewer towns in rural America) is as big a mistake as…well, as the past thirty years of education outcomes show it is!

The real question, though, concerns the future of public education. Because charter schools are publicly funded, they remain an educational lightning rod. Public investment accountability pressure will only increase. Consequently, the charter school movement must live up to its rhetoric.

I think we charter parents and supporters would agree wholeheartedly; its our kids we’ve entrusted to them!

But my point – and the point to many of the MN2020 report’s detractors – is that that MN2020 report demands a draconian response to a largely fictional, or at least overblown, problem.

How fictional and overblown?

Check back next week.

My “The Hit Is In” series (Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV) will be returning early next week.  Here’s what’s going on.

1. I’m asking a number of charter schools for comments about specific allegations in the MN2020 report about their schools.  The report includes an appendix listing specific “discrepancies” by school; I am going to get the details about these issues directly from severl the schools involved.  I’ve already spoken with three; it’s getting interesting.
2. I’m going to solicit comment about my questions, the schools’s responses, and impacts to the conclusions drawn, from MN2020.
3. I’m going over the media’s coverage of this report.  I plan on asking some media figures about their coverage, which I’d call “fawning” in most cases, but the National Association of Fawners were embarassed to endorse it.

More, hopefully, on Monday.

Also – MN2020 is taking some flak elsewhere from Fitzgerald’s report.  Their responses, so far?

Just a tad peevish.

By attacking Minnesota 2020 in this fashion, Charter School Partners [the group behind the links above] is making excuses for poor performance.

We’ll be going over what “poor performance” means next week.  Stay tuned.

Yesterday, we took a tour through a typical charter school.

The big takeaway?  Charter schools are started by organizations that want to teach kids; they might be social organizations, like the various inner-city advocacy groups that have started many charters in the Cities as well as Native-American-focused schools statewide; over 50% of all kids in charters in Minnesota are, ironically, minorities; their parents and organizations are responding to the abysmal education their kids have always received.  Others are educational; Hamline and Concordia Universities both sponsor charter schools in Saint Paul.  Others are related to religion (there are pseudo-Catholic charters, as well as at least one Islamic one) or ethnic (there are H’mong, Afrocentric and Hispanic focused charters) or program-based (there are charters for kids with emotional problelms, as well as ones based on military, arts, free-form, environment, “service learning”, science and technology, and even music recording).

The schools recruit staff who are usually non-union, but pretty much always are committed to teaching in the environment or philosophy the organization is pushing.  They are, very often, the kinds of teachers you really, really want for your kids; the teachers that will lose a few dollars for the chance to work with kids in smaller environments focused more on learning and less on bureaucracy.

Usually, this means teachers teach.

As opposed to futzing with the books.

———-

In his piece last week, John Fitzgerald’s big marquee point was:

• 83 percent were found to have at least one financial irregularity in their audit – five years earlier, that figure was 73 percent;

• 51 percent of those schools with problems identified on their 2007 financial audits had the same problems identified on their 2008 audits, according to the MDE;

• 29 percent did not respond to a request for board minutes – five years earlier, that figure was 33 percent;

• 55 percent were found to have “limited segregation of duties,” a requirement that ensures no single charter school official has control of the school’s funds;

• 26 percent didn’t have proper collateral for deposit insurance, a requirement that ensures the charter school can pay its bills.

Wow.  Seems pretty damning!

But what were these “irregularities”?  How important were they, that John Fitzgerald, writing for Minnesota 2020, a “non-partisan” progressive group, could conclude:

The state should reconsider its agreements with the 121 charter schools that cannot successfully pass a financial audit. Further, taxpayers should not continue to fund the 50 percent of charter schools that do not resolve financial problems…
If charter schools can’t run their schools in a financially competent manner, Minnesota should reconsider whether charter schools are worthy of public funding at all.

In other words, these “irregularities” are, to John Fitzgerald, so severe that the state should gut the charter school movement now, and send its students back to the public schools so many of them worked so hard to escape?

I had visions of charter school executives sitting on beaches in Rio, sipping mojitos from hookers’ bellybuttons.

What were the “irregularities”?

———-

In the non-copyable section at the bottom of the article which contains the actual MN2020 report, Fitzgerald lists the actual problems against which the schools were measured.

They were:

• Schools must provide board meeting minutes on request.
• Limited Segregation of Duties
• Inadequate Preparation of Financial Statements
• Inadequate Annual Reporting under GAAP
• Bank Reconciliations
• Collateral for Deposits
• Employee Advances are a no-no.
• Lack of Documentation of Employee Salaries
• Payroll Transaction Calculations
• Adequate Accounting System

For the benefit of those of us who are not accountants, what do these mean?

Let’s go through each of them, and Fitzgerald’s specifics, one by one.

Schools must provide board meeting minutes: Yep, it’s the law.  Public bodies are required to send minutes of their board meetings to those who request them.  Even if the request comes from a group that intends to job them in the media.  So during their work days, trying to run a school and teach kids (remember our walk through the staff of a charter yesterday?), 43 out of the 145 charters that Fitzgerald asked, didn’t send meeting minutes.

So – whether they are great schools or not, whether they provide the kids a better education or a much better education than the public schools, Minnesota 2020 thinks they should be shut down because they are sloppy with return mail.

Well, the law is the law.

Limited Segregation of Duties: in a proper accounting system, nobody should be able to do all the steps of a transaction – ask for money, write a work order/invoice, and cut a check – themselves.  There needs to be segregation of duties.  To be fair, this has led to some grotesque abuses – the head of one Minneapolis charter school is accused of embezzling $160,000 and driving his school, “Heart of the Earth”, a native-american charter serving the Minneapolis first-nations that have been served so abysmally by the public system, out of business.  To be fairer, among the 80 schools out of the 145 that Fitzgerald cites are several that I personally know to be exceptionally well-run long-term successes (both financially and educationally), and whose staffs I’m calling for follow-up on these allegations.

Preparation of Financial Statements -Fitzgerald’s report describes this one; I add the emphasis: “Many charter schools do not have the resources necessary to prepare their own financial audit, which could create a conflict of interest.  This is considered bad financial practice.”  Yes, I imagine it could.  But it’s a “bad financial practice”, not an actual offense.  For the 43 charters cited, using this as reason to close them without some, I dunno, more evidence of actual wrongdoing, as opposed to the potential for problems seems a bit stretchy.

Annual Reporting under GAAP – Huh?  Again, Fitzgerald, with my emphases:  “Schools need an internal control policy over annual financil reporting.  Without one, the potential exists that a material misstatement of the annual financial statements could occur and not be detected.” 22 schools fail to observe this – let me choose my word carefully – technicality.  Perhaps it’s an important one; I’m no accountant.  But using it as justification to demand closing the schools seems…draconian?

Bank Reconciliations – Three of the 145 charters reported not reconciling their general ledger with their monthly bank statements.  On the one hand, it seems like a good practice. On the other, it’s three out of 145.

Collateral For Deposits – The law requires that schools with deposits over the FDIC-insured amount have collateral or bonds to cover any uninsured amounts.  38 schools are cited.  At least one of them is a school I’m aware of, and which is an excellently-managed school with – for those of you who care about such things, which doesn’t seem to include MN2020 – a spectacular academic record, including amazing success with one of my children.  I’ll be seeking comment from this school, among others.

Employee Advances – Giving advances to employees is a no-no.  Two schools did it.  It could well be a form of malfeasance.  It could also be someone who’s spent their career learning how to teach rather than keep books making an error.  We don’t know – and by “we”, I mean “Fitzgerald doesn’t either”.

Lack of Documentation of Employee Salaries – Schools need to document staff salaries.  Fitzgerald, with emphasis added: “…the charter could be subject to a higher risk taht fraud or error could occur and not be detected in a timely manner”.  Again, “could”. Two schools out of 145 are cited.

Payroll Transaction Calculations -Two schools improperly calculated payroll transactions, and, as Fitzgerald notes, were asked to improve their practices.  Did they?  The MN2020 report is silent.

Adequate Accounting System – This one caught my attention.  Perhaps this’d be the one that would actually justify Fitzgerald’s demands that we close most of Minnesota’s charter schools!

But what does it mean?

Fitzgerald: “Some charter schols use accounting systems that aren’t compatible with the MDE [Minnesota Department of Education] accounting systems.  The charter schools then ahve to pay a management company at the end of the year to transfer data from the current accounting system to an MDE-compliant system.”

Ahem.

So some schools use their own systems – perhaps (we dont’t know) systems better-suited to small schools run by people who are not accountants than the Department of Education’s system (built by and for accountants!) – and that is a material irregularity that justifies shutting them down?

Both (two) of them?

That’s right – two out of 145 charter schools?

And that’s it.

———-

This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems with charter schools.  Heart of the Earth’s closure was one of several high-profile cases involving alleged fraud.  Other charters have closed because they just couldn’t manage money well; no crime was involved (or at least none that John Fitzgerald and MN2020 could conjure up from phantom context), but the business of running a school that is also a non-profit business was too much for the staff involved.

A rational conclusion: some charter schools need some help with running financials.

Not “we need to shut them down”.

Unless, of course, your motive is less about education or accountability than it is about getting rid of competition to the public school system.

I’m trying to follow up with a couple of the charter schools cited in Fitzgerald’s report.  I’ll present the results as they come in, hopefully later this week.

(Part I, Part II, and Part III of this series )

Incompetence.

It’s a big word which, when aimed at someone working in their chosen, professional field, is a big, ugly rhetorical cudgel.

Basic rules of human behavior – tact, the Golden Rule, karma – bid one to use it sparingly; it should only be used when truly needed.

Last week, we took an initial look at John Fitzgerald’s pro-forma hit piece on Charter Schools.  In part II, I noted that Fitzgerald’s piece cherry-picked its territory, focusing on financials and ignoring the real reason charter schools exist – to provide parents a choice when public schools fail (as they are, more and more) and give students a better education.

But what about the look at the financials?

———-

Before we dig into Fitzgerald’s piece, let’s take a walk through a typical charter school. Via my kids, I’ve been involved with three of them, by the way; via friends and their children, five more.

Check out the building.  It’s a rental; charter schools don’t get to float bonds to build buildings.  In the inner city, it’s usually cheap office space;  the four blocks around University and Fairview in Saint Paul are home to three or four of them in ragtag old office/light industrial spaces; Skills for Tomorrow caters to inner-city parents; Avalon (featured in an MPR report a while ago) is a non-traditional program; a new German Immersion school started downstairs from Avalon this past year.  All have fanatically loyal parents.  Other charters are tucked into cheap space all over the place; the H’mong Charter is in a long-abandoned fitness club; one focusing on kids with big emotional problems is stuffed into an annex to a public health clinic on Arcade; an environmental charter and an online charter for the disabled are neighbors in old offices on Energy Park; Yinghua Chinese Immersion school is in an old office on Pierce Butler.  None of them stand out like a typical high school, designed as they are for the glorification of the school board that commissioned them; all of them are “cost-effective” at best.

Walk in the door.  There might be an Admin Assistant; he or she may or may not be getting paid (parent volunteers fill the role, often as not), or at a bigger school handles the full range of administrative scutwork, from the school’s logistics, administrative support, office management, fielding admissions calls, giving tests, serving as a de-facto school nurse…you name it.

Ask to see the Principal.  At a public school you’d have a choice; my kids’ last public elementary had a principal, a vice-principal who handled discipline and transportation issues, another that handled academics, plus a full-time secretary.  Our charter will have one principal, maybe; it might be an on-site principal, who is usually splitting time between principal-ing and teaching; others work for the sponsoring organizations, and so are busy fundraising (because the tax allotment never covers everything that’s needed) and administering.

Wanna talk to admissions?  Leave a message.  “Admissions” is often as not a teacher who’s covering the job in addition to teaching classes and running extracurriculars; at bigger schools, the receptionist/office managewr/Radar O’Reilly might hand out forms and file applications.  Teachers rotate through all kinds of jobs, depending on their expertise or luck of the draw, from managing computer networks to running the library to handling paperwork.

There are some specialists; special ed teachers (since they take public money, they need to handle special ed at some level or another) are common; “curriculum specialists”, less so.

Every other adult in the building is a teacher, or an adult who’s volunteering to tutor, lead activities, or lend their own expertise to a class.  Sometimes, one of them is an accountant, but that’d be a rarity.

Compare this to any public school you’ve seen.  Forget about comparing it with the headquarters building of a big school district like Saint Paul’s monolithic castle at 360 Colborne, six stories crammed with administrators, bureaucrats, meeting rooms, and people who do everything that school districts need and some things they don’t; logistics, planners, the school board and its staff, accountants, bookkeepers, public relations specialists, union and government  relations staff, lawyers, curriculum wonks, a Superintendent and a bevy of assistant superintendents and their support staffs – indeed, people who do everything but teach classes; you’ll find nary a student in that building during the work day.

A charter school is “chartered” to a sponsoring organization by the city’s school board; it is, in essence, a three year contract to perform a service, teaching kids.  It might be an organization with a social mission as diverse as the H’Mong, Afrocentric, Moslem or pseudo-Catholic groups that run schools; it might be a  university Education department, like Hamline and Concordia Universities, which run charter schools almost like labs; it could be groups with an educational concept they want to further, as different as Nova (based on the classics) and Skills for Tomorrow (focusing on educating inner city kids).  What they have in common is that “teaching kids” is the thing that the school, and the limited staff it can afford once it pays its other bills, focuses on.

You’ll scour the state’s charters schools long and hard to find a full-time accountant among ’em.

———-

So I read through Fitzgerald’s piece to find the “incompetence” he cites not merely for individual schools, but for the charter school movement in general.

Remember; the marquee points in his relase were:

• 83 percent were found to have at least one financial irregularity in their audit – five years earlier, that figure was 73 percent;

• 51 percent of those schools with problems identified on their 2007 financial audits had the same problems identified on their 2008 audits, according to the MDE;

• 29 percent did not respond to a request for board minutes – five years earlier, that figure was 33 percent;

• 55 percent were found to have “limited segregation of duties,” a requirement that ensures no single charter school official has control of the school’s funds;

• 26 percent didn’t have proper collateral for deposit insurance, a requirement that ensures the charter school can pay its bills.

But what do these individual allegations really mean?

We’ll go through that tomorrow.

(Part I, Part II and Part IV of this series)

In 1961, communist East Germany faced a crisis.  The West had stiffened its spine against communism.  The East Germans (and their Russian handlers) faced a dire threat across the nation’s open borders.  So they built a fence and, through the middle of the divided capitol in Berlin, a big wall, reinforced with barbed wire, mines, dogs and machine guns.

Not to keep western invaders out, of course; it was to keep East Germans, Czechs and Poles in.  It wasn’t NATO tanks they were worried about; it was the immense efflux of the Eastern bloc’s most motivated, talented, useful people across the border to freedom.

Public schools, especially (but far from exclusively) in the major cities, are failing.  Graduation rates in Saint Paul are under 50%; it’s far worse among black and hispanic students.  And the parents of those students are responding by leaving the districts.  Due to Minnesota’s school choice rules, parents can sent their kids to other public districts, to private schools, or to charter  schools.  Over an eighth of Saint Paul parents have decamped from the public system; it’s “worse” in Minneapolis.

And like the East Germans, the Minnesota education establishment knows that it needs to stanch the bleeding before it bleeds completely dry.
The left – especially the big institutional left, the DFL, and its handlers, the teachers union – hate charter schools.  The schools are generally non-union, of course.  Beyond that, due to the 1991 law that established the charter system, the state money that would  go to the student at a public school follows the student to the charter school.

In the MN2020 hit piece on charter schools yesterday (subtitled “An Examination of Charter School Finances”, John Fitzgerald wrote:

Unlike private schools, charter schools are funded by taxpayer dollars. While traditional public schools get roughly $9,500 per-student from the state, charter schools get $10,500 for each student from the state. State officials say charter schools deserve more taxpayer money because they can’t ask local taxpayers for additional taxes to operate their schools or for bonds to build school buildings the way traditional districts can.

Fitzgerald breezes past this like it’s immaterial – presumably (I’ll put words in his mouth) to leave the reader with the impression that charter schools are over-funded compared to the public schools.

But local bonding funding more than makes up the purported differences in spending:

Statewide  – $9,063 per student

During the 2008-09 school year, Minnesota school districts will receive an average of $9,063 per student in general education revenue from state and local sources.

State funding per student will average of $8,182.

Referenda revenue per student will average $881.

Minneapolis (District 1.2) – $11,692 per student

During the 2008-09 school year, Minneapolis will receive $11,692 per student in general education revenue from state and local sources, compared with a statewide average of $9,063.

State funding is $10,797 per student, compared to a statewide average of $8,182.

Referenda revenue total $895 per student, compared to a state average of $881.

St. Paul (District 625) – $10,809 per student

During the 2008-09 school year, St. Paul will receive $10,809 per student in general education revenue from state and local sources, compared with a statewide average of $9,063.

State funding is $10,039 per student, compared to a statewide average of $8,182.

Referenda revenue totals $770 per student, compared to a state average of $881.

Remember to add 8% – the government inflation rate – to these numbers, which are from last year.

And then remember that charter schools need to pay for a whole lot of things – rent, for starters – out of their per-student allotment that the public schools largely don’t.Fitzgerald next moves on to “accountability”.

A major component of the 1991 charter school legislation allows the taxpayer dollars to follow the student: if a student leaves a traditional school and enrolls in a charter school, the per-student money leaves the public system and is allocated to the charter school.

Although charter schools receive taxpayer funds, they are not subject to the same checks and balances taxpayers have the right to expect. Traditional schools are governed by elected school boards. Taxpayers who disagree with the way their money is being spent need only go to the school board meeting and voice their concern. Ultimately, voters can exercise their rights and vote school board members off the body.

I’ve spent a solid day trying to figure out how to even address the myopia in this statement.

“They need only to go voice their concern?”  To whom?  To the very body that is causing the problem.  Who, especially in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, were put into office by local party machines and the teachers unions whose entire goal is to maintain the status quo.

And it’s true; the taxpayer can  “exercise their rights” to mount a big election campaign (at the appointed time in the election cycle), put their lives on hold, raise millions of dollars, and butt heads with the most entrenched establishment anywhere in Minnesota  politics. And, pretty much inevitably, fail.

As, indeed, people who are revolted by the way taxpayers money is being spent in the Cities today are failing, and even falling behind; the one Republican member of the Saint Paul school board (indeed, the sole elected Republican anywhere in Saint Paul) is leaving.

So what’s the alternative?

Go to a private school (with its attendant costs).  Or go to a school in another district (which is good if you can manage the transportation to and from the district; transportation funds do not follow the student, which is fine unless you are the one of the families most affected by the attempt to gut charter schoos, the working poor in the city.  And which, let’s not forget, is a function of the “Open Enrollment” law that will be the Educational-Industrial Complex’ next target when they kill off charter schools)…

…or go to a charter school.  Where, if you don’t like how things are being run, you can express your dissatisfaction by leaving.  By depriving the school of your kid’s share of the state money.

You can’t get more accountable than that – if by “accountable” you mean “to parents”.

Oh, and there’s one other way:

There is no such remedy for taxpayers concerned about the financial dealings fo charter schools. Their boards are not publically elected and taxpayers have no say in how their money is spent.

This is, of course, balderdash.  Many charter schools have boards, elected from among the school’s sponsors, staff and, lest we forget, parents.  These boards are immediately responsible to the school’s parents about everything, immediately.

And for those that don’t?  As Fitzgerald’s report itself notes, the Minnesota Department of Education itself administers the financial affairs of charter schools!

I mentioned this to a couple of different supporters of the current public school system.  “But taxpayers as a whole don’t get a say in how their tax money is spent at a charter school!”

I reeled with responses:

Your input as a voter ends at your district!  If you’re a voter in Marshall, your disgust with how your tax money is being spent in Minneapolis will fall on deaf electoral ears, except…via the Minnesota Department of Education.  Same as with charter schools!

Charter schools aren’t the only bodies that accept public money without publicly-elected boards; every non-profit that accept tax dollars has a board that is privately elected. Do I get a say in how, say, Minnesota Public Radio spends my tax dollars?  Do I get a vote on their board, just because they’re spending my money?  Hell, I don’t even get a vote for pledging to them!  No, my only say on MPR’s funding – or the funding of any non-profit that accepts tax dollars – is the same as the Marshall voters’ say over Minneapolis’ school spending, or over John Fitzgerald’s say over my kids’ charter school’s spending; via the legislature, which controls the Department of Education.  Which is frustratingly indirect, although not nearly so indirect as, say, being a conservative trying to change the composition of the Saint Paul School Board.

“But MPR isn’t a school!”  True.  But Fitzgerald’s article wasn’t about “education”, per se; you’ll find only the most oblique references to the actual business schools conduct, “educating” kids, anywhere in the article.  It’s about financial governance, compliance and accountability with taxpayer money.  And none of those differs in any but the most picayune details between charter schools and, say, a social service non-profit with a state contract (which also have spotty records), or an HMO (which are non-profits in Minnesota, and have even dicier records).   And if you want to bring the fact that a charter is a school into the mix, then it’s patently misleading to compare charters’ performance at financial management with public schools (not that any of them can manage money; they don’t have to follow the same rules), to say nothing of the differences in educational service and achievement that are the justification for charter schools in the first place.

There’s a reason for that, naturally.

But while Fitzgerald’s piece didn’t touch on education, it did talk a lot about financial management.

More on that on Monday.

UPDATE: I had to re-do this post; MN2020’s code interacts badly with a “feature” in WordPress that made it basically impossible to fix it without copying the whole thing into Notepad to scrub the invisible formatting and re-pasteing it into WordPress.

So the comments are lost.  Sorry about that.

(Part I, Part III and Part IV of this series)

Established; the left hates, and wants to extinguish, charter schools.

Charter schools – invented about twenty years ago in Minnesota, and given life by a 1991 law that allowed schools, run by sponsoring organizations and elected boards of parents, teachers, sponsors and other interested parties, to use the money that would have been allocated to the student at a public school – have been a lightning rod ever since.

For the teachers’ union and the educational/industrial complex,anyway.

For parents – especially parents underserved by the decaying inner city schools with their sub-50% graduation rates, violence and miserable achievement – the word I’m looking for is “lifelines”.  City parents – especially the Afro-American parents that have the most to gripe about with urban schools – are leaving the city schools in droves; 1/8 of Saint Paul’s kids have left the system, with even more in Minneapolis, as of two years ago.

Charter schools offer what public schools not only lack, but actively squelch; parental involvement; beyond that, parental control; staff whose jobs are intimately tied to their success with the kids, since the board that hires them administers only the school they’re in; perhaps most important, immediate accountability – not to some politicized, “elected” school board (which is in the bag for the teachers union, not the parents) and careerist administration, but to them via a decision loop that is a microscopic fraction of what it is at a public school.  If a charter school screws up with a kid, they know it right away; the board hears it and must respond immediately, or the kids, and the money, go away.

The accountability, in other words, is immediate.

Which the teachers union and the educational-industrial complex hates.  They’ve been working for almost two decades to extinguish the charter school experiment.  They’ve tittered about “academic achievement” rates that, in the cases of some schools, is a tiny hair below that of public schools, in press releases that carefully ignore two inconvenient truths:

• Charter schools are often where parents go after kids have “checked out” of the public system, developed atrocious study skills, and lost interest in education.  Call it educational recovery; it’s where many parents – myself included – go to salvage the mess our inept public schools create.
• When a kid in a public school is performing poorly enough to blow the school’s rates for purposes of “No Child Left Behind”, they’re shunted off to an “Alternative Learning Center” (ALC), which, being explicitly for kids with academic problems, is “off the books”.  Charter schools don’t have this; there’s just one Grade Point Average for a charter school!

But more than anything, it’s about the money.  Since the per-student money from the states follows each charter student, every family that decamps for the charters takes tens of thousands of dollars away from the factory school system.  It’s adding up fast.

They want it back.

John Fitzgerald came out yesterday with a hit piece on charters’ “Financial Accountability”. for “Minnesota 2020”, the “non-partisan” think tank founded by former DFL Representative Matt Entenza and employing, as far as I can see, nothing but partisans.

Seventeen years after the first charter school opened in Minnesota, this examination of fiscal year 2007 charter school financial audits shows that the vast majority of charter schools do not follow basic financial guidelines or, in some cases, state law. Since this analysis agrees with a recent report by the Office of the Legislative Auditor and audit examinations written in 2001, 2002 and 2003, we conclude that these financial problems are not being adequately addressed by the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and, further, are endemic of the charter school system.

Well, that sounds pretty damning.   Of course, the damnation is in the details -which we’ll look into later.

Efforts by the 2009 Legislature to provide more accountability to charter schools was welcome, but shorthanded. The charter school program is financially flawed and basic concepts about charter schools – such as unelected school boards and under informed business management – need to be changed.

Let’s clarify a few things about the language in this paragraph, since they obfuscate a few things that, for the charter advocate, are better re-clarified.

Some charters do have unelected boards.  Most of them do elect their boards.

And any parent that’s ever been involved in a charter school knows that most of them are run by teachers, not managers or accountants. At some charters – schools with excellent academic records – the staff freely admit they work hard to keep the regulatory hogs’ troughs slopped with the pails of paperwork that attend the spending of any public money.  It’s not an unfair charge – although to try to turn that charge into a conviction, as Fitzgerald does later in this piece, is laughably misleading.

Fitzgerald cuts to the chase

In November and December, 2008 and January, 2009, Minnesota 2020 combed through the financial audits of 145 charter schools for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2007 – reports that were filed with MDE by December 31, 2007. Our research found several trends in charter school financial management:

• 83 percent were found to have at least one financial irregularity in their audit – five years earlier, that figure was 73 percent;

• 51 percent of those schools with problems identified on their 2007 financial audits had the same problems identified on their 2008 audits, according to the MDE;

• 29 percent did not respond to a request for board minutes – five years earlier, that figure was 33 percent;

• 55 percent were found to have “limited segregation of duties,” a requirement that ensures no single charter school official has control of the school’s funds;

• 26 percent didn’t have proper collateral for deposit insurance, a requirement that ensures the charter school can pay its bills.

Well, that sure sounds bad.  And those are the numbers that MN2020 will splash all about the state’s media (the media that so many of MN2020’s staff used to work for).

But what’s behind those numbers?  You have to do some reading for that.  We’ll look into the numbers tomorrow.

But Fitzgerald reaches a conclusion:

If charter schools can’t run their schools in a financially competent manner, Minnesota should reconsider whether charter schools are worthy of public funding at all.

Which brings up a slew of interesting questions.

Why should charter schools be the only ones required to be “financially competent”?  Can we have the same debate about “worthiness” with our union-strangled, factory school system?

We’ll be back to look at Fitzgerald’s numbers tomorrow.

UPDATE:  Yep, it’s John, not Peter Fitzgerald.  I hadn’t had coffee yet; I’m lucky I didn’t write “Edmund”.

And I guess I don’t keep up with my “progressive” non-profit trivia like I used to: Entenza isn’t with MN2020 anymore.

(Part II, Part III and Part IV of this series)

A commentator at Pravda says that Marxism has finally triumphed – right here in the USA:

The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

The irony – a Russian chattering about people giving up their freedom, practically a Great Russian genetic trait – only partly counterbalances the fact that he’s got a point.

If someone were to develop an education system to create a generations-deep supply of ignorant, impotent sheeple, how would they actually change our system?

School choice in all its various forms – charter schools, open enrollment, vouchers in their various forms (scholarships, tax deductions and vouchers themselves) and easy access to homeschooling – have been a boon to millions of kids, not only improving the education the vast majority of them get, but doing it at inevitably less cost to the taxpayer.

So of course, the Dem majority in Congress (like that in Saint Paul) needs to destroy it, for the benefit of the Educational-Industrial Complex that so many of them serve.

Kathryn Jean Lopez on the Obama Administratin’s push to scupper the DC Opportunity program.

The program’s a success, increasing achievement scores.  More importantly, it’s improvements are persistent:

Unlike other programs under which students backslide when they switch schools, some children enrolled in D.C. Opportunity have improved, according to the Department of Education’s own evaluation, which reports that “achievement trends are moving in the right direction.”

Most importantly, it gives parents an option – a way out of DC’s school system, which is both the most expensive in the nation per-capita, and the most blighted; I was amazed to read that one in eight DC school students report having been attacked or threatened with a weapon in the previous year.

Yeah – gotta get rid of all that and get the kids back in the public system!

One of the great “truisms” of major cities is that public education suffers from the poverty of its surroundings.

Speed Gibson notes that it may just be the other way around:

Nothing beats an involved parent when it comes to getting a quality K-12 education for a child. It works everywhere, from Minneapolis North to Wayzata, the big difference being in the number (percentage) of involved parents.

I was about to write what I believed to be a tangent – that the schools’ concern for “parental involvement” was a sham, that the schools wanted “involvement” in the sense of “collating handouts” and “setting up tables”, but would just as soon parents keep their mouths shut about problems with the schools.

But then I realized – it’s not a tangent to this particular story.  We’ll let Speed carry on:

This is then extrapolated by equating low involvement with low incomes to say that poverty itself is the big explanation for the “achievement” gaps between “rich” and “poor” districts.

Once again we must remember that correlation is not causation, that if A and B rise and fall together there are multiple possibilities. A might affect B, B might affect A, both may be affected by a third factor C, or the whole thing may just be coincidental. To that end, consider a recent article from US News & World Report article by the Chancellor of the New York Department of Education, Joel I. Kline. He thinks poverty is a symptom, not a problem, saying that “America will never fix poverty until it fixes its urban schools.”

After citing how Washington D.C. schools spend the most and achieve the least, he challenges the conventional wisdom of poverty (and race) explaining poor results.

As a side note; the urban schools that spend the least, and perforce depend the most on parental involvement, the urban parochial and charter schools (as well as the parents who get involved by pulling the kids out and enrolling them in a public school in the ‘burbs, which takes a lot of involvement,not the least of which involves compensating for the loss of school transportation that goes along with the move) are the ones getting the best results, measured on a kid-by-kid basis.

Joel Kline:

If the academic achievement of poor black students varies substantially from district to district, the mere fact of being black and poor cannot explain why low-income black students in Washington are years behind their peers in some big cities. By contrast, if extra spending and additional resources really were the antidote for the achievement gap, black students in D.C. should handily outstrip most of their urban peers.

I don’t have the figures handy – I have at the moment no idea how to look for them, although I believe I’ll poke around and figure it out – but I’d just about bet money that poor, black kids in the few remaining one-room schools in Mississippi do better than kids in DC, for (I’d suspect) about a third the cost.  Ditto with poor Latino kids at tiny schools in New Mexico, or for that matter white kids in small schools in Minnesota.

But Kline’s – and Gibson’s – larger point is a good one; the tragic failure of our urban public schools is perpetuating the cycle of poverty; the system is raising generation after generation of kids to be nothing other than poor – financially and spiritually.

Kline’s larger point is that “socio-economic status” is too often accepted as an excuse not to work harder, as if that would be throwing good money after bad. Yet, some Charter schools seem to be able to do so, obtaining spectacular results in some cases, and for less money that Washington D.C. is spending.

Last week, Webster School in Saint Paul voted to change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”.

Do I roll my eyes and shake my head when my local school district subscribes to a personality cult for a president that’s been in office just a skosh over three months?  Of course.  Indeed, it strikes me as the kind of second-hand hubris (I don’t know a better term for “participating in others’ hubris”) that I can see people looking back on in, say, five years, shaking their heads, and saying “well, maybe we were a bit rash…”

But the real problem is  Ain this thread, on E-“Democracy’s” Saint Paul forum.  Saint Paul school board member Ann Carroll chimes in later in the conversation:

Now just hold on here a minute! Some of the posts on this topic are veering
way too close to racist comments, which is not tolerated on either this
Issues Forum or by SPPS.

“Racist comments?”

Read the thread.  Before Carroll chimed in, one commenter (Gary Fishbach, friend of this blog and a noted Highland Park Republican) dropped a couple of pleas for fiscal sanity.  A couple of DFLers responded.

And then Carroll cried “Racism”.

You’ll examine the thread, as I did, in vain for the faintest sign of racism…

…unless you believe, as Carroll seems to, that criticizing the name change, for any reason, is itself racist.

I’ll be asking Ann Carroll for comment.

The name change is just plain dumb – although not, perhaps, as disturbing as the curriculum change.  “Service Learning” is education establishment shorthand for “shanghaiing students into serving as free labor for non-profits”. Like so much that passes for normal in the Saint Paul and Minneapolis public schools, it’s got very little to do with education, but much with paying chits to the educational establishment’s supporters, and making sure future generations get healthy doses of koolaid at an early age.

The Saint Paul School Board is considering changing Webster Magnet to “Barack And Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”.

Leaders at Webster Magnet School say they want their name change to reflect the school’s renewed focus on teaching students about community service.

One name being considered is the “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School.” The other option is to call it “Webster Service Learning Elementary.”

The process involves a public voting process.  According to an email forward to me from Superintendant Carstarphen:

Thank you for your email concerns to Director Conlon on April 21 regarding the proposed Webster name change.  As with previous school name change proposals, we ensure there is a process for all people to have a voice in this process.  Anyone who lives in Saint Paul will be able to vote on April 30, 7:00 a.m. –  7:00 p.m. at the school.  Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) Community Relations department has worked on a notice giving all the details regarding the voting process and location which the Pioneer Press has agreed to publish.

If you live in Saint Paul, and believe that Wellstone, Ventura and Franken were embarassment enough for this state, show on up at Webster during the window tomorrow.

I’ll be there, of course.  If you’re there, and see anything – er – interesting, email me.

Governor Pawlenty, from his new Twitter account:

hockey, teacher said she is being laid-off. Union in her district turned down more money to avoid performance-based pay. Go figure!!!

Paying good teachers extra? All hell would break loose!

Pat Buchanan on the discontinuation of DC’s education voucher program; the Obama Administration is basically starving the program to death.

As Buchanan notes, there’s a political reason to starve the program out:

With no living, breathing students profiting from the program to give it a face and stand and defend it the Congress has little political pressure to put new money into the program. The political pressure will be coming exclusively from the teacher’s unions who oppose the vouchers, just as they oppose No Child Left Behind and charter schools and every other effort at reforming public schools that continue to fail the nation’s most vulnerable young people, low income blacks and Hispanics.

The National Education Association and other teachers’ unions have put millions into Democrats’ congressional campaigns because they oppose Republican efforts to challenge unions on their resistance to school reform and specifically their refusal to support ideas such as performance-based pay for teachers who raise students’ test scores.

By going along with Secretary Duncan’s plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage.

But you knew Pat Buchanan, enemy of eduation, would say that, didnt you?

UPDATE: Oh, of course it’s not Buchanan.  It’s Juan Williams.

And this is an issue that Republicans should be banging on like a pan lid at a frat party drunken percussion jam.

Of course, timid of being portrayed as “extremists” by people who call every Republican “extremist” for the crime of running against Democrats, most Republicans acquiesce with the current system, believing there’s something to save.

There’s really not a lot!

I’ve taken my shots at Dems’ “Get Out The Vote” efforts, in that they tend to be not so much educational (as have been the GOP GOTV efforts I’ve seen) as logistical.  Democrat GOTV efforts were wonderfully summed up by the delightfully dissociative Jennifer Vogel in her classic article, “F*CK THE SUBURBS”, in some dismal little Seattle freebiezine a few years ago:

A poll volunteer approached and embarked upon a lengthy explanation. The African woman interrupted. “Kerry,” she said loudly. “I want Kerry.” That was that.

To sum it up: teach a [fill in the label of choice] the name you want filled in, tell them what that name is going to give them, and send them to the polls.

Which is fine, where “fine” equals “legal”. But is it what our democracy is supposed to be striving for?

The franchise is a vital part of democracy – but not as an end unto itself.  It’s supposed to be the first step in a process that leads to good, publicly-minded people of whatever party being sent downtown, or to Saint Paul, or to Washington.

And if the only thing people know about the process is a name and a list of programs, then that’s what the people are going to send off to run your city, county, state or nation.

So while I proposed yesterday to have an all-day national three-for-one happy hour on election day, to keep idiots away from the polls, a little consideration (and spending Saint Patricks Day in downtown Saint Paul, among the raving-drunk pseudo-Oirish reminding me how awful and ugly a drunk populace is), leads me to a better idea.

It’s time to reinstitute the poll test.

In order to vote, everyone should get at least a “D”on a test to make sure they’ve been paying attention to their city, state, and world. The test is non-partisan, gender/race/culture blind, and only makes sure people are actually paying attention to what their government is and how it’s supposed to work.

Here’s an example:

1. Who is your city’s current mayor?  [If the mayor’s race is on the ballot (or any races below, for that matter) it’d be omitted]
2. Does your city have a council, a commission, or a manager?
3. What ward [precinct, city council district, whatever] do you live in?
4. Who is your current city council representative?
5. What county do you live in?
6. Who is your current County Commission representative?
7. Who is the Governor?
8. Who is your State Representative?
9. Who is your State Senator?
10. Name at least four of your state’s constitutional offices and/or officers? (Hint:  Governor [fill in the governor] is one of them).
11. What are the three branches of our State and Federal government?
12. What Congressional District do you live in?
13. Who is your current congressional representative?
14. How many Senators does your state send to the United States Senate?  If guessing, get as close as possible to the actual number without going over.
15. Name as many of your state’s current US Senators as possible.
16. Name at least four cabinet departments or members:  (hint: Secretary of State is one example).
17. Who is the current President of the United States?

Now, should anyone who can’t get at least 60% of these questions correct even be voting?

No, I think that’s the kind of thing a citizen should be able to know to take part in our democracy.  I mean, why should people vote for the control off offices and institutions they don’t understand?

Liberals will respond “That’s Racist!”  Liberals also say “that’s racist” when their pad thai comes to them undercooked or when they get a parking ticket.  What they’re really saying is that “our factory schools – the ones that kids outside the ruling class go to, the ones we want to mandate everyone go to, especially all those minorities, don’t teach the basic of citizenship” – in other words, who’s the racist, here?

I confess; I haven’t listened to Joe Soucheray’s radio show in years.  I’m rather uncommon; Joe’s numbers are pretty much carrying KSTP-AM these days.  Let’s just say “Garage Logic” and I don’t click.

But in print?  When Joe’s hot, he’s hot.  

And I’ve rarely seen him better than unpacking the absurdity of the Saint Paul Public Schools’ response to the impending departure of Superintendant Maria Carstarphen.

Do you know how a lot of people — maybe everybody with a kid in the St. Paul schools — got the news that Meria Carstarphen was taking the same job in Austin, Texas?They got an automated phone call, similar to an announcement about snowplowing.

In fact, I bet it was just like a snowplowing call, which meant that it probably went out in a variety of languages. In the announcement, Carstarphen tells of her mixed emotions and her regret and how much progress has been made in St. Paul. I believe it was intended that the recipients of the calls were to understand the burden and the anguish Carstarphen faced in making the tough decision to move to a warmer climate for more money.

The big-school superintendent market, of course, is the real problem here. 

Now, many readers have misunderstood my preoccupation with Carstarphen’s leaving. It’s not that I don’t think Carstarphen has every right in the world to advance to bigger districts and higher salaries. It’s more to the point that we are absolute saps for letting these inmates continue to run the asylum in such wasteful fashion. There is also the inconvenient fact that these bureaucrats are so seemingly insulated from the reality of our current economic conditions.The taxpayers of St. Paul should be outraged that another $50,000 or $100,000 might get spent on a national search that can only result in somebody else being brought in here about whom the exact same things will be said that were said of Carstarphen and are being said about her right now in Austin.

The supers are in an exclusive club. Once they are in the club, it doesn’t make any difference who they are.

Read on for a trip through the money pit that is the SPPS’ 360 Colborne Avenue headquarters.

And the money pit it will stay, no matter who the board “chooses” to fill the slot.

The State of Minnesota – with the able assistance of the teachers’ unions and a class of professional administrators more wedded to policy than education – has already ruined public education in much of Minnesota.

Why not gut the safe havens to which parents turn when the public system just doesn’t cut it?

The DFL tried to strangle charter schools in their crib when they were first founded.  Then, two years ago, they tried to cap the number of charters; since the GOP was still close in the Senate, the measure failed (since six DFLers with consciences joined every single Republican in voting to kill the cap.

Anyway – they’re baaaaack:

Big changes in the way the state’s 153 charter schools are monitored and regulated are likely to emerge from this year’s legislative session. If so, it would be the first time since 1991, when the state blazed a national trail by passing charter school legislation, that state lawmakers have overhauled the system in such a way.Minnesota’s charters, which serve 30,000 students, will probably face a future of tighter controls, more oversight and increased training for charter school teachers and governing boards.

Over the years, charter schools have been battered by problems with poor student performance, fiscal woes, conflicts of interest and charges of inappropriate mixing of public education and private religion.

“The public is questioning how the schools are operating,” said Kathy Saltzman, DFL-Woodbury, and chairwoman of the Senate charter schools working group. “And there are some charter schools that aren’t working.”

Legislators are likely to propose freezing the number of new charters. In part, that’s in response to criticism that charters suck students, and the state money that comes with them, out of the regular schools.

Wow.  Didn’t see that coming.