The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers – their “local” of the teachers’ union – having spent a couple of decades fighting charter schools, is now setting up its own

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers is trying to become the first teachers union in the country to authorize charter schools.

The union hopes it can help create a network of “guild schools” run by unionized teachers and focused on professional development and effective teaching practices.

As we noted in my charter school series last summer, charter schools operate under some tight financial constraints – the kind of thing that would kill most public schools.  One of the ways they make it is by hiring non-union teachers.

So it’ll be interesting to see if  a “guild school”, with its higher costs and big union pension, can even survive – or if the union extracts some sort of concession from boards and the legislature.

Almost more interesting than the new charter market is the implied strife within the cozy public school racket between administrators and teachers:

“The education system has become very heavy and weighed down, and it sits on the backs of teachers,” said Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis union. The guild schools will “maybe have enough flexibility [for teachers] to do what they know is the right thing to be doing for kids right now.”

On Saturday, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it is giving the Minneapolis union a one-year, $150,000 “Innovation Fund” grant to help it pursue its goal…As an authorizer, the Minneapolis union couldn’t require schools to be unionized, but Nordgren said, “We’re hoping the teachers will be unionized, because we think a union of professionals makes a stronger school and a stronger profession.”

And from the Union brass?

Tom Dooher, president of Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union, acknowledges that unions are sometimes skeptical of charters, which in Minnesota have a mixed track record.

“We’re skeptical of poorly run schools, whether they’re charters or not,” Dooher said. “But the idea of having teachers in charge of the schools and running the policy is something that we think should be happening anyway. If [the Minneapolis union] believes they have the capacity to authorize and run one, more power to them. I think it will be good for kids in Minneapolis.”

“Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia, Winston”.

I’ll be following this…

One of the basic rules one must always follow when dealing with government is this: anything government does, for whatever reason, will have unintended consequences.  These consequences will pretty much always be as bad as or worse than whatever problem the original action was supposed to rectify.

When Minnesota legalized “charter schools” – publicly-funded schools run by site-elected boards rather than the city/district board, under a “charter” from the district – they barred charter schools from using district money directly to buy school buildings.  The stated reason was to keep charters out of the real estate business. 

The consequence was that charter schools had to rent space.  And in a busy real estate market (like the Twin Cities were) or in a small town (especially like the many Indian reservation charter schools), it can be hard to find a space that’s suitable, or even up to code, to use as a school space for 50-300 or more kids. The state provides, as part of each charter student’s funding allotment, a certain amount ($1,200/year) of “lease assistance” – which is in fact part of the roughly $10-11,000 per student that charters receive in the Metro.

Regular “district” public schools get a huge advantage in this area; they can use public bonding and tax levies to build their buildings.   While both involve the inconvenience of having to convince voters and/or governmental bodies to float the bonds, once that’s done the schools have it fairly easy; having a big school district or city behind your bonds makes bonding a relatively inexpensive proposition – or at least gives the district plenty of size and time to hide and amortize the costs.

But charter schools aren’t allowed to use public funds to buy buildings.  Being relatively tiny entities, they aren’t usually big enough to float any kind of meaningful bond issue themselves.  But there’s a loophole; a charter school can found or affiliate with a separate construction company, which can float bonds and build a building for the school.  Many schools are doing exactly this, including at least one Saint Paul charter.

But since the schools and their affiliated companies are small, their bonds aren’t backed with the kind of infrastructure and collateral that support bonds for cities, counties and school districts.  A

The DFL establishment in Minnesota – and few things in Minnesota are more “establishment” than the Minnesota Federation of Teachers – hate charter schools.  Via their proxies in various “think tanks” like MN2020, they’ve been trying to cap and, eventually, kill charter schools for quite some time.  Last summer, I joined with a number of charter school advocates to flense a MN2020 “report” that grossly distorted a series of Department of Education findings about Charter school accounting practicices – but the endless drip-drip-drip continues.

 Via Speed Gibson, the Strib’ s Tony Kennedy wrote a piece earlier this week exposing issues with the practice of issuing “Junk Bonds”.  It covers the facts, more or less, while missing a much larger subtext.

And while I started out doing a garden-variety fisking, this is actually a much bigger story than that – and needs more than one impossibly-long blog post to cover. 

So I’m going to address the article – and, no doubt, the political motives behind the article – in one of my patented several-part series, starting Monday.

It should go without saying that Hurricane Katrina caused nearly unprecedented problems in New Orleans.

Of course, problems can lead, if one is lucky, to opportunities.  One problem/opportunity to befall New Orleans was the  complete destruction of the New Orleans public school system.  Although given the system’s performance before the hurricane, “destruction” was a pretty relative term:

According a New York Times report, New Orleans public schools were “among the most abysmal in the nation before the storm”. In the 2004 Louisiana General Exit Exams (GEE) for high school students, 96 per cent of New Orleans public school students scored below “basic” in English and 94 per cent scored below “basic” in maths. The public school district was corrupt and debt-ridden.

The NOLA Schools, presented with an unprecedented “clean slate”, literally had to start over.  One of the key initiatives was to allow, indeed promote, the formation of charter schools.  These schools are public schools,  funded with each attending student’s share of public money allotted to them, which are “chartered” by the local school board or the state department of education or some other governing body depending on the state’s charter school law 

 Five years later, PBS reports on the experiment; this is a transcription of a “NewsHour” piece by PBS’ John Merrow.

In March, President Obama sent Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to New Orleans, which some consider the national laboratory of the charter movement. Leading the city’s charter transformation is Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.

PAUL VALLAS, Superintendent, Recovery School District: Well, I’m a believer in schools having the freedom and autonomy to make decisions that are in the best interest of the children. And so I support charter schools, because charter schools are a vehicle for achieving that type of freedom.
 
As principal of a charter school, you are responsible for everything. I make sure instruction is in place, and its effective, and its aligned with the state standards. I make sure that the budget is balanced and that we have money for payroll.

The report touches on one of the big advantages of charter schools; notwithstanding the slanders of some of their critics; the accountability loop between student, parent, teacher, principal and board is usually within one building, and decisions happen almost immediately, as opposed to the months (and sometimes years between School Board elections) at the sclerotic public districts.  Parents are not only a simple phone call from their locally-elected board members – they are much more likely to be on the board than at any big public district, especially at a big, politicized urban district.
 
The change has been immense:

 SHARON CLARK, Principal, Sophie B. Wright Middle School: As principal of a charter school, you are responsible for everything. I make sure instruction is in place, and its effective, and its aligned with the state standards. I make sure that the budget is balanced and that we have money for payroll. I make sure that we continue to register kids and that our attendance works.

JOHN MERROW: Principal Clark has used her power to make some significant changes.

Where are the boys?

One of her first decisions was to separate the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades into single-sex classes.

MALE STUDENT: At this age, boys get distracted. So by us being all boys, we’re more focused on our work.

FEMALE STUDENT: When you have boys in your class, you got to be, like, trying to impress them, but if you just in school with some girls, you’re just not worrying about it.

Try to pull that off in a public school without having to tangle with a big, Union-owned, “elected” city-wide board, a dozen special interest groups (who only tangentially have the kids’ interests at heart, if at all); you’ll be wrangling with lawyers until your kids’ grandkids are in school.

But it was the right thing to do.  It got done.  And the kids are better off for it.

FEMALE STUDENT: At the beginning of the year, I was going to Marshall. And it was like the principal couldn’t control his students. There was fighting. So I told my mama I didn’t want to go there.

When I came here, I felt like it was much better. The teachers were showing you a lot of attention, make sure you understand your work.

This parallels my experience almost perfectly.

Remember the debate on “merit pay” for good teachers, to encourage great staff to do great work, and which the Teachers Unions have bottled up and delayed, in every case, since I was in high school?

Done deal!

JOHN MERROW: Principal Clark rewards her best teachers with bonuses of up to $5,000. Darlene Rivers teaches math.

DARLENE RIVERS: With my first year with the test, my fifth-grade students scored the highest in the district. Your test scores have to be in the 90th percentile, and you get a monetary award, and I have received that. Yes, I have, I received that, and it really came in handy.

JOHN MERROW: Principal Clark does all the hiring. And if it doesn’t work out?

SHARON CLARK: If they don’t have the mission that we have in mind as part of their mission, we are free to what I call freeing up a teacher’s future.

JOHN MERROW: She means she fires teachers who don’t measure up. Clark’s authority seems to be making a difference.

SHARON CLARK: Our school is performing in the top 10 of the city. We are actually performing higher than some of the magnet schools that have selective admissions, and we don’t.

JOHN MERROW: In fact, 9 of the 10 top performing schools in the district are charters.

Amazing what a little actual empowerment, local control, and reward for effort as opposed to mere seniority can do.

There are, of course, downsides; charter schools are excellent places for the vast majority of students.  But they are frequently very small, working with very low budgets; they don’t have access to local education levies, and they can’t float bonds for facilities (at least in Minnesota), so rent comes out of most schools’ allotments.

And that means some of the services that some parents counted on in the big, public districts are harder to come by:

 JOHN MERROW: National studies support Branche. Although there are many outstanding charter schools, reports show that overall charter success is mixed. [Although you need to make sure you’re comparing apples and apples]

Branche has further reason to be wary: She says some charter schools are being unfair to disadvantaged children.

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: Parents are seeking places for their children who may have physical handicaps, mental or emotional handicapping conditions, and they’re not being accepted by charters. I get referrals from specific principals of charter schools. “Go to Banneker. Tell Miss Branche I sent you. Go to Banneker.”

JOHN MERROW: It’s what school administrators call “dumping,” transferring those with special education needs or just kids who are behaving badly to other schools.

You’re getting kids who are being pushed out of charters…

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: Correct.

JOHN MERROW: … more special-ed kids than you…

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: Correct. Yes, exactly right.

JOHN MERROW: So the charter movement is hurting you.

CHERYLLYN BRANCHE: It is hurting children.

Well, no.  A bureaucratic practice is hurting some children, children who are by definition both outliers and who are also, currently, incredibly-badly-served by traditional big public schools.  Something does need to be done to try to reach these students…

…but they are, again, by definition, exceptions to the rule.

The whole thing is worth a read, provided you remember it’s written with the skin-deep attention to fact that you get with TV reporting, even from PBS.

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.

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.

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)