I sat in on “Radio Free Nation”, Marty Owings’ Blogtalkradio show last Saturday night.

Marty had booked Minnesota Fifth District representative Keith Ellison.  Ellison appeared for about 45 minutes.  For the first 25 minutes, the Representative talked about his economic platform:

• “Reform” of regulations for financial services companies
• “Strengthening Union Rights”, as he referred to it, via the Empoyee Free Choice Act
• Changing Capitalization requirements for bank assets.

So if you leave out the odd reference to Sean Hannity being a “bigot”, and conservatives “winking” at Von Brunn (the Holocaust memorial murderer), and his line that the US needs to stop “toeing the line for Israel” if we want peace in the Middle East?  Fairly uneventful.

Sorta.

I got my chance to ask questions about 36 minutes into the netcast.

I asked my first question: since, in his response to a previous panelist about the solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem, Representative Ellison said that it was (closely paraphrasing) up to the people to push a solution (and the people wanted the solution!), I asked, given that the charter of the Hamas government that the people of Gaza elected to power in a landslide calls in as many words for the destruction of Israel as a nation and people, how we could expect “the people” of Gaza to really want “peace”?

Well, I tried to ask.

His immediate response?  “How many Palestinians do you know?”, followed by a fairly peevish little tirade.
I’m not sure if he wanted me to respond “some of my best friends are Palestinians”, or if he was just acting like a lawyer and trying to buffalo my question or what.  You can listen, if you’d like, to try to pick apart the tirade that follows.  I don’t want to say Ellison is “typical” of Minneapolis DFLers in being unable to hold a civil conversation with a dissenter (after all, I had a great time interviewing RT Rybak).

But I don’t think Ellison appreciates us peasants questioning our betters one little bit.

But we’ll find out – maybe.  If you recall, about a year ago – responding to Andy Birkey’s observation that Michele Bachmann only appeared on conservative media (which the last year has pretty well belied in any case), I sent invites to a slew of regional DFLers – Senator Klobuchar, Candidate Franken, Representative McCollum, Mayor Rybak…

…and Keith Ellison.

Only Rybak responded (as noted above).  Ellison’s press people didn’t even give us the courtesy of a “screw you, peasant”.

So I took the liberty of asking again.

We’ll see how that turns out.

Years ago I visited Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan on a business trip, just after their purchase by Daimler Benz. I noticed a Mercedes Benz C-Class sedan in the expansive reception area and asked my executive host “What do your employees think of a Mercedes in your headquarters?”

“It’s not so bad.” He replied. “…we’re probably handling it better than the German’s who now have a minivan in theirs.”

Alas, the Germans were not able to make a go of Chrysler and sold them for a loss to Cerberus some time ago.

Now the Italians, not known for their domination of the business world, let along the automotive industry, are quickly taking charge and striking fear into executives at Fiat’s new American arm, Chrysler.

When Chrysler’s crisis-weary staff gathered in their Michigan headquarters this week to hear an address from their new leader, Fiat’s chain-smoking Sergio Marchionne, the atmosphere was far from ebullient.

“Numb” was the word one Chrysler manager used to describe the mood.

The American automotive industry’s woe’s can not be tied to a sole cause. A combination of management’s short-sightedness, government over-regulation and a union bent on an unsustainable model of “work less, make more” all conspired to gut an industry, once a source of national pride.

“The Cadillac of…(fill in the blank)” is now a sad anachronism in a era of Cimarron’s and rebadged Tahoes and Suburbans – not that Fiats are known for their excellence in craftsmanship, design or durability.

But apparently, unlike many American’s in the sector, the Italian’s know how to work.

Chrysler’s employees have some reason to be wary. At Fiat, where Mr Marchionne is both respected and feared, he has shunted aside underperforming managers and expects underlings to join him working nights and weekends.

Discounting the blow to national and corporate pride among the ranks of Chrysler workers, this isn’t so bad in light of the alternative. Had the deal with Fiat not closed this month, Chrysler would have almost surely been liquidated. An 80-hour work week seems a fair alternative to a zero-hour one.

…and an apt prescription, in contrast to our President’s socialistic policies, for the relief of the Great Recession.

How ironic is it that we find ourselves schooled on capitalism by the Italians?

Pass me the Chianti Classico.

Tony Sutton won the State GOP Chair slot in one ballot, bright and early this morning.

Michael Brodkorb took a couple of ballots to get the Deputy Chair slot.

David Sturrock rounded out the executive slots, winning the Secretary Treasurer job that Sutton will be vacating.

Good job, guys.

Now, let’s win some elections.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM. 

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I are up next, from 1-3.  We’ll likely be talking about Obama’s Bermuda flub, healthcare, the state GOP Chair and Deputy Chair races, the latest developments in the Gang Task Force story, and much, much more.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King is on next, dishing his own personal brand of conservative hurt from 3-5.  Check it out.
• And don’t forget, our long-time colleagues David Strom and Margaret Martin lead things off on the David Strom Show from 9-11AM!

(All times Central)
So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream)
• Podcast at Townhall (usually uploaded by Monday morning).
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!

Join us!

(Title via Rick and Robin)

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.

In my post last week about the MNGOP leadership battle, I noted three things:

1. I don’t do endorsements. I mean, if I did, who’d care?  I’m small potatoes. It’d be the height of misplaced ego to think my “endorsement” would matter to anyone.  And not only am I not a Central Committee voter, but I think I only know one or two Central Committee voters personally.
2. I think Tony Sutton will do a good job as party chair – which is a good thing, because due to the nature of the State Chair race, he’s got a huge electoral leg up.
3. Nonetheless, I’m givign a loud “attaboy” to Dave Thompson, if only to send a (tiny) message to the party; the status quo is not working.

Ironically, I’ve gotten more flak about the Deputy chair race; I’m told that I (among a few others) was removed from the running to MC a candidate debate because of my alleged allegiance to one candidate or another in the Deputy Chair debate.  To be perfectly honest, I barely knew what a Deputy Chair was before this go-around, and wasn’t entirely sure why it mattered until fairly recently.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have a dog in the fight.  Michael Brodkorb’s a friend and former Northern Alliance colleague.  I have a generalized sense he’ll do a good job, if only because he’s a butt-kicking “make-things-happen” one man political wrecking crew, and if for some reason the MNGOP administration were called upon to, say, build a bridge across the Minnesota River, Mike’d have the cars rolling early and under budget.

But I have no grounds to “endorse” anyone in the Deputy Chair race since, duh, I haven’t really formed a coherent opninion.

But Pat Shortridge has:

I didn’t intend to become involved in the MN GOP leadership races. I helped Brandon Sawalich frame his ideas about reforming and modernizing the state party when he was considering a run for Chairman. But, until now, that has been the extent of my involvement.

But, having read and heard many of the, what I consider to be, unfair criticisms of Michael Brodkorb, I decided to share some of my thoughts. The conservative blogosphere has been particular disappointing in its treatment of the Deputy Chair race. I find the analysis, from people I generally respect, lacking.

But to use my own criteria, I’m going to talk about what I’m for than what I’m against.

He makes the case for Brodkorb.

The Central Committee votes tomorrow.  I’m hoping we can get the results as close to real-time as possible on the NARN.

One little factoid about the New Deal – buried in seventy years of media and education-establishment myths on the subject – was that it likely prolonged the Great Depression.

Getting a straight number out of economists is like getting a convincing “go ahead, punk, make my day” out of Clay Aiken – the best way to get thirty opinions about an economic issue is to put ten of them in a room together – but I’ve seen convincing cases that had the government kept their mitts completely off the economy, the Big One would have ended by sometime in the late thirties.  As it was, the New Deal and all the other government interventions pushed the Great Depression well into World War II, when the “Draft the Unemployed” program finally got everyone working and all the remaining factories humming.

As Bogus Doug notes, history repeats:

Of course reactionary cynics may note that it seems odd for the Obama administration to follow their prior attempt in “creating or saving” jobs by more of the same, when the economy actually shed 17% more jobs than said administration forecast would be lost if they did absolutely nothing to try to save them. This graph from Geoff at Innocent Bystanders illustrates this insolent observation of actual measurable employment numbers, rooted in the failed politics of the past which our Great Leader has promised to transcend:But happy members of Obama-nation know this ignores the important foundational work going on in delivering us into a new era of Hopeyness. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as the saying goes, and you can’t “create or save” a few hundred thousand jobs without “collateral damage” to a few hundred thousand other jobs. That should just go without saying. I mean really people, does he have to spell everything out for you?

Read the whole cynical thing.

Ryan Flynn at MDE on the latest developments:

I have been informed that Brian Sullivan and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann have officially ruled out Gubernatorial campaigns.

No news on Bachmann; her star is rising in Washington, she’d be a tough sell for Governor right at the moment.

Sullivan,though, is a disappointment.  Although I can see his point; if his main reason to run were to spend a lot of money to drive an eventual nominee to the right, noble and needed as that is, I can see Sullivan having better things to do for the next year.

So who is everyone else looking at for the GOP nod so far?

Who’s less excited about the new Sacha Baron Cohen film than I am?

Austria:

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen currently still has a massive fan base in Austria, but that is soon to change as the media dubs his latest film “dull”, “insulting” and a threat to the country’s world image – and economy.

To be fair, most Americans haven’t been aware of anything from Austria since Yahoo Serious.

Obama has apparently lost the Roseanne Barr vote.

Libtalker Stephanie “Like Laura Ingraham, But Lefty And Not Very Good” Miller asked Barr what she thought of the latest Obama speech:

BARR: I don’t at all. I just don’t at all. If you want to know what I think, go to read my blog, rosanneworld.com. And I don’t at all. Basically his speech, his you know joke of a speech.MILLER: Why?

BARR: Huh? Because it’s just Bush Doc… continuing, Bush Doctine with absolutely no change at all. It’s very frightening.

MILLER: How do you figure? I thought the tone was completely different.

BARR: He said nothing.

MILLER: He said nothing?

BARR: He said absolutely nothing. No, he didn’t.

MILLER: What were you hoping for?

BARR: I was hoping for you know some change.

He’s not radical enough!

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.

I got to throw out the first pitch at a Saints game last night.

OK – I got to throw out one of five or six first pitches; the Saints brought a guy who does a club-hopping show on the local CW affiliate, three Coon Rapids city councilpeople (the city was celebrating its fiftieth birthday last night) and me to the mound.  For a guy who hasn’t thrown a ball in anger in probably eight years, I did OK; it would have been high and outside for a lefty, and a near-beaner for a right-handed batter, but I didn’t have to bowl the ball across the plate, and the catcher didn’t have to bolt for it like he was going for a foul, so I was pretty happy.

And as it turned out, one of the councilmen and I might have had a better outing than the Saints’ starter Adam Cox did.

We were followed by the usual Saints game events, and a woman singing the national anthem – one “Andrea”, a bartender from Somerset – who did a version that’d have sounded good, I kid you not, in a strip club.  And I don’t mean that entirely as a bad thing.  You had to be there.

I always love going to Saints games.  Pretty much everyone there does.  I saw a few people from the neighborhood, some Patriot fans (AM1280 is one of the Saints’ sponsors this season, again), and the usual Saints game crowd (although I didn’t see Bill Murray).

I’ll hope to make it again sometime this season.

Reports are still congealing, but 2-3 have been injured in a shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

Israel responds:

The Consulate General of Israel in New York City called the reported shooting “disturbing” and said it seemed “someone didn’t internalize the message.”

One could say that.

Hey, good thing Washington DC all but bans civilian gun ownership, and is dragging their feet on Heller; goodness knows how bad it could have been.

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 )

John Falls, in Outside Online, writes one of the better reports I’ve seen on how counterinsurgency war is won in the Third World, in his dispatch from Jolo Island, in the Philippines, as he accompanies a group of US Special Forces and, mostly, Filipino Marines in an extended battle with Abu Sayaf.
It rarely looks like a Chuck Norris movie:

As I learned on Jolo, the campaign was noble in principle and often hilarious in practice. Traveling with a minimum force of 20 Filipino marines and several Green Berets, we would speed back and forth on Jolo’s paved road like a platoon of armed elves, delivering chairs to cheering schoolkids and visiting adult learning centers. One particularly sweat-drenched day, we headed out to an isolated hamlet called Sitio Lavnay for the turnover of a new well, one that would bring clean drinking water to 125 desperately poor families. The heavily guarded ceremony featured local VIPs in little plastic chairs, several roaming chickens, and 100 villagers gathered in the stifling heat. It opened with an acoustic version of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing,” blasted into the jungle on a boom box, and only got worse.

After the Muzak overture, the speeches started. A lean, clean-shaven Green Beret admonished the villagers to “take ownership of the resource,” while the marine-battalion commander thanked the dignitaries for their hard work. Unfortunately the speeches were delivered in English and translated into Tagalog, a language the assembled Tausug couldn’t really understand. During the ribbon cutting, a mongrel dog drew the event to a close by taking a leak on the podium.

But for all the ham-fisted production value, the villagers still lined up patiently to thank the soldiers. The most important event that day went little noticed. After the ceremony, the chief, a handsome man in black jeans, slipped a Filipino officer a single sheet of paper with a carefully typed list of needs. It was exactly the kind of act Sabban’s counterinsurgency doctrine was designed to elicit.

Yes, as a matter of fact I do suggest you read the whole thing.

The story of the six technically-human organisms that stomped and kicked a dad half to death for objecting to their groping his daughter at Valleyfair last year is finally going out.

With a whimper, not a bang, as the last of the defendants takes the deal:

Derry Evans, 20, of Minneapolis; Terry L. Arnold, 23, of Brooklyn Park; Andrew D. Shannon, 20, of Minneapolis, and Anthony C. Gildersleeve, 21, of Edina each pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, a felony, in Scott County District Court. Arnold entered his plea May 28, Shannon pleaded June 1, and Evans and Gildersleeve pleaded June 4. All four will be sentenced Aug. 4.

Darris D. Evans, 21, of Brooklyn Park and DeVondre Q. Evans-Lewis, 19, of Columbia Heights pleaded guilty to felony third-degree assault on April 13. They will be sentenced June 22.

So for teaming up to stomp the living crap out of a guy who was defending his daughter, these six pieces of under-the-stove-greasy-buildup will get not more than five years, and not more than a $10,000 under the Minnesota sentencing guidelines.

I’m gonna guess that the victim is going to be paying for this crime a lot longer than the defendants.

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)

The most obnoxious, channel-knob spinning commercials on TV today are the ones where the D-list comic (name eludes me) dressed as a beer delivery guy goes to a bunch ostensibly hoity-toity locations – trackside at a horse race, an “exclusive” club – and makes a big show out of removing the “honest” beer (Miller, aka “your cat has diabetes”) for all the regular people to drink.

Which means times must be tough.  It’s the closest our society gets to Woody Guthrie anymore.
One of the ugliest sides of “progressivism”, especially in tough economic times, is the cynical faux-populism that wafts out from the bathrooms and basements of the “progressive” movement.

Dave Mindeman at mnpACTed mines that same ugly vein – and does it pretty badly in this piece from yesterday:

Tim Pawlenty says he has no set plans for the future, but it is becoming pretty clear what he wants. He wants to be President.

This gives the DFLers vapors; as if a young, talented, ambitious politician is supposed to just say “maybe I’ll go into call center management” after spending years at the brink and years more working his way toward that point.  (Unless he’s Walter Mondale, of course).

The last 4 years of his tenure as Governor has been a cold hearted calculation about positioning himself for the big show. And, he has been mildly successful at it…. at least in perception.

I wonder if even Mindeman knows what that sentence means?

Pawlenty’s full phrasing on his sloganeering is…”We need to be the party of Sam’s Club, not just the Country Club.”Pawlenty assumes the Country Club crowd will stay. And why not? The Sam’s Club Governor continues to promote polcies that benefit them with little help for the rest of us.

This is actually brilliant messaging – or, if you prefer Mindeman’s treatment, “calculation” – on Pawlenty’s part.  Ronald Reagan, after getting many of the same criticisms Pawlenty’s gotten for not a few similar stances during his stint as Governor of California, built his entire national message on the idea that government is supposed to get out of peoples’ way; that, left to their own devices, the American people will build the prosperity they want and that their merits can earn.

Mindeman:

The real Pawlenty message is ..’Come on you Sam’s Club people. Join us. Aspire to make it to the Country Club. See what we can do for you if you do?’

I guess this is the reason people like Mindeman are liberals and DFLers.  The “real” Pawlenty message (actually conservative message) is “Come on; join us.  Aspire to make it wherever you want to make it – country club, your own business, a home in the ‘burbs or a condo downtown, putting your kids in college, getting out of poverty, building a new life in this new land, ; we will get out of your way.”

Nothing was made more clear in that regard, than the 2008 Legislative Session. Pawlenty’s policies have certainly affected those Sam’s Club people. He put them out of work [Really?  Pawlenty caused the mortgage bubble to burst?  Pawlenty started the recession?  I doubt even Pawlenty would want to be that powerful… Ed.], took away their health care [Again – really?  How many actual families without means of support got cut off?  Ed.], forced them to pay more for care for relatives [Er, no – he passed on more of the cost of state-funded care to those who could – and, rightfully, should – pay more of it – Ed.], raised the taxes on their homes [Good lord, Mindeman – now you’re saying Pawlenty is on every single county commission in Minnesota?  The counties are in charge of property taxes!  If they are spending money on something, why should the county’s residents be less obligated to pay for it (or more unwilling to do without it) than people in Thief River Falls?  – an ever-more-tired Ed.], and then, on top of all that, tried to force their kids to pay for it all.

Now, if they perservere and can overcome all of the obstacles that Pawlenty has burdened them with so he could protect his Country Club crowd…if their perserverance pays off and they manage to get that membership upgraded to Country Club status,….then they will find a Republican Party that can keep them happy and secure in their new lifestyle.

Conservatives?  You all wanna answer that one?

None of us depend on the party to make us happy or give us a lifestyle.

Of course, while the Sam’s Club crowd is working their way against the grain, they need to vote for those GOP candidates that are protecting their “future” way of life. They may not make it and probably won’t.

“It probably won’t work?” 

Dave Mindeman?  The American people called, and left a message; “Thanks for the vote of confidence.  Kindly speak for yourself”. 

And what would a son of a meat-packer who became a lawyer, and then governor, know about that?

Yeah, yeah, I know – funny show, groundbreaking comedy, yadda yadda.

Look, don’t get me wrong; I like The Simpsons.  I liked Life In Hell, the  comic that brought creator Matt Groening to scuzzy, underground prominence in the eighties.  I liked The Tracy Ullman Show, on which The Simpsons started as a series of interstitial shorts.  I even enjoy watching the show, usually (except for the last five or ten years, when the show hasn’t been nearly as good as the first ten or fifteen years, or whatever).

No, it’s not The Simpsons I dislike, per se.

But The Simpsons are a lot like Star Trek; it’s not  the show itself that bugs me.  It’s the fans.

Over-the-top Simpsons buffs – the people who sneak show references into the most mundane bits and pieces of everyday life, who sit around cafeterias and trade show trivia for day after day, who answer serious questions with vaguely-appropriate Homer quotes – remind me of Star Trek fans, the kind that’ve adopted “Gene Roddenberry” as their worldview and live the creed in their daily lives.

They’re just like the Comic Store Guy…

…oh, crap.  Now I’ve done it.

Conventional wisdom is that Rocky is the only part of the franchise worth watching (or was, until Rocky Balboa, the sixth part of the series, came out).

But I beg to differ, from the CW and from most critics; I loved Rocky III.

The film featured Sylvester Stallone and “Mister T” – both of them at the brink of the “caricature” phases of their careers (from with Stallone only emerged in the mid-nineties, and T has not), but not quite there yet.

I saw this film about the same time I was drifting toward conservatism.  And that may have been one of the reasons I loved it; Rocky, the old-school plugger and ex-kneebuster from Philly (along with former foe and now-teammate Apollo Creed) were the old school; T’s Clubber Lang represented all that was gauche and vile about modernity.

And yet, for a film that basically was a cartoon, I loved the Clubber Lang character; T played it with visceral, uncompromising anger that went – I thought, and still think – way past the material.

Look, Mister T will probably never do Shakespeare in the Park – but after watching Clubber Lang, I was always disappointed he wound up on “The A Team” and chattering “I Pity Da Fool” for the rest of his career.

Rocky was, of course, a classic – one of my favorite movies ever.  Rocky II was, of course, utterly predictable; there was never a moment of suspense; you knew Apollo Creed was going down (and even though I’ve seen Rocky at least a dozen times, it’s still got suspense).

And even though I was a Republican by that time, Rocky IV was too obvious a “morning in America” Cold War movie even for me, the newly-minted Reagan voter; I knew the entire plot as I walked into the theater; First Blood was a much better movie.  I have yet to see V, and Balboa was another whole thing altogether (a great movie, but just…different).

But Rocky III?  I felt that one.

It’s a wrecking crew.

…I mean it.

Oh, yes I do (emphasis added):

Snow has fallen in Dickinson in June, the first time in nearly 60 years the city has seen snow past May.National Weather Service meteorologist Janine Vining in Bismarck says there were unofficial reports of a couple of inches of snow in Dickinson on Saturday.

Snow was actually reported from Bismarck on west.

Go head, Sisyphus.  Have Saint Cloud top that.

Posited in advance:  to paraphrase Scott Glenn’s “Bart Mancuso” Fred Thompson’s “Admiral Painter” from Hunt for Red October, bureaucracies don’t take a dump without someone writing down a policy beforehand.  Bureaucrats that try to tend to get in trouble.

Background: Early (earlier?) in the Obama Administration the Department of Homeland Security drew immense – and utterly justified – scrutiny for compiling a list of “extremists” and “potential terrorists” that, oddly, included just about everyone in the US that wasn’t a likely Obama constituent?

And remember how the left assures us that Obama, pinkie swear, doesn’t support gun control?

A number of MOB blogs got this email, from a longtime friend of the MOB.  Derek at Freedom Dogs wrote it up first:

I wanted to switch gears and mention a note I got from a friend last night about vets and concealed carry, or simply carry permits as they are known here in Minnesota. This was on my mind because just yesterday, I went down to the Hennipen County Sherrif’s office to apply for a permit along with a friend of mine who took the carry permit course with me. Simple process really and we should recieve them in about 30 days.Here is the note I got from a friend who I trust. If you are a vet, you are under the lens of scrutiny but don’t be “stressed” about it:

I had a doctors appointment at the local VA clinic yesterday and found something very interesting.

I would like to pass along.. While going through triage before seeing the doctor, I was asked at the end of the exam, three questions.

(1. Did I feel stressed?)

(2. Did I feel threatened?)

(3. Did I feel like doing harm to someone?)

The nurse then informed me, if I had answered yes to any of the questions, I could have lost my concealed carry permit as it would have gone into my medical records and the VA would have reported it to Homeland Security.

I am a Viet Nam vet and 15 year cc permit holder. Looks like they are going after us vets.”

Be forewarned and be aware. If you know veterans, you may want to pass this on to them.

So pass it around.

Remember – in Minnesota (and most Shall-Issue states), the sheriff has to find an affirmative reason, defensible (in Minnesota) in court, to reject your permit application or renewal.  And the key reasons come from government databases.  And if the government is actively trying to set peoples’ “caution” flags to give more governments more reasons to justify denying more permits…

I’ll be calling the VA to try to get to the bottom of this.

And if you’re a veteran who’s answered this question, I’d love to know if the potential consequences are being consistently explained to people.  I’ll be checking with the VA on that, too.

I was shocked to read over at Casual Sundays about the turmoil in MLP’s life:

I have strayed.

I have been unfaithful.

I have lusted after that which was not mine.

I have coveted.

I wasn’t looking for trouble.  I wasn’t unsatisfied with my choices. I was happy!  I never thought I’d be the type…I didn’t know!

I didn’t know.

Forgive me.

Read the whole sordid, cathartic story over at CSwMC.

…that I, a young liberal who believed in the left in my adolescent way (but was starting to sour on Jimmy Carter) was mortified that Margaret Thatcher had become the Prime Minister in the UK.

And then came Reagan.

Now, I don’t believe history repeats.  But after a couple of years when Europe has moved to the right with elections in Germany, France and Italy showing a center-right swing (by Euro standards, naturally), and a likely big conservative pickup in the next elections in the UK, it’s good to see the trend picking up speed across the continent:

Conservatives raced toward victory in some of Europe’s largest economies Sunday as initial results and exit polls showed voters punishing left-leaning parties in European parliament elections in France, Germany and elsewhere.Some right-leaning parties said the results vindicated their reluctance to spend more on company bailouts and fiscal stimulus amid the global economic crisis.

First projections by the European Union showed center-right parties would have the most seats — between 263 and 273 — in the 736-member parliament. Center-left parties were expected to get between 155 to 165 seats.

Of course, there are no real parallels with the seventies just yet; America was ready to come out of the miasma of post-Vietnam trauma, Watergate and stagflation when Reagan came on the scene; I don’t know that America’s really woken up to the hangover from it’s last electoral tantrum yet.

But give it time.

I checked out Bing – Microsoft’s latest attempt at a Google-killer.

And while I didn’t really give it a solid workout, I noted that it has one “feature” in common with Google.  To wit; I do a quick vanity-search on my self.  And of course, Shot In The Dark comes up at the top (which has got to piss off Mitch Berg the Santa Fe glass artist and Mitch Berg the Canadian hockey player).

But below that?  Even though I’ve been linked a couple dozen times by Instapundit, to say nothing of dozens and dozens of times by Hot Air, Powerline, Lileks and other genuine heavyweights, my first page is clogged with links from leftyblog amoebae like Dump Bachmann, Minnesota Tragedy of Spyrochaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project and Scottsdale Woman.

Which isn’t something that keeps me up at night – I mean, duh, it’s a vanity-Google…er, vanity-Bing?.  But if you google Mozart and get three pages of people crabbling “Salieri was teh shizzle you loosers!”, really, what good is it?