How can you tell when MN2020’s John Fizgerald is talking gibberish about charter schools?

His fingers are moving over a keyboard.

His latest piece, “What Do The Metro Gang Strike Force And Charter Schools Have In Common”, continues the pattern of casual, ofay group slander he started earlier this summer with his series on supposed financial mismanagement at charter schools. As I had a phalanx of other charter school advocates showed, Fitzgerald wrenched facts and context beyond recognition, inflated piddling accounting errors (that had largely been corrected) into capital charges, and turned specific incidents of malfeasance into a general attacks on the institution of charter schools.

Now that we have an incident that appears as if it could include genuine corruption?

Well, do you think Fitzgerald is going to let a pattern like that go away easy?

The connection between the strike force and charter schools is simple: They both have very tenuous allegiance to an elected body.

As we’ll note below, this is absurd. A charter schools is inseparable from, and utterly accountable to, its elected board.

This tenuous connection can lead to inappropriate and ill-advised actions among officials.

The connection is simple; also utterly specious.

Let’s continue.

The 34-member Metro Gang Strike Force has been implicated in misconduct and is being investigated by the FBI after a scathing report by the Office of the Legislative Auditor in May. Allegedly, Strike Force employees conducted improper seizures of property then took home seized property for personal use. Oversight for the Strike Force is conducted by the Minnesota Gang and Drug Oversight Council, which has broad responsibilities for drug task forces and gang strike forces throughout the state, and the Metro Gang Strike Force Advisory Board which selects and supervises the strike force’s commander, reviews the strike force’s operations and approves its expenditures.The OLA report stated that “Neither the Minnesota Gang and Drug Oversight Council or the Metro Gang Strike Force Advisory Board oversaw the financial practices of the Metro Gang Strike Force, allowing the strike force’s commander to determine how the strike force would operate. Those practices put at risk the strike force’s ability to safeguard and account for seized assets and maintain the integrity of criminal evidence.”

Neither group’s membership is elected. Members are appointed by their various city counsels and county commissions. Therefore, the strike force’s chain of command is muddied and responsibility for Strike Force actions does not go directly to elected officials.

And when you’re talking about a body that has the search and seizure power, and the power to investigate people, and in extreme situations has special dispensation to use lethal force with vastly different consequences than for civilians, that’s a real problem.

With a school?

That same lack of oversight exists among Minnesota’s nearly 150 charter schools.

That, of course, is baked wind.

The Gang Strike Force’s overseers checked out of the process. They abrogated their duty.

But for the odd cast of malfeasance, Charter Schools’ accountability is present, active and effective. A charter school’s accountability loop is pretty much in the same building as the school itself.

It just isn’t tied as closely to the state, its bureaucracy and the Teacher’s Union. Which is, of course, the part that bothers MN2020.

By state law, charter school oversight is provided by three entities: the school’s sponsor, the school’s board of directors and the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)…A charter school’s board of directors is comprised of teachers and parents elected among the school’s teachers and parents.

This, by the way, is a good thing, driving control and responsibility down to the individual school level. Like any responsibility, people may or may not live up to it – but the charter school board system means any mismanagement or irregularities are much more difficult to hide than they are in a system like, say, Saint Paul,
That board hires the executive director who, unlike public school superintendents, is not required to meet the stringent state laws for administrative licensure.

“Stringent laws” which not only have nothing to do with education, but – if you’ve paid attention – don’t necessarily ensure competent administration either.

The executive director serves at the board’s pleasure.

The Department of Education is charged with holding charter schools responsible to state law and provides help when the schools run afoul of any laws.

To sum up, charter schools – which receive roughly $10,500 of state taxpayer money per student (roughly $1,000 more than traditional public school students)

But not, as Fitzgerald continues to disingenuously omit, any local or district bonding or special levy money, which drives the public school expenditures per student well over the charter schools’ level.

– undergoes oversight by sponsors that are not required to be active overseers, boards that are elected by members only, and a bureaucracy with only a tenuous tie to one elected official, the governor.

Against that, Fitzgerald prefers the “accountability” and “access” of the district school board – which in Minnesota’s biggest, most expensive and most troubled districts is elected in the same sense that the Iranian presidency is an elected job; in one-party cities like Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the School Boards are DFL sinecures, their members accountable in reality only to the teachers union (of which most of them were members) and the Party; they are “led” by superintendents that they hire to serve in their own image (and who live by public sector standards a rock-star life, with money and perks that’d be the envy of many mid-level CEOs), who change jobs so frequently that accountability is an even bigger joke than it is among the boards themselves.

Indeed, look at the major school districts – Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth. The memberships on the boards, and the specific butt sitting in the Superintendent’s chair, may change -but the overarching principles behind the Boards and Administrations in one-party cities never change. The only real change is the perpetual free-fall of graduation rates and achievement – and the spiking numbers of people like me who’ve pulled our kids out of the festering nightmare and put them in the charter schools that Fitzgerald wants to kill off by any means necessary.

This next paragraph nicely encapsulates the creaking illogic not only behind this piece, but behind MN2020’s entire logically vacuous attack on charter schools. You will be excused if you need to read it twice; I sure did:

That’s why the chain of command is so terribly important. That’s why officers and deputies need to answer to elected county commissioners and city council members through their sheriffs and chiefs, not to non-elected multi-jurisdictional boards. And that’s why charter schools should be responsible to elected officials through licensed administrators, not to members of their own charter schools, sponsors that may or may not be involved in the school or a statewide commissioner answerable only to the governor.

Did you catch that?

Police need to be accountable to an elected body with power to enact changes as close to their level as possible.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what charter schools do. A school of 200 students and 12 staff and teachers will report to a director and board whose only administrative job is to deal with the affairs of the school. Not forty schools and thousands of employees via a bureaucracy of hundreds of unionized worker bees, mind you; one school. One staff, all of whom they know by name. One checkbook.

While there are some charter schools doing a good job managing their finances, proper oversight is imperative. If it doesn’t exist, then rules must be changed to provide it before people do the irrational, ill-advised things people sometimes do.

Spectacular failures in accountability – like the Gang Strike Force and the embezzlement at the Heart of the Earth charter school – obscure the larger, but vastly less-sexy and headline-grabbing, issue.

Look at the “chain of command” for the schools that are almost universally floundering, the big urban districts; all of them report to huge administrations that are (let’s be a bit pollyannaish) “accountable” to school boards that serve entirely as DFL power incubators and teachers union power reservoirs and, if you’re a parent and taxpayer, your “representative”, provided you agree with them on every agenda point (because nothing is going to change!). On a financial and curriculum level they are “accountable” to the Minnesota Department of Education, and thence on many issues to the US Do’E.

That’s not accountability. That’s bureaucratic overburden; a maze of red tape and gibberish that serves largely to swallow up and digest any real notion of “accountability”.

If public schools’ responsibility loops were pushed down to the individual school level, as charter schools’ are, they’d stand a chance of actually working.