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?

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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.

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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)

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Education, School Choice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.