California State Auditor
November 2002
The California State Auditor released this examination of four districts that have chartered a larger number of schools, concluding that they're not doing a very good job of it - and may be garnering more state funds than they should to compensate themselves for their weak oversight. The districts (Fresno, Oakland, San Diego, Los Angeles) say it isn't so - and fill more than half of this 216-page report in explaining themselves. With some 436 California charter schools now enrolling upwards of 160,000 pupils, this is a big subject. Charter advocates regard the Auditor's report as a hatchet job, part of the intensifying political campaign to curb these schools' freedoms and restrict their numbers. At the same time, they acknowledge that the California charter-school accountability picture is less than perfect. This has led their statewide association to propose having schools accredited (by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges) and to require added fiscal accountability. State board chairman Reed Hastings suggests that no school should get its charter renewed unless it scores at least a 4 on the state's ten-point Academic Performance Index. (Critics of THAT idea say a "value added" or "progress" measure should be used rather than a fixed standard.) While the Auditor's recommendations for districts (and the State Department of Education) strike me as plausible, the risk, as always in these discussions, is that stepped-up "oversight" by charter authorizers will turn into clumsy over-regulation. Whether that results from mischievousness by charter foes or the innocent inability of bureaucracy-bound authorizers to imagine any other way to live up to their responsibilities, the result could be devastating. But it's not a good thing for schools with bad fiscal practices and woeful educational results to continue unchanged, whether they're charters, traditional public schools or private schools. Someone needs to blow the whistle. The challenge is to find ways to do that without sliding into a mass of red tape. You can find this report online at http://www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/pdfs/2002104.pdf.
