by David Safier
Every year, Arizona requires charter-school operators to get their books audited.
Every year, the results are the same: Scores of charter companies fail to track their spending and can't produce receipts for many expenses. Some schools haven't paid their taxes or don't keep accurate attendance records, with some inflating attendance to bring in more state money.
The state usually sends out a letter asking schools to fix the problems but takes little or no action.
According to the article, charter schools get away with all kinds of financial mismanagement and outright theft due to a combination of lax enforcement and laws that emphasize independence over accountability. (Note: you can have both independence and accountability.) Put simply, the Charter School Board was created to promote charter schools, not police them.
The Board says it's changing its ways.
Last year, the state sent $602 million to charter-school companies. State officials are just beginning to create a computer system to determine how much is going to educate kids and how much is being wasted or abused.
Until now, most of the accounting information has come in on paper, not electronically. It sits in file cabinets, pretty much untouched by human hands and unviewed by human eyes.
This is a microcosmic version of the national financial debacle we've seen on a macro scale. Let abuses run rampant through lax regulation, promise to do something when things get out of hand (what happened to all that regulatory tightening we were supposed to see after Enron collapsed?), but don't do anything to really correct the problem until some kind of disaster strikes. Then say, "We had no idea . . ."
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Oh yea, it is the fault of the the charter school companies receiving checks from the State of Arizona (for failing to document some irrelevant expenditure).
I don’t suppose that the government should be grading charter schools on how well they teach.
I think that believing that computers will save the day is as foolish as assuming that the regulators could properly audit the charter schools when they required paper bookkeeping submissions.