EVER NOTICE that politicians, on state and federal levels alike, have a habit of passing legislation that sounds great, and for which they are not reluctant to praise themselves, and then turn away and never bother to make sure the thing is working as promised?
It doesn’t happen quite as much on the local level — particularly the small-town local level — simply because it is harder to miss a failure when it’s happening right under the people’s noses so local officials know they have to keep their eyes open in order to stay out of hot water.
Dropping the ball on sounds-great new government laws and ventures happens all the time, and while perhaps everyone now knows of several instances involving financial regulations and obligations that were ignored, there actually appears to be little that has not fallen into such neglect. That includes things of strong promise that have won general public support, not to mention that of this newspaper.
Take, for instance, charter schools — public education using local and state funds but outside the official school board system; schools that may have special goals or targets (like the new Floyd County College and Career Academy) and that are supposed to actually be “run” by the teachers, the parents, concerned community interests.
Georgia’s got 113 such charter schools at present with 43,000 students, or about 3 percent of the state’s total.
THE STATE recently moved to overcome some local board of education resistance to them (usually because of the diversion of money out of board hands) by creating a Georgia Charter Schools Commission that can force local school boards to help fund such ventures. This June it is expected, in a first step, to do so regarding six state-chartered public schools that local boards have refused to support with hometown money. According to the Georgia Department of Education, those classrooms now get only $3,000-$4,000 in state money per student and not the roughly $7,000 per student they would have if the local share going to other facilities were in place.
Why, there’s even a new measure this year, HB 555, passed by the House and Senate, that says local schools boards must, if they have old empty school buildings and other facilities, permit charters to use them if they want. It even sets up a state “facilities fund” for charters that would let them use such money to buy property, renovate buildings and so forth. Even letting slide the obvious question — yeah, but is the state actually going to put money in the budget for such a thing? — it’s another move in the correct direction.
That’s why a short, very small, recent news item should set off alarm bells not only among charter supporters but even more so from state/local taxpayers. An Internet search found only eight state newspapers and TV stations had even mentioned it.
DESPITE a 1998 law requiring an independent review of whether such charter schools are meeting the minimum academic requirements of all pubic education set by the state — the basic condition for otherwise being able to “do their own thing” while ignoring most other state mandates, such as class size — that hasn’t been happening. This is 2009, 11 years later, and a Department of Education audit found little being done, by local school boards and the state alike, to make sure those terms are being met.
To be sure, many charters, although not all, seem to be showing excellent results and often beat the pants off of “regular schools” academically. But that’s not the same as monitoring the promised internal workings. Indeed, it’s rather like the way that the state “confirms” public school systems are meeting the minimums, which seems largely to rely on standardized test score rankings that ignore whether the outcome is achieved by “teaching the test” while everything not on the exam is ignored or slighted.
If being “educated” is based entirely on being able to meet what the government says our kids ought to know then a whole lot of our ancestors, including the Founding Fathers, were real dummies.
What’s really troubling is that this lack of monitoring can’t be considered much of a surprise. Atlanta and Washington alike are increasingly notorious for throwing money at problems and then never checking to see if the desired result, or any result at all, is attained.
INDEED, IT IS only when there is a known risk of physical harm occurring that any effort at all is routinely made. Imagine what restaurant kitchens might look like if the establishments knew that no health inspector would ever pop in — and worry about the fact that locally, because of “budget problems,” the number of such inspections have been cut back. Or, how many partygoers would a firetrap venue pack in if no fire marshal ever showed up to check on the size of the crowd?
It’s not only charter schools that ultimately won’t work if nobody keeps tabs on them — it is pretty much everything. To the extent charters seem to often work it is precisely because they do have unofficial, unappointed inspectors crawling all over them ... the parents of the students, the underpaid teachers driven to make their workplace one of excellence. That doesn’t mean the state can turn away from its responsibility to “make sure” tax money is properly spent. It definitely doesn’t mean it need not bother to even look.
Many government programs and initiatives can very legitimately be criticized as having been failures and the taxes spent upon them wasted. Many government contracts similarly encounter massive cost overruns and even outright fraudulent bookkeeping.
That doesn’t mean the idea was bad; that the contract was a boondoggle. It only means that nobody in government was assigned to follow through, to make surprise and unannounced inspections.
MIGHT ONE suggest that a whole lot of government would actually work, or certainly work better, if someone was actually required, on behalf of the taxpayers, to follow through? And not just on charter schools either.
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