We don't know if we're here or there!

The front page article in The Dallas Morning News today details more waste of our tax dollars. And what's worse than the waste is the corruption. And what's worse than the corruption is the apparent attitude that "everybody's doing it" and "we can't stop it."

The waste and corruption arise from shady accounting practices in 93 of Texas' 211 charter shools -- waste and corruption to the tune of at least $26 million. Some of that money will never be recovered because the schools went out of business. The charter schools collected the extra money mainly by inflating attendance records.

One of the reasons cited for the fraudulent activity is that charter schools don't have strong oversight. It seems to me that if they're getting our money, they should also be getting our scrutiny! TEA official Lisa Dawn-Fisher says that "If they can't get the warm bodies in the building, they may feel an incentive to falsify records." I'm not sure if she's excusing these crooks or not, but in my book, theft is theft is theft, no matter what the "incentive." The newspaper report says that TEA puts monitors at schools only after serious problems have been identified. Maybe we wouldn't have serious problems if they put them there beforehand.

Katie Howell, executive director of the Resource Center for Charter Schools, says "Unfortunately, the public just hears about a very small percentage that's done something poorly, just like with public schools." I don't know where Katie went to school, but I don't call 44% of the schools stealing my money a "very small percentage." I call that a significant number!

John Dodd who took over as president of Dallas-based Honors Academy in 2001 said he found rampant attendance fraud there. Teachers wrote absences in pencil so they could be erased and changed by administrators. Students were told they would be marked present for the entire week if they showed up as much as one day.

TEA officials excuse this corruption by saying that this is mostly accidental (we accidentally changed those absenses to presents and accidentally told those kids they didn't have to come) due to inexperienced workers, complicated attendance rules, bad accounting software. What's so hard about counting how many kids are at school? Either a kid's there, or he's not! When I was in school, we didn't have computers and accounting software or complicated attendance rules. When the bell rang, the teacher called the roll. If she heard, "Here," she put a check mark in the box by the student's name. If she didn't hear anything, she put an "A" there. Then she turned in the roll sheet to the office where the attendance secretary added up the classes (using nothing more complicated than a 10-key adding machine) and filled out her reports. The big difference here is that school personnel used to be of the highest moral fiber. They didn't believe in cheating! And if a worker is so "inexperienced" that he can't count people, he probably should be flipping burgers instead of working with children.

Jack Ammons, a former school superintendent who works with troubled charter schools said, "If taxpayers knew how much of their tax money was going to charter schools and what the actual return on their tax money was . . . they would see that the Legislature address the whole charter school concept."

Sounds good to me -- close 'em down and we won't have to worry about whether or not they're smart enough to keep attendance records.