•••
The Minnesota Legislature invented charter schools, with good, bad and indifferent results around the country, and a fundamental flaw. The law should have funded and required mandatory state auditors, the lack of which is now melting down numerous charters in the state (“Charter schools scramble for audits,” Jan. 20). This is not a small detail. Since the law went national, charters have been founded by idealistic teachers believing they have a better way, by entrepreneurs seeing an opportunity and by charlatans and rip-off artists. The idealistic teachers were never accountants, and the other groups needed solid accounting oversight to prevent the pilfering of public-school dollars.
Actually, the current meltdown reveals a second serious flaw in charter schools, the presumption that only the charter operator suffers when bad ones fail. But when they do fail, their students do not vanish but are suddenly dispatched to local public schools, which are required to take them in, disrupting both the charter students and the public classrooms. At minimum, legislators should provide funds for the Department of Education to provide all charter school auditing functions as a cost of the charter, so teachers can teach, and preventing at least some the education disasters underway now. Better yet would be a thorough accounting of the pros and cons of the charter law itself.
James P. Lenfestey, Minneapolis
•••
I recently read with interest the article outlining the accounting problems facing Minnesota charter schools. During my perusal of the article I was reminded of one of the original intents of the charter school legislation. That is, to create laboratories for new educational methodology and innovation.
I was hired by St. Paul Public Schools the same year City Academy started up in St. Paul — 1992. I retired in 2007. Since there are now 180 charter schools in Minnesota, there must have been nearly 100 when I retired.