Teachers’ union opposes charter school lawsuit
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- January
- 17
  New York State United Teachers wants to enter the fray over whether state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli should have the authority to perform so-called performance auditsâ€â€anything that falls outside a financial auditâ€â€on charter schools. The New York Charter Schools Association, the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence and more than a dozen charter schools recently filed suit against the Comptroller’s Office on the matter. They argue that the publicly funded but privately run schools are already regulated by state institutions and shouldn’t be audited on things like whether they are meeting the goals in their charters or their efficiency.
  NYSUT, which represents 585,000 teachers, school-related professionals and higher-education faculty, is seeking permission to influence the case by filing a friend-of-the-court brief.
  “Charter management wants to define itself as a public entity when receiving tax dollars but redefine itself as private and unaccountable to the state comptroller when spending those tax dollars,� NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi said in a statement.
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  “Knowing where dollars go, how students do and how charters select their student body are essential to education policy decisions,� he said.
  NYSUT opposed legislation that passed last year to expand the number of charter schools allowed in New York from 100 to 200. Districts with a high concentration of charter schools say they are a hardship because education funding follows students who transfer from public schools to charters.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 5:11 pm by Cara Matthews.
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As a general “golden rule,” anything the teachers
union is against…is a good thing to be for.
The charter schools named in the lawsuit collected some $45 million in public dollars last year alone—that’s money from the federal government, state aid and local property taxes. Don’t you think anyone getting public tax money should be accountable for how it’s spent? We vote on our school budgets, get property tax report cards, elect our school board members and can attend school board meetings. Every test score is reported publicly, and proof is in the Journal News’ excellent series on schools. Yet, charter school management wants a different set of rules, with no accountability. And you blame NYSUT for calling them on?
It’s not that the charter schools do not accept financial audits from the comptroller’s office. It is that the comptrollers office is stepping out of their traditional role of fiscal audits into the area of judging performance that is hard to swallow. Charter schools are small entities with limited resources and the new comptroller’s audits last months and create quite a strain on operations.
As shown with Enterprise charter school in Buffalo, the auditor’s report can influence charter renewals, whereas with traditional public schools, there are truly no consequences…what is accountability without consequences?
Unhappy that it has come to this, but I have to agree whole-heartedly with Ethan’s comment.