Last week, State Controller Maila Cohen released a report from the Multi-Agency Charter School Audits Task Force containing factual findings and dozens of recommendations to beef-up California’s auditing practices and standards for K-12 education agencies in response to recent fraud activity in California schools. While it contains a number of common sense and potentially helpful recommendations, the 59-page report also raises numerous concerns.
The report focuses too heavily on auditing, an inherently weak fraud prevention tool. Its recommendations would make the auditing experience far more costly and burdensome for charter schools, and to a lesser extent would also impact school districts and county offices of education. The report also overlooks the failure of state agencies to act when concerns were raised about errant charter schools operators.
Like two other reports before it responding to charter school financial abuses, this third report ignores what is arguably the core problem: California’s long-festering charter school authorizing and oversight laws that...
