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January 26, 2006
Audits in LA LA Land...
From the Daily News... My favorite part of the editorial is in BOLD below...
Auditing the LAUSD
Chick's investigation can help determine district's future
After some foot-dragging, the Los Angeles Unified School District has complied with a public records request from City Controller Laura Chick. For better or worse, Chick now has every audit, report and study analyzing the district since the 2000-01 academic year.
That's 782 in total. It took 10 big boxes - and a truck - to move the documents from LAUSD headquarters to Chick's City Hall office.
But if the enormity of all this analysis measured up against the rate of reform at the LAUSD tells us anything, it's that audits don't do much. They can assess problems, not fix them.
The truth is that organizations don't change unless the people running them have the heart to do so. No matter how closely Chick pores over all the old audits - or even if she gets her wish to do an audit herself - it won't do much to make the LAUSD more efficient or effective.
For that, bigger, comprehensive reforms are needed, whether it's creating a lot more charter schools, or Antonio Villaraigosa's vision of mayoral control, or a breakup of the district into smaller, more manageable pieces.
The purpose of Chick's investigation, then, is not so much to direct the LAUSD, but to educate the people of L.A. Her analysis can tell us just what's going on at the district: What are the not-so-obvious successes and failures, and what steps have officials taken to improve things?
With that information in hand, the public will be best equipped to decide what changes will be needed to create a responsive, high-achieving school district worthy of this great city. L.A. residents are paying for the nation's most modern school facilities, and they deserve the results to match in the classroom.
---Keaney's Comments---
Why would Laura Chick be audting the LAUSD without the authority to do so? IS it because the City, and the USD have realized that economic vitality, and school performance are closely related?
Is it possible that LA is feeling the effects of decades of mismanagement by the LAUSD?
Is Romer complying so he can eventually deflect the heat?
And is this a model for your City and School District?
You should be asking the questions...
Tim
Comments
Financial audits generally uncover only fraud. It takes a performance audit to uncover waste. School districts are good at detecting fraud.
The real problem is finding and detecting waste. Waste comes from poor business practices. Poor business practices come from a lack of focus on the business end of the educational process.
Without the profit motive, governments are always going to be somewhat less efficient than the private sector. Generally this is a small price to pay for the added stability and safety that we expect from our public agencies. Well run government agencies can be competetive with their private sector counterparts. They have to keep up with the state of the art in their business and adopt modern practices.
That's where the education community has its problems. Schools are a single purpose business entity. They are run by educators, not MBA's. School boards are not generally blessed with business people - the motivation to run is more to the educational side. The staffs, the training, the business investment is not focused on running an efficient business.
The County School Boards Association had a speaker last week from the state agency that oversees financially troubled school districts. They also try to stop districts from becming troubled. He explained how districts get in trouble with bad budgeting decisions. He was asked if fraud was a big problem. He answer was 'the school district' problems are not from being crooked but from being stupid.'
So the question is whether LA City as a general purpose governmental agency has better business practices than LA Unified. May guess would be yes, and a city takeover would improve the schools financial performance. The question then becomes how to turn that into better educational results.
Greg
Posted by: Greg Stratton at February 8, 2006 10:13 AM
Yes,
Audits only give certain information. I'd honestly like to see the school districts be broken into smaller more manageable pieces.
I am very concerned that LAUSD is overgrown and unresponsive to parents forcing them to actually look to municipal government to fix their school problems.
The LA Mayor made a lot of education promises in the election and was pretty much elected to take responsibility for the school district much the way Mayor Bloomberg has in New York City. I think if the LA Mayor wants to be effective in his campaign promise, he is going to have to upset some of his loyalist supporters.
The real question is he is not in the school district, so how can he actually change something where the school district can just say no.
Scott
Posted by: Scott Blough at January 27, 2006 09:59 AM