Election Section

SACRAMENTO — School districts that grant charters to independent public schools don’t watch the schools to ensure they’re financially sound and meeting academic goals, a state audit released Thursday found. 

Charter schools are public schools run by nonprofit or private organizations, such as parent and teacher groups and, in some cases, for-profit companies. The schools are monitored by individual school districts that grant the charter and are allowed to bypass much of the red tape that bogs down regular public schools in exchange for increased accountability. 

The schools are required to hired only credentialed teachers, offer a minimum number of instructional time and certify that their students have participated in the state’s testing program. 

Too often, however, the districts that grant charters are not “ensuring compliance with these legal requirements at each of their charter schools,” the report said. 

Districts also don’t examine the school’s finances well, the report said. 

While districts can charge schools a fee for the financial oversight, none of the districts examined had documented their costs and may be charging schools too much or too little, the auditors said. 

The four public school districts examined by the state auditor — Fresno, San Diego, Los Angeles and Oakland — submitted lengthy rebuttals to the audit, saying the state’s education code is vague when it comes to district’s responsibilities. 

Fresno Unified School District’s response called the report “fundamentally flawed” because the auditors misunderstood the state’s charter school laws. 

Charter schools “do not exist for the purpose of being held accountable to public school districts,” the school district’s response said. Instead, charter schools were created to give parents, teachers and students “different and innovative teaching methods” and other alternative programs within public schools, Fresno officials said. 

The audit “fails to understand that charter schools are not, and never were intended to be, subdivisions of school districts,” the response said. 

Assemblywoman Sarah Reyes, who asked for the audit following the collapse of the Gateway Academy in Fresno, disagreed with the districts’ assessment of the law. 

“Your right and responsibility in signing an agreement with a charter school is to make sure they’re successful and that those students benefit,” she said. 

The failure of Gateway, which closed in January after it racked up a $1.3 million debt, Reyes said, showed that “the state is largely in the dark about oversight procedures used by chartering entities to oversee schools that they have chartered.” 

But Reyes, D-Fresno, said she was most surprised about the lack of oversight of charter schools’ academic progress. 

“That is the responsibility of the charter school, but it is also the responsibility of the entity that grants that charter,” she said. “By not assessing student performance against the charter terms, the schools are not demonstrating their accountability for meeting their academic goals.” 

A Reyes bill signed by Gov. Gray Davis this year will require charter schools to operate in the district’s boundaries or in the same county. That bill was designed to make it easier for local communities to oversee charter schools. 

The new law also set up financial requirements for schools that close, and required charter high schools to notify parents and students if their classes do not match up with college requirements. 

Reyes said she was considering legislation for next year that would further clarify the districts’ responsibilities. 

California spends $524 million each year on charter schools, Reyes said, and more oversight needs to be in place to make sure state money isn’t lost. 

Gary Larson, a spokesman for the California Network of Educational Charters, said the school districts needed more guidance on how to oversee the charter schools. But new laws directing oversight might not answer the audit’s criticism, he said. 

“It’s difficult to legislate problems out of existence,” he said. “If that were the case, we’d see a better system of public education with all the legislation enacted in the last 30 years.”