When Bush became Governor in 1995, one of the first things he did was to push a charter schools bill through the legislature as a sop to the school voucher advocates who supported him with contributions during his campaign. "During his first few months as governor in 1995, Bush helped persuade the Legislature to allow nonprofits...to create special public schools that would operate independently of local school districts," writes Stuart Eskanazi in the 7/22/99 issue of Houston Press, the source of information for this piece. "Called 'charter schools' because the Board of Education issues what effectively is a charter for them to open, they would operate relatively free from many state regulations. Charter schools are given more latitude in creating a curriculum and do not have to adhere to a minimum seven-hour school day for students. The administrators can hire just about anyone they want as teachers and pay them whatever they want. The goal is to give charter school operators enough flexibility to create a learning environment that best serves a student niche, whether it is high achievers or dropouts." Although the TEA, a state agency, was empowered to oversee the working of the charter schools, the Board of Education, a group elected by the voters throughout Texas, decides who gets the charters. The first 20 charters were granted by the 15 member Board of Education in the Spring of 1996. A near-majority of the board's membership consists of Theocrats far to the right of Bush and Mike Moses the Bush-appointed head of TEA who resigned last week although he was not up for re-appointment until 2002. Many of the members of the board had been calling for Moses' resignation since he, along with Bush, began to carve away its powers two years ago. A Bush aide once called the board, and we're paraphrasing, "the last booth on the right in the carnival of life." "Not since awarding the first 20 charters has the Board of Education demanded the CEOs or other key officers of proposed schools to come before it for a face-to-face interview. Instead, the board has relied on the assessment of a 45-member application review committee, appointed by board members and the education commissioner, to grade the written applications. Only now, at a time when embarrassing audits of charter schools threaten the entire movement, is the Board of Education leaning toward supplementing the committee evaluation with a return to in-person interviews."

Here are the TEA's most ambarrassing findings thus far:
*One of the first 20 charter schools, Cypress Lodge in East Texas, never opened, but collected $240,000 in state checks, which has never been recovered.
*Harrison Charter School in Waco was $300,000 in debt before it opened. The state granted its charter without knowing that the head had a history of financial troubles. The school has since been shut down.
*Rameses School in San Antonio had its charter revoked because of possible school attendance inflation. The state pays charter schools between $4,000 and $5,000 per student.
*Four charter schools under the rubric of "Life's Beautiful Educational Centers, Inc." in Houston owes debts totalling several hundred thousand dollars. These schools overestimated the projected number of students who would attend, did not cut their costs when the actual number was lower, and spent their money for the entire year during their first five months.The corporation claims its books were taken during a burglary, leading a puzzled TEA official to note that "the black market on school records isn't very good."
*Writing about the troubles of Impact Charter School in Houston, Eskanazi opines, "If it wasn't bad enough that the Board of Education approved a charter school with a CEO who didn't know she was CEO, it awarded a school based on a written application that featured this jumble of grammatical mumble: "Impact Charter target grade level 3 year old -- fourth grade.... Our focus will be that of Intervention by reaching the children at earlier age will prevent failure of later years."

When news of the shambles of the Bush charter school system reached the press, "Mike Shepherd, a board member of the Texas Language Charter School in Dallas, wrote a May 30 editorial in the Dallas Morning News titled "Failing charter schools are the exception." He cited two examples of quality charter schools. One is the Dallas Can! Academy. But TEA's audit division is investigating that charter school and its sister school in Houston for undisclosed transgressions." The other charter school Shepherd held up as a model of quality under Bush's administration is Renaissance Charter School, which had branches around the Dallas area at that time. Eskanazi looked at the Arlington branch, where a student said, "You name it, we don't have it!" Here's a list of what this model school didn't have: heat, desks, chairs, dictionaries, tap water, textbooks, chalkboards, trash cans, phones, filing cabinets, offices, a gymnasium, a lunchroom, vending machines. computers. Here's what this model school under Bush had: two rooms with dim bulbs overhead, a concrete floor to sit or stand on, one sofa for 40 students, holes in the ceiling, stains on the walls, bugs, a toilet that barely flushed (the students walked two-blocks through a busy commercial neighborhood to use library restrooms), and a second floor declared unsuitable for habitation by the City of Arlington.

We've been told that Bush's administrative style is to come up with big ideas, then appoint others to take care of the nuts and bolts activities of turning these ideas into realities. Time after time, we find that his ideas have not been thought through, he has not provided his administrators with the tools to do the work, and he seems unable or unwilling to make the needed corrections in time to head off disaster. Bush is implying to the nation's voters that because he says he wants quality, they'll get quality, but he's told that to the citizens of Texas already, and they're sitting on too many cold concrete floors with dim bulbs overhead, wondering when the textbooks will come. 7/26-28/99