‘A’ is for audit -- of schools

LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS NEED to improve their students’ academic performance, for the good of the city as well as its children. That’s something every interested group -- business leaders, civic officials, school overseers, teachers, students and their families -- agrees on.

The progress achieved under Supt. Roy Romer helps point the way to more comprehensive improvement, and mayoral control of the district would boost its accountability. But to really understand where to go next, outsiders and insiders alike need a brightly illuminated picture of how the district’s administration operates, a task akin to penetrating the inner workings of the Kremlin in the 1950s.

Los Angeles Controller Laura Chick has offered to do the job. The self-protective instincts of the L.A. Unified School District’s bureaucracies should not be allowed to block her proposed performance audit.

It’s always encouraging to see elected officials who are civil servants in the best definition of the phrase. Chick is one of these, transforming her office into a comprehensive evaluator of the effectiveness of government. Few city departments have not faced her audits’ sharply focused questions about what they do and how they do it. She has produced dozens of practical blueprints for improvement. Perhaps most important in the schools’ case, the details of her audits, both by staff and outside firms, are easily available to the public.

The teachers union and the school board have agreed on an outside “review” of the district’s costly administrative operations. Unfortunately, the agreement provided only $200,000 for the project, raising doubts about the seriousness of the commitment. A thorough performance audit would be labor intensive and expensive.

Romer, after hearing Chick’s audit offer, suggested she might not know enough about the schools. School board member Mike Lansing suggested she could have political motives. That is mostly smoke.

For starters, Chick put four children and stepchildren through the L.A. public schools. Her experience as a City Council member as well as controller gives her ample knowledge about budgeting, allocation of assets and bureaucratic protectiveness. The audit’s scope would have to be decided in consultation with Romer, the school board and the union.

As for her politics, she is an ally of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whose interest in control of the schools is no secret. But her intentions and the integrity of her audits have never been questioned.

The district’s own inspectors general have not been able to put together a broad picture of how the district is run. The teachers union has long criticized what it sees as waste and inefficiency. The district’s budget accounts numerically for its $6 billion in general fund spending, but it says nothing about whether it is being spent on the most useful things. For instance, should the district even be operating its own costly and mistake-prone payroll operation? Outside firms do such things much more economically.

An audit veteran with the right kind of experience and independence is in the district’s backyard. If Romer, the school board or the union balk, the mayor and City Council should provide Chick with the backing to try to change their minds.