Monica Yant Kinney: Not the lesson charters were supposed to teach

My dad taught high school for 30 years, and my mom still works as a district secretary in my Hoosier hometown. Devoting their lives to public education meant they'd always get Presidents' Day off, but would never get rich.

If only my parents ran a charter school in Pennsylvania.

They could have charged granite countertops to taxpayers and been reimbursed for family trips to Disney. Had the Yants been "reformers," they could have hired their only child as a consultant, paying me $100,000 to read Dr. Seuss.

Charters, you might recall, were supposed to rescue children trapped in struggling schools.

Some city charter schools - think Mastery, KIPP, Independence, Young Scholars - are soaring. But if you follow the remarkable reporting of my colleague Martha Woodall (http://go.philly.com/charter), you'll see greedy grown-ups pilfering public gold under the guise of enriching children's lives.

At last count, at least six of the city's 67 charter schools are under federal investigation.

In an audit released last week, City Controller Alan Butkovitz found 13 of 13 charters engaging in financial mismanagement and questionable business practices. Charter administrators paid themselves $150,000 to $200,000 to supervise a single school, well beyond what assistant superintendents earn in the Philadelphia School District.

"Complete and total failure" is how Butkovitz describes efforts to monitor and hold city charters accountable for the $300 million of your money they spend each year.

Even State Sen. Jeffrey Piccola (R., Dauphin), cosponsor of the 1997 law creating charters, concedes that the grand educational experiment has been tarnished.

"The charter school concept and movement has to have credibility," Piccola told me. "We need accountability to get credibility."

The tales of educational egregiousness are plentiful and pitiful.

In 2009, two Philadelphia Academy Charter officials were convicted of using the school as "a personal piggy bank." A third committed suicide before he could be charged.

Mount Airy's New Media Charter has been accused of using public money at the chief executive officer's vegetarian restaurant while failing to pay teachers and provide books to students.

Sisters who led the Raising Horizons Quest Charter were found guilty of using $14,000 in school funds on booze, dining, and travel. They got probation, but ought to have done time just for adopting such a lame name.

Federal investigators are examining whether Dorothy June Brown, who founded Devon-based Agora Cyber Charter, diverted money to her management company. And yet the beleaguered educator received a $3 million settlement to sever ties with the school.

Charter operators routinely hire relatives and route lease agreements through an incestuous web of nonprofit and for-profit partners. Often, so-called reformers dismiss oversight as overkill.

Veronica Joyner, founder of the Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter in North Philadelphia, acknowledged that board members had approved a staggering $536,093 in travel expenses without documentation. I need more proof to return bibs at Babies-R-Us.

Sadly, many of the scams and schemes were made possible by the loophole-laden charter school law. The Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools unveiled an accountability code in March 2009, but it's voluntary and, thus, meaningless.

Piccola, the charter champion, now finds himself trying to reform his reform measure. Legislation he's introducing this week would add reporting requirements and no-nos that should be no-brainers.

You'd think veteran educators would know not to turn the cafeteria into an after-hours nightclub, as Harambee Institute of Science and Technology did in West Philadelphia. The new bill would make in-school speakeasies illegal, just in case there's any lingering doubt.