Finally, charter school failure to comply is being punished.

There are many ways that charter schools fail to comply. The Aug 15 & 22 2011 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article on Michelle Bachmann, including her participation in founding a charter school in Stillwater, MN.

Bachmann and her followers feel that public schools exist only to indoctrinate children with anti-biblical dogma. Bachmann is a follower and student of Steven Wilkins (the Civil War was a "theological war" and slavery was a benevolent solution to caring for pagan Africans who couldn't care for themselves until they found god), David A. Noebel (a John Bircher homophobe who warns against America's greatest evil, the "secular humanist worldview"), and John Eidsmoe, whom Bachmann encountered when she attended law school at Oral Roberts University. Eidsmoe authored "Christianity and the Constitution," and Bachmann is proud of Eidsmoe's influence, openly advocating that American life should be "permeated with a distinctively Christian flavoring."

To set up the New Heights School charter, a publicly funded school, Bachmann and fellow boardmembers had to sign an agreement with the Stillwater School District, per Minnesota regulations for publicly funded schools, mandating that all charter school activities would be nonsectarian.

From the beginning, board minutes record evangelical, god-oriented plans for the curriculum and blatant violations of the nonsectarian agreement. Parents complained of classroom creationism teachings. Within 6 months, Bachmann and her friend, the school's CEO and evangelical activist, Dennis Meyer, resigned, under threat of charter revocation, and the school eliminated all religious elements from the curriculum.

If only charter schools could deliver the education that their supporters claim to want. When the concept rolled out in California in the early- to mid-1990's, it seemed unbeatable. Schools, freed from the crushing mandates and bureaucracies of the state Education Code could concentrate on teaching, innovating, and reaching kids the regular schools miss.

The reality has been quite different. For every charter school that excels, there are dozens that achieve only mediocrity, and many end up mired in scandal. The governing boards, with their limited resources cannot find competent administrators and fall for charlatans who make lavish promises that cannot be kept. Or, worse yet, they hire some for-profit business to take over the day-to-day management of the school for a fat fee. Then the fee ends up in the pocket of some unqualified administrator who mismanages the school into failure. (Yes, this has happened many times, and in San Diego County.)

The motives of these wealthy backers of the charter school movement are suspect. Many just don't like the idea of public schools that must take all comers. But they also don't like the idea of having to pay the full cost of private or parochial schools. So a charter school that caters to them, yet is largely or fully paid for with public funds, is the goal.

In the near future we will see and hear more scandals involving this recent proliferation of charter schools. As those schools take enrollment away from the regular public schools, the job facing those schools becomes more demanding. As it now stands, the chartering school districts are ill-equipped to properly oversee the charters, and they generally operate with little control or public scrutiny of how public funds are spent.

But who suffers when a charter school fails to deliver? The kids who were supposed to be getting an education is who.

Arne Duncan actually cracking down on charters? A welcome development and long overdue.

Please note that CA Charters Schools chief Jeb Wallace was a just a trainee in the front office at San Diego Unified under Superintendent Alan Bersin, paid with Gates Foundation money.