AUDIT FINDS PROBLEMS IN PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
HARRISBURG, Pa. --
An audit report released Tuesday by Pennsylvania's elected fiscal watchdog revealed management problems in the state Department of Education and its 21-member Board of Education.The audit supervised by state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a Democrat, covered the period between July 1, 2010 and Aug. 1, 2015, including the four-year tenure of former Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who made deep cuts in state education spending.
Among the findings:
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OUTDATED MASTER PLAN
The board's "Basic Education Master Plan," supposedly a roadmap for statewide education policy, has not been updated for 16 years.
DePasquale blamed "misdirected leadership" on the board for failing to update the plan, as the Pennsylvania School Code requires every five years, and that this failure has left the state without a strategic plan for dealing with the difficult issues facing public schools.
"If (the board) had actively updated its plan, it would have better positioned itself as a leader in developing educational police, instead of relying on gubernatorial convened commissions of stakeholders, whose agenda were controlled" outside of the board, the audit says.
In a written response included with the audit, Board of Education Chairman Larry Wittig acknowledged the need for a current plan, as the audit recommends. He said the board has strived to meet its obligations in spite of limited resources and the Legislature's imposition of many new responsibilities.
DePasquale's charge of "misdirected leadership" seems to be an opinion, not a fact supported by objective evidence, Wittig said.
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POOR-PERFORMING SCHOOLS
The auditors identified 561 academically struggling schools that serve more than 310,000 students but do not receive as much special state assistance as other schools because the department has failed to define "poorly performing" schools and targets its assistance based on federal guidelines.
The auditors recommend a three-step process that calls for the board to update the master plan and designate a committee to take on "the epidemic of poor-performing schools." They recommend that the department make organizational changes and take charge in helping such schools improve. Eventually, the department should help such schools "through partnerships with school districts, not takeovers."
"PDE needs to reinvent its brand and provide better direct outreach to school and district leadership," they said.
In response, Education Secretary Pedro Rivera says the department generally agrees with the audit's findings and recommendations, but that he hopes they are instructive.
"It is my hope that this report will help demonstrate the pressing need for the commonwealth to properly invest in the educational resources of the commonwealth, including the internal resources and capacity of the department," Rivera wrote.
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RETIRED STATE EMPLOYEES
The department often relied on retired state employees who returned to work in the department on a short-term emergency basis, the auditors said.
They said the department failed to monitor those people to ensure they did not remain on the payroll longer than the 95-day maximum they are allowed each year. The auditors examined the records of the 38 annuitants hired by the department and found one violation of the rule.
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This story has been corrected to show DePasquale called leadership 'misdirected' not 'misguided.'
County-by-county listing of the 561 academically challenged schools:Audit finds problems in Pennsylvania Department of Education | 6abc.com: