Orange County Register, January 13, 2003

With the recent swearing in of California's newly elected constitutional officers, a number of term-limited politicians have finally been forced off the public stage. One taxpayers won’t miss is former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin who last month said, “we don’t have the courage of heart and spine to raise taxes to educate the children.”

The responsibility for the miseducation of our children, however, lies not with taxpaying Californians but Eastin and her failures.

As state schools chief for the last eight years, Ms. Eastin has seen total government education spending in California rise from about $5,500 per pupil in 1994-95 to the more than $9,000 per pupil currently. For their generosity, taxpayers have gotten little bang for their buck. Test scores, especially on the new standards-aligned exams, languish at alarmingly low levels. This weak student performance has not been helped by Eastin’s deplorable oversight of state education spending.

Last month, a jury returned a multi-million-dollar judgment against Eastin and her state Department of Education for persecuting a departmental whistleblower who uncovered misappropriation of federal funds doled out by the department between 1995 and 2000. The federal dollars went to community-based organizations that were supposed to run adult-education English and citizenship classes, but ended up in the pockets of the organizations and their leaders, such as the late Bert Corona of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional based in Orange and Los Angeles counties.

James Lindberg, the whistleblower demoted by Eastin, said, “When I reported the fraud, [Eastin] chose to cover it up rather than deal with the issue.” The jury found Eastin personally liable for nearly $1.4 million in non-economic damages and also levied $150,000 in punitive damages. Lindberg’s attorney said that the verdict showed that government officials like Eastin will be punished “when they retaliate against individuals who are simply trying to do their job of protecting taxpayers.”

The verdict, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Eastin’s mismanagement of her department. According to a state audit report in 2000, the Department of Education has been plagued for years by “flawed” practices, including the absence of “an overall view of its monitoring activities because it has no comprehensive tracking system” of how state and federal funds are used.

State auditors also found that Eastin’s department placed “little emphasis on ensuring the accountability of those receiving funds, or on the planning and evaluation of the department’s own monitoring activities.” As a result of its inefficiencies, “the department cannot ensure that recipients appropriately use funds to meet the needs of eligible children and adults.”

During a four-year period covering most of her first term as state superintendent, Eastin’s own audits division conducted no on-site audits of any school district. Eastin’s department ignored risk factors, such as a history of rule breaking, in its evaluation of districts and non-profits receiving government funds.

The department failed to collect documentation in its reviews of how districts and non-profits were spending funds. Even when the department stumbled upon spending violations by districts and non-profits, state auditors found that Eastin and her crew didn’t evaluate the timeliness of any corrective actions and imposed few, if any, sanctions.

The bottom line is that because of Eastin’s negligence, large amounts of taxpayer dollars were wasted. That same mismanagement, unfortunately, is the reason why we will never know just how much tax money went down the drain.

Eastin’s successor, whom she endorsed for the post, is longtime Democratic legislator Jack O’Connell. Given the huge state budget deficit, one of O’ Connell’s top priorities should be to bring greater fiscal accountability to education spending. Despite the bleating of the education lobby, the key point remains how we spend our tax money, not how much we spend.

Lance Izumi is a Senior Fellow in California Studies at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He can be reached via email at lizumi@pacificresearch.org.