Since 1994, I have been delivering a regular monthly radio commentary for KQED-FM, the National Public Radio affiliate in San Francisco. My on-air jabs at the follies of government have no doubt infuriated many, including my editor at the station, a former Democratic congressional staffer.

I pointed out that Los Angeles spent $250 million -- that's a quarter billion dollars -- on the disastrous Belmont Learning Center, which will not educate a single student. I also cited the recent State Auditor's recent devastating report on the California Department of Education, the second such report within a year, charging that flawed fiscal management practices were prime examples of the waste, irresponsibility and corruption endemic to the state's government-run education system. My editor responded saying that such an accusation was "hooey." Evidently, he had not been reading his local San Francisco newspapers.

Recently, the liberal San Francisco Weekly reported that the San Francisco Unified School District's financial records "are in such disarray, it turns out that in late December, the state Department of Education actually withheld acting Superintendent Linda Davis' pay for more than three weeks until the district coughed up long overdue financial reports."

The district could not close out its books in a timely manner, even after the school board voted to pay a sizable consulting fee to the district's former chief financial officer. The accounting for the fiscal year 1998-99 was only finished last month, more than six months after the fiscal year ended and much later than required by law. Because of this unlawful delay, outside state auditors were unable to complete the annual audit of the district which, again, is required by law.

In addition, the district misspent $18 million in federally required desegregation funds on "all sorts of things that didn't have much directly to do with desegregating schools." Because of this misdirection of funds, the state has refused to reimburse the district for costs.

At the prodding of Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco), the state Department of Education sent in a team of financial experts to investigate. After months of frustration, Tom Henry, the team's leader, concluded that the district "has had some serious problems managing their cash, and their programs, and their revenues."

All of this comes as no surprise to those of us at Pacific Research Institute. Carl Brodt, a certified management accountant, who co-authored PRI's recent briefing A Short Primer on Per-Pupil Spending in California, examined numerous local school district budgets and found that, "By far the most incoherent budget presentation, though, was the 412-page tome by San Francisco Unified -- a book that contains less than half the data necessary to understand costs at the district level." Worse, PRI found that whereas the average state per-pupil revenue funding in 1999-00 is $7,535, and Los Angeles Unified's per-pupil revenues funding is $9,029, San Francisco Unified receives a whopping $10,021 in per-pupil revenue funding.

As I noted in my KQED commentary, the state Department of Education, which oversees all this, is itself in disarray. It's performance monitors, says the State Auditor, are "virtually nonexistent." Statewide, a government-run education system is wasting countless millions of dollars that taxpayers earmarked for the education of children. That isn't hooey, it's a scandal.

-Lance T. Izumi