A new report says Texas public schools rely on such opaque accounting practices that no average citizen can possibly determine how they are spending state funds.
Titled "No Financial Accountability" the privately funded report was released Tuesday night.
It says school districts dutifully follow state rules and provide copious amounts of data in their annual financial statements. But it also shows that they lump large expenditures into nebulous categories like "instruction."
The authors collected financial statements from about 50 districts statewide. Scrutinizing one annual report, they determined that just 22 percent of "instruction" funds were actually going to pay teachers for teaching.
It was written by three private equity investors with no financial links to public education. They paid for the report with their own money.
