After months of widening criticism of Baltimore's school-privatization venture, the City Council last night created an oversight committee to scrutinize the spending and progress of for-profit Education Alternatives Inc.
The move capped a 4 1/2 -hour hearing marked by radically differing views of the experiment, as more than 150 people, many of whom expressed strong support for the company's work, jammed City Council chambers and spilled over into the corridor.
Carl Stokes, the 2nd District Democrat who called the hearing, said he and a majority of fellow council members had lost faith in schools Superintendent Walter G. Amprey's ability to objectively evaluate the company's work here.
"We, the council, feel the Baltimore City public school system is working for EAI rather than holding EAI accountable for the contract and for young people," said Mr. Stokes, who chairs the council's Education and Human Resources Committee.
Mr. Stokes and other council members complained that they had been stonewalled by the school system and EAI in their efforts to get information about the company's spending of taxpayers' money and about its performance.
Mr. Stokes noted that the school system has yet to provide any information on EAI spending for the past 1 1/2 years.
Critics have repeatedly pointed out that neither the city administration, the school system nor EAI has provided any accounting of how it has spent tens of millions of dollars in taxpayers' money since spring 1993.
Mr. Stokes said the oversight committee will include members of the council as well as education and finance experts, who would work free of charge, and will report to the Education and Human Resources Committee within two months.
"I think -- and quite a few others think -- that we are spending more and not getting better results," Mr. Stokes said. "We still haven't gotten the answers to the policy questions and the finance questions that we want."
Dr. Amprey, EAI chief John T. Golle and other company officials, however, strongly defended the work of the company, which holds five-year city contracts worth about $180 million and now works in a dozen schools. About two dozen parents, many of them bused to the hearing by EAI, and a few teachers from the "Tesseract" schools joined in defending the experiment, outnumbering the detractors testifying.
Dr. Amprey said EAI has helped break "educational gridlock. The answers are at the edge. . . . Our city is on the cutting edge."
When council members asked for financial details of the agreement, Dr. Amprey said that he could provide none and that nobody from his financial staff was present to provide the information.
The latest available figures from an independent audit and a school system evaluation of 1992-1993 -- the company's first year managing the nine Tesseract schools -- show that of $26.7 million in city taxpayers' money, $1.7 million went to EAI headquarters in Minnesota as revenue.
During that first year, the company spent $13.5 million on regular instruction, $1.4 million less than the city had planned to spend; $1.2 million on special education, or $1.1 million less than the city had budgeted; more than $280,000 on accounting fees; more than $278,000 on attorneys fees; and $128,284 on corporate travel. It also spent $4 million in city money, more than twice as much as the city had, on improvements to facilities.
Mr. Golle, however, said the company has steadily increased its spending for instruction and that new figures would bear that out.
In response to questions about the company's spending, he said EAI had provided unaudited financial data for the 1993-1994 school year to the city school board in August.
Neither the board nor the Amprey administration, however, has released any of that information to lawmakers, the news media or city teachers unions.
As the school system works to erase a projected deficit of $10 million, questions surrounding EAI's finances have been asked with growing frequency. City budget documents show that if Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke pulled the plug on EAI contracts, the city would save at least $9 million a year.
Council President Mary Pat Clarke, who hopes to unseat Mr. Schmoke next fall, repeated her complaint that all schools deserve at least as much as EAI receives to run the ones it manages. Most do not receive nearly as much. "Don't take [the money] away from anybody," she said. "Every child in the public school system has the right to equal protection."
Irene Dandridge, president of the 8,500-member Baltimore Teachers Union, attacked the company's credibility, accusing EAI of staging an "exercise in confusion and confounding."
"The information we ask for is never forthcoming, and there's always an excuse," she said.
Like EAI, parents and a few teachers said the company has dramatically improved the condition of buildings, morale, enthusiasm, parent participation and student performance.
Ellen Farmer, the parent of a child at Mary Rodman Elementary, a Tesseract school, said the school "is in every way comparable to a brand-new county school. I don't care what the test scores say."