It’s been awhile since I’ve written about BASIS schools. Most of what needs to be said has been said already, by me and others. And besides, the “BASIS education miracle”—which isn’t miraculous in any way, shape or form—has become background noise in the “education reform”/privatization propaganda machine. The charter schools no longer need the intense scrutiny they did back when privatization enthusiasts used BASIS as the poster child for all that’s wonderful about charters. My most recent post on the subject was on the arcane subject of the BASIS business pyramid, a nest of separate but interlocking business entities which encompass nonprofit charter schools, for-profit U.S. private schools and one international private school in Shenzhen, China.
So I was pleased to see the topic revived in a lengthy, informative overview of the BASIS enterprise in the Washington Post written by Carol Burris, the executive director of Network for Public Education. She does an excellent job of summarizing the way the schools operate. The new news for me is the possibility that the charter schools may be in financial trouble. More about that at the end of this post.
Burris’ whole piece is worth a read, but if you don’t want to take the time, here are the Cliff Notes.
BASIS, Burris acknowledges,”provides a challenging education” for its students. But who are the students? Burris has a chart comparing the ethnic mix of Arizona’s BASIS charters to the rest of the state.
Ten times as many Asian students, a fifth as many Latino students, significantly more white students. Clearly, BASIS has a selective, non-representative ethnic population. It also has a tenth of the students with learning disabilities as Arizona schools in general and no English Language Learners. And since the schools don’t have a lunch program which would provide free and reduced lunches, they don’t have many low income students who would depend on that service. Add the placement of the schools in higher income areas and the lack of transportation services to bring students from other, less affluent areas, and you have a student population that sits firmly atop the socioeconomic and academic ladders.
Then there’s the attrition rate. The BASIS Tucson class of 2016 had 130 seventh graders and ended up with 54 seniors, a drop-off which is typical of BASIS schools. The rigorous curriculum and other academic demands weed out students who can’t make the grade, turning the already-selective enrollment into an ever more selective group as the students approach graduation.
Want to know why BASIS schools score so high in the national “best high school” rankings? The fewer seniors, the more AP classes they’ve taken and the higher the AP test scores, the higher a school is ranked. With BASIS’s emphasis on AP coursework, the selective nature of its students and the year-by-year weeding-out process, top rankings are built into the schools’ DNA.
The individual BASIS charters are nonprofits, but the top administrative levels are for-profit enterprises, meaning that most of our taxpayer money which goes to the schools ends up behind a for-profit firewall where the financial wheelings and dealings are hidden from the public.
At the end of the article, Burris writes about the possibility that BASIS charters are running a deficit, which could put the charter chain in financial jeopardy.
[Arizonan Curt Cardine, a former East Coast superintendent and former charter administrator] analyzed the latest audit for BASIS and he sees trouble ahead for the charter chain. “The most recent audit shows that BASIS School Inc. is now running a huge deficit in their assets of over $13 million. The charter schools’ net loss for the 14-15 year alone was $3,074,317.”
Cardine said he was not surprised. “In the state of Arizona, the financial failure rate on charters is 42.79 percent. Over-leveraging is a huge problem,” said Cardine. “Charters fail, but somehow folks leave making money. Charters like to say they are ‘for the kids, not the adults.’ That has certainly not been my experience — especially here in Arizona.”
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2017.
Thanks David. Look at their audit. They are now making “interest only” payments to some loan company at 11% interest with a big old balloon payment coming. Dig into their financials. Carol Burris.
I think you are right about this particular School.
I will however continue to say that the Public School System is not for every kid. From personal experience they can be very rigid and unhelpful when dealing with different kinds of learners and kids with disabilities. Some charter schools are good options for kids/parents.
How is it fair to compare BASIS student demographics to that of the ENTIRE State of Arizona?. How about comparing the schools to the surrounding neighborhoods or the districts in which they reside?
How about comparing Basis student demographics to the demographics of the 65 NYC public middle schools that are allowed to select students and that admit less than 1 in 10 of the students who apply?
http://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-middle-schools-tougher-to-get-into-than-harvard-2014-10
Care to do some public records requests to highlight the demographics of those 65 schools, David, or would that rub you the wrong way, ideologically speaking?
Or perhaps you could do additional public records requests to force transparency of admissions requirements to selective NYC public schools outside of NYC District 2, where an advocacy organization recently FINALLY, after years of effort, forced disclosure of the schools’ un-transparent admissions rubrics:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20161109/upper-east-side/district-2-middle-school-applications-rubrics-released.amp
Does Carol Burris know about the existence of these schools? If so, where is the outrage…or is selectivity / exclusiveness in populations served by schools applying public funds just fine when those schools operate within the public district system? Just not when they operate within the (shudder) Arizona public charter system.
Really tired of the hypocrisy and the false assumptions built into your propaganda, David. Among those false assumptions I include the notion that public district schools are some fabulous paragon of transparency, equity and democratic responsiveness to constituents served. They are NOT that, and anyone who cares to take even the most cursory look at their operations locally or nationally knows it damn well.
Character assassination again?
…which is not to say that there shouldn’t be reporting on what’s wrong with Basis. There should be. But Basis’s problems can be discussed without the notion being conveyed that public district schools are bastions of equity, transparency, and democratic responsiveness. No such bastions exist and they will never be given the chance to exist, if the media stops providing the kind of reporting that asks the public district system to achieve needed reforms.
The ANTI-PRIVATIZATION camp wants us to accept an inaccurate, reductive, Manichaean-style black-and-white representation of a current educational scene that exists in shades of gray. Worse, they adopt a strategy of omitting coverage of the abuses and inequities in the public district system, and in so doing they fail to provide the kind of commentary that democratically controlled institutions need to remain healthy: accurate reporting that ensures that the electorate knows the facts about governance and administrative leadership, so they can make the right decisions when they vote.
While this reductive anti-privatization propaganda dominates media reporting on education, students in the public district system are undefended from all kinds of abuses. For example, locally:
–While David Safier is busy reporting on the evils of Basis, TUSD’s University High School increases its AP requirements, reduces flexibility in its curriculum, proposes to apply funds that were previously used in the fine arts and extracurriculars to pay standardized test fees for students whose families do not qualify for free and reduced lunch, and inappropriately ramps up the pressure in an already high pressure academic environment so it can compete with Basis and milk its students for the AP scores, rankings, and College Board Awards they can earn for the school and district. David Safier is silent.
–Detracking implementations are botched, degrading teaching and learning conditions and producing poor educational outcomes. Magnet programs are underfunded and poorly administered and fail to achieve the metrics which will allow them to retain their magnet status. These kinds of administrative failures give “desegregation” a bad name locally among those who think botched detracking and failed magnets must be what “desegregation” means, because it’s all they’ve seen taking place under that rubric. David Safier fails to play any role in educating the public about what competently implemented desegregation programs look like. Instead, he seems increasingly to promote the view that attempts to desegregate have not worked and should probably be abandoned as impossible:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/12/18/troubling-news-about-desegregation-out-of-new-york
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2017/01/06/tusd-magnet-schools-desegregation-and-the-next-step
(If he’s content to let NYC and TUSD off the hook for integrating, perhaps he should explain why the composition of the student body at Basis concerns him so much.)
–TUSD, which is suffering more than other local districts from the state-wide teacher shortage, fails to apply available 123 and 301 to improve shockingly low teacher salaries and bonuses at the same time that administrative compensation and bonuses skyrocket. David Safier busily spins and makes excuses.
It’s the reservation of privileges for a particular class, corruption, lack of transparency, bad educational methods, disastrously low teacher compensation, and mis-use of public funds that need to be opposed wherever and whenever they occur, in charters, in privates applying vouchers, AND in public district schools. But that seems to be little understood in the current politicized, polarized context.
HEADS UP to those trying to “save” the public district system: there may not be anything left for you to save if you allow the patient to be ravaged by internal infections while you busy yourselves with countering only external threats.