For all the uncounted taxpayer money that gets shoveled their way and for all the unwarranted praise that vomits out of the mouths of the kid-haters in the State Legislature, the fact remains that the average charter school is still crappier than the average real public school.

That’s the way it’s been since charter schools were first dumped on Arizona 20 years ago. And, while the gap might be closing a bit, it’s the way it’s always going to be for a couple reasons.

One is that the charter schools at the bottom are way, way, WAY worse than anything that even a bumbling public-school district would allow to happen.

The second is that the charter schools at the top (and, quite honestly, there are a few) are few and far between because there are just so many well-off white kids from two-parent families to go around.

For those of you who weren’t around in the 1990s (or weren’t paying attention), the public-school opponents in the Legislature were in such a headlong rush to try out the latest right-wing crackpot idea that they rushed charter schools into existence without providing an apparatus to see how much taxpayer money was being thrown at a solution to a problem that didn’t exist or how that money was being spent.

This is not an exaggeration: People would literally rent an abandoned convenience store and set up a “school,” preferably one with “Excellence” and/or “Academy” in its name. Then they would compile a list of students, some real, some not; some who actually lived in Arizona at the time, some who didn’t.

The operator/scammer would present the list to the state of Arizona, which would promptly (and without any oversight whatsoever) cut a check for tens of thousands of dollars. The check would be cashed and the scammer would be gone.

This absolutely happened and do you know how many times it happened?

Well, neither do I, because nobody kept track of anything. How much taxpayer money was stolen as those in the Legislature winked and nodded? Ten million dollars? Almost certainly. A hundred million dollars? Possibly, but there’s no way of knowing.

What we do know is that the number of fake charter-school operators who blatantly stole taxpayer money and went to jail for it is the same number of people named Joe Arpaio who will spend time behind bars for their crimes.

To be fair, the fly-by-nights aren’t that prevalent anymore (not because the Legislature cracked down on them; there still isn’t any oversight to speak of).

Over the past decade or so, the charter-school cheerleaders in Phoenix have codified the scamming into law. The ones at the bottom who used to split at the first opportunity now wait a year or two, and it’s legal. Meanwhile, the ones at the top (the BASISes of the world) have so much cover provided them by lawmakers that they can basically get away with just about anything—over and over!—so why would they want to stop? A scam that’s written into law is no longer a scam…so much.

Nevertheless, we taxpayers—conservatives and liberals alike—should be shocked at what some (most?) charter-school operators have been getting away with. A recent report by the Grand Canyon Institute details charter-school practices that are stunning in their scope and audacity.

Among the findings:

• Three-fourths of Arizona’s charter school holders engage in related-party transactions that did not fit the definition of “saving money” or “efficiency,” an oft-cited reason given for allowing charters to engage in this practice. Think about that. Three out of every four operators use your money to buy books or software—at wildly inflated prices—from companies owned by their wives or brothers or cousins or mistresses. If a public-school employee did that, he’d go to prison. If a charter-school operator does that, he gets an award from the hypocrites at the Goldwater Institute.

• In 2013-14, 48 percent of Arizona’s charter school expenditures for contracts, leases and rents were owed (committed) to for-profit companies that employed or were owned by the charter holder or a related party.

• Here’s my favorite: Numerous cases were found where charter administrators’ salaries are shockingly high for the number of students they oversee. They found one case where a guy who was in charge of 90 students at one location got paid as much as a public-school superintendent in charge of a district with 23,000 students. Wouldn’t it be nice to set your own salary?

And, oh yeah, the guy’s school received failing marks from the Arizona Board of Charter Schools. And if you can’t satisfy that fake-ass board, that’s like getting a D-minus from your mom when you’re home-schooled.

One last thing: For those who point to the handful of charter schools that are doing well, I have two things to say.

It’s about damn time and how hard can that be? Getting motivated kids (with motivated parents) to succeed in school is like making an uncontested lay-up on an eight-foot basket. Getting that kid from the broken home who has to dodge drug dealers on the way home to even show up to school tomorrow is hitting the last-second three-pointer with multiple hands in your face.

Despite what our legislators think, kids aren’t a commodity and education should be a sacred public trust.

This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2017.

15 replies on “Danehy”

  1. In the countries where charter schools and tax vouchers are successful, there is strong central control and oversight, which is missing from the US versions. Great article in the Economist a few months back on this topic, one which lays out all sides of the argument. Netherlands has the number seven best educational system in the world and uses both religious and governmental schooling. The mix works only because of a strong oversight from their central government, something which Betsy Devos seems to miss. By the way, the Economist article gives the US a number thirty-seven rating. Ask yourselves where China and other competitors are before opening your mouth about how wonderful charter schools are.

  2. This member of a two-parent white household loves our charter school. They have discipline, and dress standards, and high teacher-student ratio, and teachers who haven’t been completely beaten down by the system. Those are all horrible things, I know. If we were proper liberals we should have our kids in the local 2,000 kid mediocre-or-worse high school. They could be part of a social engineering experiment by the pols on the TUSD school board.

    * As always, full disclosure, I am that most evil thing in the world: a straight, white male.

  3. Define sacred public trust. This language indicates you are not genuine in seeking accountability, responsibility for waste of taxpayer dollars

  4. “And if you can’t satisfy that fake-ass board, that’s like getting a D-minus from your mom when you’re home-schooled.” LOL

  5. A few years ago I had a temp job at a charter school on Prince in which not one single teacher presented lessons to students. Packets were given to students who were interested in them, but most kids just sat around all day and talked with their friends. I’ve worked in numerous public schools as well, and almost every teacher I encountered was trying to do his or her best with the circumstances handed to them.

  6. Charter Schools is just another way for politicians to funnel public money into private coffers. They could care less about the education that students get. Charter schools allow the owners to continue funneling money back into the politicians re-election campaigns so that both parties continue to benefit from their mutual agreement. Also charter schools were devised by Republicans to get rid of or weaken the Teachers Union as well. Killing two birds with the same stone is a Republican trait.

  7. I dare you to actually go visit a charter school in Tucson before you write another article that is so anti-charter school. My son attends a charter high school that has a location in mid-town and one in the Northwest, and no, it is not Basis. The kids/parents choose to attend for various reasons, but many need to have jobs, so a school that has two different sessions is helpful to their situations, they can go to school and then go to work in the early afternoon. Some kids don’t like or fit into the traditional culture of a high school having, been bullied by other students (which is NOT tolerated at this HS) or the they just want to graduate asap since this is possible to do it at your own pace. There are also special needs kids that the public schools can’t seem to find a place for (that’s my situation) and they are a lot smaller and more adaptable then the public school. So get the chip of your shoulder and go beyond your hate of Basis and see what other low profile charter schools are all about, who they serve and why they are there.

  8. Why do you dislike my comments??? Because you would rather agree with his rhetoric than actually think about the possible positive affects good charter schools may have?

  9. Think nothing of it Azmom. I’ve been around here a long time, you get used to it. I could praise the virtues of Mother Teresa and people would hit dislike. And don’t ask these people to think on their own. If Tommy says it, that’s good enough for them.

  10. It’s interesting – a friend has for years claimed that throwing money at the problem will not help. Now that there are private schools and vouchers, he says he’s ‘willing to try anything’. Especially throwing money at the problem.

  13. Azmom,

    Don’t worry about the dislikes. When they are higher than 9, its because one person came through with an anonymizer and disliked you 15 times. Your 7 likes are very solid. Only about 1 in ten readers register an opinion.

    Your experience with charter schools is typical of probably 70,000 parents whose children would never survive a district school.

    We can see this huge effect in the social data. Since we started charter schools in 1992, murders by juveniles have dropped from 70 to 20 despite our at-risk population rising from less than 100,000 to more than 400,000.

    And, it’s not just murdering, it is all juvenile crime. Our juvenile detention centers in Arizona have just about vanished.

  14. Wow, John, with that comment, you still are proving that you don’t know anything about anything.

    Keep up the shitty work.

  15. Response to Hupp Needs to Vanish:

    Did juveniles not murder 70 people in 1992?

    Did they not murder 20 people in 2014?

    Did our at-risk population not hugely increase?

    Do well-run schools influence the social behavior of students?

    Can teachers who care influence the social behavior of students?

    Is the relationship between schools and parents in Arizona the best in the nation? Believe it or not, the answer to that question is possibly yes.

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