Not long ago, there was a headline in the op-ed section of a nationally known newspaper that read, “Can We Stop Fighting About Charter Schools?”
My initial response to that question was an emphatic “Oh, hell no!”
But then I thought about it and tried to be more open to the possibilities. I, for one, would be willing to stop fighting about charter schools when the last Republican stops trying to get tax breaks for the rich. I’ll stop complaining about charter-school rip-off schemes when the other side stops trying to keep people of color from voting. Heck, I’ll stop fighting about charter schools when the Arizona Legislature stops using taxpayer money to send rich kids to private schools. That seems fair.
The piece’s author, Eve L. Ewing, tries to walk a tightrope pointing out the gaping flaws in the charter system while expressing hope that, with everybody on board, the problems will just magically disappear. Basically, her muffled cry of “Why can’t we all get along?” didn’t work when Rodney King tried it and it’s not going to work now.
Her argument is that charter schools are basically entrenched in the educational system, so why not just shrug and go along. Charters are here to stay, so stop pointing out the hypocrisy behind their creation and the incredibly uneven quality of the education provided by charters. Some people might think that charters are here to stay, but I used to think that there was no way that Shakey’s Pizza and Chicken would ever go out of business and there you go.
Most people who hold education dear know about the sordid political machinations, the vulgar hatred of public-school teachers by Arizona’s elected officials, and the outright criminality that ran unchecked during the first decade of charters in our state. Arizona probably lost hundreds of millions of dollars to outright fraud because the legislators who were in such a rush to get the charter sham going that they forgot (or did they?) to provide any oversight for where the taxpayers’ money was going.
(For those of you who weren’t in Arizona in the 1990s, crooks would rent an abandoned convenience store building, send in a phony list of students who were “attending” their “excellence academy,” cash the check, then skip town. It happened a lot, but nobody knows how many times and with how much loot.)
Nowadays, some of Arizona’s charter schools claim to have a patina of respectability. There is the much-despised BASIS, the high-pressure academic factory that churns out test-taking burnouts. The latest thing is the chain of charter schools owned by hedge funds. At last count, Arizona has at least THREE high schools named American Leadership Academy. Yeah, OK.
I have no doubt that the teachers and parents of charter-school students want those kids to succeed. But if the entire system is built on a false premise and, to this day, is wide open to fraud and mismanagement, it’s ridiculous to suggest that we should just embrace it and move forward.
There was a reader’s comment recently in this publication claiming that “That the Black Lives Matter people would form an alliance against school choice is an abomination.” It’s such a lazy argument to claim that being against charter schools is the same as being against “school choice.”
In fact, Arizona parents have had a choice as to where to send their kids for decades now. And they have always had a choice of sending their kids to private school; they just had to pay for it. Now, “school choice” means using taxpayer money to defray the cost of sending kids from wealthy families to a private school that they were going to attend anyway.
It’s like the anti-vaxxers whose empty arguments revolve around “protecting one’s medical history.” Ain’t nobody cares about your medical history, whether you’ve had gallstones or hammertoes. We just want to know if you did your part to help us get our country back on track. If so, you can go to the movies with us.
One of the numbers that jumped out in the article is that only 19% of all charter schools outperform their (closest in geography) non-charter peers in reading and math. I don’t know, I only got my math education in public schools, but it seems to me that 19% is a pretty crappy number.
Again, to be fair, 19% is better than less than 1%, which is where charter schools stacked up against real public schools for the longest time. So, in the past quarter-century, we’re up to 19%. If (and that’s a big IF) that trend continues, charter schools will be all the way up to mediocre by the year 2061 (which is also the year that Halley’s Comet is coming back).
How many kids will fall through the unmonitored charter-school cracks (as untold thousands have done in the past 25 years) in the Republican legislators’ never-ending quest to give public-school teachers the middle finger? For that matter, how many unscrupulous Republican legislators will bend the law in their favor so that they can enrich themselves at the public trough? And finally, how many years will pass before those of us who truly care about education just give up and accept the charter-school myth?
Sorry, that’s not gonna happen.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2021.
CHARTER SCHOOLS WERE CONJURED BY REPUBLICANTS IN ORDER TO FUNNEL TAX MONEY TO PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS THAT HAD BEEN COLLECTED TO FUND PUBLIC SCHOOLS. IT’S THE TYPICAL CONSERVATIVE BAIT AND SWITCH TECHNIQUE OF USING PUBLIC MONEY TO FUND PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS. PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS BEEN UNDER ATTACK BY REPUBLICUNTS FOR YEARS. “PRIVATIZATION” IS THE GQP CATCH WORD FOR PUBLIC DEBT YIELDING PRIVATE PROFIT! SCREW CHARTER SCHOOLS AND THE WHORES THEY RODE IN ON!
According to the National Education Association, New York State is the top spender in education at $24,000 student per year while Arizona ranks 49th at $9,000 per year.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, here are our 8th grade math scores:
…………………………………………………Arizona………………..New York State
Black…………………………………………..267………………………..255
White………………………………………….295………………………..292
Asian…………………………………………..314……………………….309
Hispanic……………………………………..275…………………………272
The average spending by charter schools in Arizona for the 200,000 students in charter schools is about $1,500 less per student than in the district schools (Tom, you can only call them public schools in Arizona because in Arizona district schools are open to the public. In most other states, these systematically racist institutions, developed after the civil war to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods still exclude students outside of the district.) That $1,500 difference is a $300 million per year less burden on business taxpayers enabling them to keep the Arizona job machine active for our graduates.
The same legislators created school choice among districts who also created charter schools. The same legislators who voted against charter schools also voted against district school choice.
There are incredible education stories in Arizona not being told because of institutional blindness as yours. You scream in agony over a few pennies while a gold mine is within reach.
For example, the Phoenix Elementary School district is the school choice juggernaut of Arizona with 25% of their students coming from outside their district. The Stanford Education project rated them in the top 1% of the nation in academic gains.
What do New York State students receive for the extra $32 billion per year they spend? Nothing except a state economy that hasn’t created a single job in the last 8 years. In fact, the money has to be badly damaging their education results.
Not only do we see academic benefits, there are huge social benefits. In 1992, the year before we started school choice in Arizona, juveniles in Arizona murdered 72 people. Over the last five years, that number has averaged less than 20 despite a quintupling of our at-risk student population in the last 30 years.
Yes, it is an abomination that Black Lives Matter is opposing school choice.
The best is yet to come and it will happen first in Arizona. Take a look at this video to get a glimpse of that future:
https://youtu.be/bJYTGxgY-Gw
“the entire system is built on a false premise and, to this day, is wide open to fraud and mismanagement, it’s ridiculous to suggest that we should just embrace it and move forward.”
Danehy, that is the definition of public schools. Critical race Theory and the Marxist power try will help charters flourish.
Thank you.
Thank you Tom for telling it like it is.
Public money/private money.
Explain how the government lost 400 billion in unemployment money.
They tried to.
As I have said to many people who say to me, “Aren’t you in favor of school choice.” I said “I am 100% in favor of a parent’s choice of schools.” I am 100% against the taxpayers funding every school “choice”. Despite the nonsensical Supreme Court ruling, that if you launder taxpayer money enough it becomes clean enough to spend on private schools, the State Constitution still, in plain language, prohibits public money for private schools. And everyone from charter advocates to our own public school advocacy groups, stop calling charter schools, public schools. They are not. They are private schools spending public money. Sometimes on Manhattan penthouses. So happy to see the Huppster commenting again. It makes Huffman look like the greatest Superintendent in State history.