I’ve been wondering lately, has the growth in the number of students in Arizona’s charter schools slowed significantly? This is just speculation, built on wisps and indications I’ve noticed over the past few years. But it may be that our charter schools have completed their rapid expansion and reached something like an equilibrium in their percentage of the overall student population.
I’ve been sensing this for awhile, but a possible confirmation came from an article titled Charter School Enrollment Continues To Rise In Arizona. It sounds like it should be an affirmation of the continued growth in the number of students in charters, but a bit of number crunching makes it seem like it’s damning the increases with faint praise.
About 180,000 students currently attend charter schools in Arizona. That’s an increase of 8,000 students in the last year.
At the same time, district school enrollment has stayed the same.
Let’s look at those numbers. Adding 8,000 students amounts to a 4.7 percent charter enrollment increase across the state. That’s not bad, adding a little under five percent in a year. But with 180,000 students, charters have less than 20 percent of the state’s total student enrollment. Over a million students attend district schools. The 8,000 student increase amounts to less than one percent of the district school population.
That 180,000 student, number is on the Arizona Charter Schools Association website. But the association’s 20 Years of Charters publication says the charter population was 190,000 in 2013-14. If that figure is correct, charters have actually lost 10,000 students from a few years ago. If it’s a projection, it means the association was far too optimistic about enrollment growth. An enrollment chart in the publication shows increases have slowed since charter schools first opened in the mid-1990s.
This makes sense to me. Charters have been around for 20 years. They aren’t a new, exciting big thing anymore. And they haven’t lived up to their promise of creating a Brave New Education where students’ achievement leaves district schools in the dust. Similar students tend to show similar achievement in both types of schools — a bit more here, a bit less there. Charter chains like BASIS and Great Hearts which appeal to a mainly white population of highly educated parents with high-achieving children have done well and are used to indicate that charters are wildly successful, even though their students’ achievement tracks with similar high-achieving students elsewhere, but those schools aren’t a source of rapid growth. They’re only a small portion of the charter population, and they haven’t added large numbers of students lately. (The BASIS corporation appears to be moving away from charters and toward the more profitable private school sector in other states, and even in China, so they can’t be counted on to add many charters in the future.)
Charters aren’t likely to grow much outside of urban and suburban areas. They need a reasonably dense population to draw enough students. Sparsely populated areas present almost insurmountable transportation obstacles for charters, which need to pick up a few students from this school and a few students from that school to fill their classrooms. Arizona’s urban and suburban areas are reasonably charter saturated. I’m not sure they can fill many new schools.
I don’t know if I’m right that charter growth will continue to slow if it’s left to its own devices, though that seems likely to me. But I do know that charter supporters, including Governor Ducey and the Republican-majority legislature, want to put their thumbs on the privatization scales to boost the increase in charter enrollment numbers. Watch for this year’s school budget rewrite to funnel more money to charters, meaning less for districts. Watch for a law that will give financial incentives for “successful” charter chains—meaning those with high test scores—to open new schools. And further in the future, watch for legislative pushes to convert “failing schools” into charter schools, or even convert entire districts into charter districts, something that’s already happening in other states. All those moves would artificially inflate charter school numbers.
This article appears in Dec 29, 2016 – Jan 4, 2017.
We’ll be adding one more to that enrollment, thank you very much.
I know it will infuriate you but it’s so nice to have the choice of a smaller school that matches our values. Otherwise our only choice would be the very large and relentlessly mediocre government high school where there is no dress code, little or no discipline, and very little adult supervision of kids. Despite dedicated teachers, government high schools are always forced toward the lowest common denominator.
Let parents have some choices for their kids. As I’ve stated here before, the pubic schools aren’t for everyone. Having 4 kids go through, I Know! The school districts vary on what and who they are good for. Marana was useless for my son who is on the autism spectrum, no help.
Is there a directory of charter schools in Pima County for us to choose from, or can you attend one of your choice if you provide your own transportation?
Voila, a slowdown in charter growth was inevitable. And, competition was always about improving district schools, not destroying them. However, beware on your analysis – 8,000 students times $5,000 per student is $40 million transferred into the charter stream, not the district stream. I recently watched an incredibly sophisticated analysis of school competition by Matthew Strom of the Chandler School district on local cable channel. CUSD knows the exact data by school, by grade level of students in charters from their territory, from other territories, students leaving to charters, students coming back from charters.
With 75% of parents rating their child’s school excellent, up from 38% in 1998 and triple the nationwide average, CUSD is holding their own. But, even they are slightly vulnerable with 25% rating them good or satisfactory. Only excellence counts.
Even Tucson Unified is above national averages, but simply being above average is not good enough, they are losing over 500 students a year, a whole school. That process will continue until they are an excellent school district.
What’s coming next is going to be a true “Race to the Top.” Which school district and which charter system is going to be the first to achieve a 95% excellent rating? Here is a predication. Ten years from now, we will not have 450+ charter systems, we will have less than 20. We have three school districts which keep meticulously accurate records of their parents rating the quality of their child’s school. All three, Chandler, Mesa and Vail are higher than the ten school districts which NICHE rated as the ten best school districts in America.
Hocus pocus, the invisible hand magically solves all the tough problems that some used to think were solved by recruiting and retaining well educated, thoroughgoing professionals in our teaching workforce and exercising judicious oversight of the education system through state level regulatory mechanisms.
This mode of running a state “education system” is about as real and reliable as it sounds: hocus pocus schmocus.
We have one of the worst teacher shortages in the nation and parent satisfaction surveys don’t tell you jackshit about the quality of education delivered. Parent satisfaction surveys are poor indicators of student learning in any context, but they are even worse indicators in a state like Arizona where the % of the parent population holding college degrees is lower than in other states.
Someone advised that you read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty a while back, Huppenthal. Did you do so?
Districts like TUSD are not improved by competition. They are weakened for all the reasons Hirschman stated. Now a district serving close to 50,000 students is in a death spiral from which it will not recover by the introduction of “parent satisfaction surveys.” You and others who know little about the professional field of education and bought into this absurd, ideologically-driven, magical-thinking approach to running our schools are responsible.
Spoken like a true liberal government employee. We the people have had enough. Keep your schools and run them into the ground, but the rest of us choose to get out.
Who are you addressing, “Death of Public Ed”? Huppenthal? He would be an appropriate recipient for your message. He was the Superintendent of PUBLIC Instruction in Arizona. What did he do with his role? Made robo calls to citizens letting them know public funds were available for them to apply in private institutions.
Here’s a novel idea for Arizona: perhaps one shouldn’t take the role of captain of the ship, when the ship is not one you feel you can keep from sinking. Many of us feel that seeking the role of captain and then letting the ship go to hell while you direct passengers to the lifeboats is not an honorable way to comport yourself in the job.
(Hey Huppenthal: if you’re such a fan of applying public funds in the Catholic school system, which is the primary beneficiary of the tax credit program in this state, perhaps you should consult the captain of the Catholic ship some time. Pope Francis has had some choice things to say about the efficacy of the “invisible hand” in achieving social justice in recent days…you might find his remarks interesting when contemplating what you chose to do with the education system in this state.)
You public school supporters should be glad the charter and private school folks found a way out of the failed schools and are very satisfied with the alternatives. Keep preaching social justice, global warming and outcome based education. All those kids will be left behind.
“Parents don’t know jack***” ?
That’s your opinion and may be true of some parents. But that opinion, so strongly held by not only you but most policymakers and voters is the primary reason education can’t improve.
In 47 years of polling by Gallup and phi delta kappa, the percentage of parents rating their child’s school an A, is 24%, the second lowest in that history. The ratings of TUSD are a little bit higher.
If the opinions of 45,000 TUSD parents and 62 millIon nationwide are worthlesd, certainly yours is worthless and hopefully everyone should treat it accordingly and think more deeply and positively about the importance of fully engaging and supporting students and parents. And, expressing that importance by measuring and improving it.
Focusing on test scores hasn’t worked in 50 years. Time to quit beating that dead horse. The productivity of the American school system has collapsed by 15% since the year 2000 and no one has even noticed.
In their quest to excell public school admin and staff relagated parents to an adversarial roll. How is that working out for them?
jhuppent@hotmail.com –
You took the parent survey quote out of context and re-wrote it, which significantly distorted the meaning.
The correct quote: “…parent satisfaction surveys don’t tell you jackshit ABOUT THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION DELIVERED. Parent satisfaction surveys are POOR INDICATORS OF STUDENT LEARNING in any context, but they are even worse indicators in a state like Arizona where the % of the parent population holding college degrees is lower than in other states.”
Your misquote: “Parents don’t know jack****?”
Most parents know a lot about their children and they should absolutely be treated with respect and engaged as partners in the enterprise of educating students. But most parents are not professional educators. Most have never had a class in child development or pedagogy. Most know nothing about the best methods to use to maximize a child’s progress in reading or math. When it comes to their “satisfaction,” some will only be satisfied when they see a school using the methods that were used in their own education. If you know the improvements made to math instruction after the NCTM standards were developed you will know that “how it was done in my day” can not always be used as a reliable indicator of good instruction.
I received my own K-12 education in a blue state with an excellent public school system. For the past 20 years, both as a teacher and as a parent, I’ve had inside views of every type of education currently available in Arizona: public, charter, and private (both Independent schools and Catholic schools).
My main takeaway from 20 years of observation: the quality of education delivered in this state is insufficiently monitored and overseen. My kids have had some excellent teachers here and there, now and then, but lack of uniformity in achieving minimum standards of competence is unacceptable, and, in cases where at least one parent in a family is not a professional educator themselves who is able to compensate at will for whatever deficiencies there may be in the various classrooms their children pass through, it can make for serious academic problems for the students in a system where uniform quality from one grade and one school to the next is not systemically ensured by proper credentialing requirements and proper administrative oversight.
Year after year the Arizona education “system” sadly handicaps both the functioning of tens of thousands of individual students and the overall functioning of the state’s society and economy.
(An aside to “Concerned Mom”: I’ve seen parents treated as adversaries in public schools and in private schools. When the schools are insufficiently responsible and professionalized, they often have to take an adversarial position vis a vis those who raise reasonable concerns. In most cases, they have no ground to stand on in defending their improper practices and insufficiently qualified staff, so aggression against those asking questions is the default response, and they know that there is no external authority capable of holding them accountable when they abuse parents.)
(An aside to “Death of Public Ed”: the private and charter system does not have the capacity to receive every student who wants out of the public system, and it never will. More than 80% of our students are educated in public schools. If you don’t want to live in a democracy where more than 80% of the population has received an inadequate education — a circumstance whose dangers to the body politic should be obvious — you’ve got to take seriously the need to ensure excellent services are delivered in your public schools. This is something Huppenthal and his ilk either did not accept the responsibility to do or did not understand how to do. The invisible hand simply does not work as a mechanism for maintaining a high functioning school system across the board in every type of institution, public and private, and this has long been understood by people whose own educations have been sufficient to help them understand the difference between “Hocus Pocus” and sound administration of public institutions.)
The NCTM standards were developed in 2000. That is an interesting and epic year for our US education system. Since 2000, the cohort academic gains on NAEP have collapsed by 15%. So, take 2015 math scores for 8th grade and subtract 2011 4th grade scores and that number is 15% less than a similar exercise done in 2000. That difference is the best measure we have for the productivity of the American education system.
You are offering your anecdotal observations on quality, but that is all that they are – anecdotal.
In Arizona, our African American 8th graders score first in the nation in math, our Hispanics ranked 11th and our white students ranked 6th. Our rankings in reading were 14th, 7th and 29th.
This isn’t a story, this is gold standard data – NAEP.
When the determination of “success” or “failure” rests exclusively on stats and rankings, much that is relevant to what happens to students in schools is abstracted out of the analysis.
I’ll give you one example that has been discussed in Tucson. During the 2013-2014 school year, all the high school sophomores at University High School in TUSD were forced to take AP Chemistry, though not all of them wanted to take the class and not all of them had had the math prerequisite the College Board recommended for the class. (Most other local high schools require that the math prerequisite be taken and that an entire year of chemistry be taken before you can enroll in AP Chemistry.) There was so much negative reaction to this policy that the Parents’ Association at the school forced the school’s administration to report the exam results in a fall Parents’ Association Board meeting. The results showed this: both the raw numbers and the percents of students taking the class who earned 4’s and 5’s on the year-end AP exam (the only scores on the exam that earn students college credit at the University of Arizona) went down. The number of 3’s (the lowest score on the exam that the College Board calls “passing,” but which does not earn students college credit at the University of Arizona) went up. The number of 1’s and 2’s (flunking scores) went up significantly.
If the Parents’ Association hadn’t forced the scores to be published, no one would have known there was anything wrong with the course. The district advertises the AP course policy changes that have been made under the current administration as successes because the number of 3’s (technically passing scores) went up as a result. Policy changes like this earned TUSD an award from the College Board for increasing the number of students taking and passing AP exams. (Of course the College Board rewards this behavior because they benefit from an increase in the # of exam fees paid to their company.) But in advertising this “success” to the community, TUSD neglected to mention that in the case of the AP Chemistry policy change this “gain” had been achieved through forcing losses on scores of students:
— the students who could have taken the course and received 4s and 5s if the instruction hadn’t been watered down to try to help kids who hadn’t had the math prerequisite understand the content and achieve 3s
–the kids who didn’t want to take AP Chemistry and got 1s and 2s on the exam — they could have used this space in their schedule to take an AP course relevant to their interests, in which they could have achieved a passing or a college-credit-qualifying exam score, not a “flunk.”
(In 2014, there were 11 more 3’s than in the previous year, but 9 fewer 4’s and 5’s, and 62 more flunking scores (1s and 2s). I call that a net loss, in terms of effect of the policy on students.)
In a properly run education system, there is oversight that prevents this kind of stat-and-ranking-manipulating, student-abusing behavior from taking place in the publicly funded school systems that 80% of our population use. But not in Arizona, where abuse goes on without anyone holding authorities in schools and districts (and privates and charter schools) accountable. When it comes to public school districts like TUSD serving tens of thousands of students — 1/3 of all the students in Pima County — we have to rely on bloggers like the Three Sonorans to let us know that TUSD is not following mandatory reporting requirements on sexual abuse, or is hoarding 301 monies rather than dispensing them in teacher bonuses as it should, or is lying to the public about not having awarded $10K bonuses to central administrators, or is misleading the public about what the desegregation authority actually requires of the district. Bloggers like Three Sonorans report, but what does it matter? The Department of Education has no response. There is no enforcement of any reasonable standard in this state — not standards of financial transparency, not standards of constructive administrative behavior, and certainly not standards that would guarantee humane and educationally beneficial policies in the schools.
You can call this kind of information about what is really going on at the ground level in our Arizona school districts “anecdotal” if you like. The fact remains that the stats and rankings administrators and education officials like to advertise to the public as demonstrations of the “success” of their policies are often misleading. In reality, one of the most significant measures of whether a state-wide program of “education” is succeeding is the degree to which it is able to maintain a fully professionally qualified, effective and engaging teaching force in its schools. That is what matters most to whether the progress of any given student in the system will be maximized: is there an effective teacher in the classroom/s he or she will be utilizing that year?
I think you know what grade Arizona, a state that has chosen to starve its public schools and brutally underpay its teaching workforce, receives on that measure of quality: F.
It would be wise to heed the words of Diane Ravitch, whose 2013 book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement…” hit the nail on the head: “School choice turns parents into consumers, not citizens…We have a civic responsibility to support public education.” Along the same lines, she said that the most important function of public education “is to prepare children for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.”
Therein lies the quandry. How can we if what “Supporting Public Ed” said above is true? We can’t force TUSD to care about our children and we can’t get voters to wake up and remove them. What is left to do? Take your kids and go. They kiled public ed, not me.
Both Starcommand and Concerned Mom are correct.
Starcommand is right that as citizens, we need to support public education. Part of “supporting” it is telling the truth about what state it is in and what is ACTUALLY happening in the schools. Another part of “supporting” it is keeping the pressure on local and state level officials to do what is necessary to IMPROVE it.
Concerned Mom is right that as parents, until the Pima County Democratic Party gets a clue and starts holding malfeasant TUSD governing board members and the chief administrator they oversee ACCOUNTABLE, we as parents need to continue removing students from TUSD. I’ve watched two election cycles in this district closely now, 2014 and 2016. In 2014 both malfunctioning incumbents were re-elected, Hicks and Grijalva. In 2016, two of the three malfunctioning incumbents were re-elected, Stegeman and Foster, and a third candidate who knows very little about the actual workings of the district was elected to a powerful swing vote position, over three candidates that were all more well informed about TUSD and more qualified to serve on its Board.
When the electorate in a democratically controlled district serving almost 50,000 students is this poorly informed about what kind of leadership it will take to improve services to students, that is a very serious problem. And this blogger (David Safier) is a devoted servant of a local Democratic Party that actively seeks to block the delivery of accurate information to the public and to distract them from information they should be taking into account when they vote, like Kristel Foster and her support of the outsourcing of substitute teachers and her receipt of a large campaign donation from the for-profit company to which labor was outsourced.
When will you admit, David, that what you are doing here month after month and year after year is the very thing that undermines the legitimacy of the public school system you supposedly support? Telling the TRUTH about it is necessary, if the democratic control mechanisms that are to ensure its proper functioning are to be given the chance to work as they should.
Response to “Supporting Public Ed Means Supporting Local Reform”
Your description is not anecdotal at all, it is replete with measurement and your conclusions are correct – the school enacted defective policy that resulted in worse outcomes for almost everyone.
It is likely that TUSD administrators were reacting to changes made to the US News and World Report scoring for the Best High Schools in America. 25% of that score is based on the percentage of students taking at least one AP class. However, their strategy resulted in them going down, not up. From 2015 to 2016, they dropped from #8 to #24. But, one sparrow doesn’t make a spring.
There is a bigger issue here than a simple one step policy by a single school in response to a national ranking scoring system. Schools are always reshaping themselves to accommodate education culture. Is that culture scientific, or is it mythical? Take the US New and World report ranking system. The system is entirely based on Advanced Placement exams. Understandable, there is a huge correlation between AP results and college success. However, when NELS followed 8,000 students from 8th grade till adulthood, the correlation with college success vanished for all AP classes with the exception of Calculus.
For all the hoopla, AP isn’t likely helpful to any student for school nor should it be a determining factor for a parent making a choice about a school.
You can see this when examining the most spectacular success story of US News – BASIS schools. The BASIS school system has schools ranking 2nd, 3rd and 6th among the 20,000 plus schools analyzed by US News – amazing. However, when you analyze their results of BASIS as a system and compare them with other Arizona schools, a different story emerges. There are over 50 schools with larger scale score gains in reading and math than the BASIS system in Arizona.
Further, when you examine their student population as a cohort over 5 years, they average the 58th Student Growth Percentile, a sizable chunk above the statewide average. However, when you examine their students when they are not in BASIS, those students average the 56th percentile. Scientifically, there’s not much evidence that these top ranked schools are even above average or that their AP strategy is beneficial to their students.
The very first school I examined as a State Senator in 1993, had the highest test scores in the state, over the 94th percentile. However, as I examined those scores, I realized that they had gone down from the year before. Finally, it dawned on me that I might be looking at a below average school.
Nothing much is what it seems in public education.
Mr Safier
You are conflating different numbers either out of ignorance or negligence.
190,000 would include pre-school and fully count K.
180,000 is ADM from the state would not include preschool and only counts part time student fractionally, like .5 for K.
For FY 2015 charters ADM increased 7.3% while the state student enrollment overall increased 3.98%. The FY 2014 increase for charters was 7.1%, while AZ Charters said enrollment grew at 5.8% for FY 2017 at the same time that district enrollment grew at 0.5%.
Finally you wrote…
“Over a million students attend district schools.”
Where did you get this statistic from? According to ADE for FY 2016, Oct 1 enrollment was…
Charter School 175535
Elementary School District 253542
Juvenile Facility 210
School District – Accommodation 2102
School District – High School 98488
School District – Unified 594838
Arizona 1124715
That would be 948970 for district schools. Not over a million.
Charter Schools: Report profits. Report salaries. Report all budget lines. Or don’t accept tax money.