An exhaustive new study by the Grand Canyon Institute and Arizonans for Charter School Accountability concludes that many charter schools spend far more on administrative costs per student than school districts. The higher costs amount to $128 million a year. To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers looked at every Arizona charter school and school district’s finances by poring over the Annual Financial Reports they submitted to the state for the 2014-15 school year, which means the results are based on the school or school district’s own reporting.
I’ve looked over the AFRs of individual schools a number of times—they can be found on the Department of Education’s website—and analyzed the kind of information used in the study, but I’ve never gone through the laborious task of compiling AFR data for all Arizona schools. As a result of the thoroughness of the study, the conclusions it reaches can be confirmed by looking over the data. Some tables in the study pull out data on specific school districts, charter schools and charter school chains, and others include information about every district and charter school in the state, allowing readers and researchers to check the study’s conclusions and use the data for further research.
This is a 64 page report filled with data and analysis, far too much information for one post, so I’ll probably be digging into it in further posts. But for now, here is some of the information highlighted by the authors:
• Charters spend an average of $1403 per student on administration. School districts average $628, less than half.
• School district spending is analyzed by the state Auditor General, but charter school spending is not. The state Charter School Board is the only agency responsible for the oversight of charter schools, and it doesn’t analyze charter school spending.
• Though smaller charters would be expected to have larger administrative costs because of the administrative inefficiency common to smaller institutions, in fact, some of the large charter school chains are the biggest spenders on administration per student.
• BASIS charter schools are especially big spenders on administration. However, since most of their funds end up at BASIS.ed, a for-profit Education Management Organization, we have no way of knowing how that money is spent because it’s hidden behind a for-profit firewall.
A clear takeaway from the study is that the state needs greater transparency from its charters and also needs to exercise greater oversight. This study of administrative costs is just one example of areas where we know too little about how charter schools operate.
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2016.
Keep the heat on those charters, David. They definitely need looking into. I look forward to your future articles on the AFRs.
(I don’t mean to divert discussion in this comment stream from the topic of your blog, but may I suggest that you consider taking on in one of your future blogs another matter of local concern relating to how taxes levied in support of our local education system are used, mis-used, or unused by the various parties that draw on them? Please evaluate for us the claims made in Monday evening’s TUSD State of the District address. Since you’ve shown repeatedly that you are interested in racial justice, I’d be particularly interested in having your thoughts on the “desegregation case myth busting” section of the presentation, where the TUSD administrator who has a more than $400K per year administrative compensation package (no, I didn’t say “salary,” I said “compensation package”, including various bonuses, expense accounts, unused vacation days he is allowed to turn in for cash, etc.) gives us his perspective on what is “true” and “false” in the public’s perception of the district’s relationship to deseg funding. Amazingly, he lists as one of his “accomplishments” reducing the amount spent trying to achieve Unitary Status Plan goals by $5million, in a state with one of the lowest per-pupil funding rates in the nation where the legislature persists in refusing to pay the schools money the courts have ordered them to pay. These questions do come to mind: why, in this context, would an extraordinarily generously compensated Superintendent in a shockingly underfunded school district 1) accept such a compensation increase, and, 2) during roughly the the same time period, hand $5million that could potentially have been used to enhance services to students back to taxpayers, voluntarily? Perhaps you can answer that for us, while you’re on the topic of how our education tax dollars are allocated, mis-allocated and / or NOT allocated.)
He won’t do it.
That’s nothing compared to the hundreds of millions, BILLIONS being spent on children of illegal aliens.
And at least with Charters, the parents aren’t trapped into sending their children to the liberal indoctrination centers to study white guilt.
So glad to get the Weekly online and such an impressive piece by David Safier and the first commenter as well. We moved here in 1965 from NYC, kids walking to great little Wrightstown Elementary. Now… Wrightstown has been .razed and is surrounded by Charters. “a state with one of the lowest per pupil funding rates in the nation where the legislature persists in refusing to pay the schools money the courts hae ordered them to pay” (from first commenter). That says it all.
That is $128 million that did not get to TUSD to waste and spend on racist classes. I can live with that.
David once again you shed light on a state-wide issue – that of charter schools, how they spend the taxpayers dollars, and now the legislature is considering vouchers for all. This will only compound the problem. Several commenters seem to conflate the issue of charters with TUSD. They are separate issues, the good people within the TUSD boundaries need to address that issue but it is separate from the State, the Legislature and Governors continuing attempts to de-fund our neighborhood schools
The report is faulty in many ways including…
1) It does not compare apples to apples like the AZ Auditor General does. Comparing the average charter admin expenses to the average school district is meaningless. Example, Baboquivari Unified School District #40 with 951 students (likely larger than 95% of charter schools) spent a whopping $2,680 per student in admin costs.
2) Charter schools must spend a significant portion of their administrative costs on facilities, either via a lease or interest on a loan. District schools get ‘free’ facilities and their bond costs via property taxes are paid directly to the bondholders, bypassing the administration expense category. Comparing the two is unfair.
3) Charter schools classify their spending differently. The author completely ignores that fact that charter schools use this system…
Uniform System of Financial Records for Arizona Charter Schools (USFRCS)
While district schools use this one…
Uniform System of Financial Records for Arizona School Districts (USFR)
Comparing the results is not the same when they are using different systems.
4) District schools get significant funds from the Federal government which goes to the classroom, while charter school get very little. Again apples to oranges.
One more point, if charters as ‘wasting’ this money on administrative costs, then why are they showing better results than district schools…
“NAEP
Recent data indicate that Arizona’s charter students outperformed nearly every other state on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress. On eighth grade mathematics, for instance, Arizona charter students scored in a statistical dead heat with Massachusetts, the highest scoring of the 50 states.
AzMERIT
•Charter students outperformed the state average of students passing the test in ELA and Math by 5-12 percentage points in every grade level.
•49 of the top 50 LEAs on the English/Language Arts exam are charters, when looking at percent of students passing the test.
•49 of the top 50 LEAs on the Math exam are charters, when looking at percent of students passing the test.”
https://azcharters.org/arizona-charters-academically-exceeding-in-2015/
Is it fair to compare average test results of 15% of the students versus the other 85% when the demographics are completely different? No it is not, just like comparing average administrative costs of charters vs districts is not fair.
Michael: Charters can be as successful as they are because in this state, the legislature is allowed to underfund public schools and to be negligent in requiring them to be transparent and high functioning. The issue of how successful charters are (and how much demand there is for vouchers) is directly related to how dysfunctional TUSD is. Where do you think the 1,000 TUSD students who have been leaving the district every year for the past decade and more have gone? Some of them have open enrolled in other districts, but many of them enroll in charters and some of them use vouchers to make private schools more affordable.
If you have trouble understanding the relationship, try thinking of it this way. A teenage girl growing up in a negligent home moves in with her boyfriend, who is no great shakes and doesn’t treat her very well. Who is at fault? The boyfriend for attracting the teenager away from her family and then not treating her well, CPS for not identifying a case of neglect before it produced this result, or the family for being negligent enough to make her want to leave home? In this analogy the girl represents the students leaving TUSD, CPS is the AZ legislature, and the boyfriend is the charter schools taking in refugees from low functioning, negligent public districts. Who is at fault?
Yes, charters are not transparent. They spend too much on administration. Many of them, like Basis, don’t have fully qualified professional educators delivering instruction to their students. Why would people choose this for their children? Because the schools they are leaving are not meeting their needs, so they seek a solution that ends up not being a good solution.
The legislature and our governor are not actively “taking money” away from our neighborhood schools. It’s more insidious than that. They are allowing the schools to become so low functioning that people CHOOSE to leave, and then they allow the per pupil funding to follow those who are leaving. Is the solution to this to imprison students in low functioning schools that are not meeting their needs? No, it is not. The solution for all conscientious “supporters of public education” who properly understand their responsibilities as citizens is to pay attention to what is going on public districts like TUSD and say “This is not good enough — the funding is too low, the functioning is too low, we demand that our neighborhood schools be BOTH better funded and more responsible, higher functioning.” That also means paying enough attention to what is going on with public district boards so that you can elect responsible governance, and that is NOT something that happened in 2014. I hope to God it will happen this fall. We’ll see.
Charters spend an average of $1403 per student on administration. School districts average $628, less than half.
What is the TUSD average?
Hi OPV,
According to the Annual Report Of the Arizona Superintendent of Public TUSD’s Admin costs per ADM were $981 for FY 2015.
So-called supporters of public education like to contrast “transparent” public district schools with “not transparent” charters. The fact is that though Arizona law has more transparency requirements for public districts than it does for charters, in certain key areas that relate to ensuring that the application of funds achieves real student benefit, it seems those laws are not enforced.
In the state of the district address, the TUSD Superintendent asserted that there is plenty of oversight for how the district is applying deseg funds.
Want to investigate that claim? The district is required to post docs relating to the deseg case on its website. You can find correspondence from the Special Master and Plaintiffs making very reasonable requests: where precisely is the money being applied, and how are you evaluating the effectiveness of the programs and documenting student benefit? Now try going on the district’s website and finding the district’s answers to those questions. When I did this a few months ago, the spreadsheets I was able to find that break down deseg spending and purport to fulfill reporting requirements do not provide anything resembling the level of detail that could be understood to constitute reasonable, responsible answers to the questions being asked or to the laws that stipulate what kind of reporting is required. Now try looking on the State Department of Ed website and phoning them to ask that they help you find docs that show that they are requiring TUSD to produce the kind of reporting that the law governing deseg tax levies, spending, and reporting (ARS 15-910) requires. (“The Arizona department of education, in consultation with the auditor general, shall develop reporting requirements to ensure that school districts submit at least the following information and documentation to the Arizona department of education beginning in fiscal year 2006-2007:…”) The list of reporting required is extensive, but can the State Department of Ed produce reports that show that the detailed information required in a number of different categories has been provided to them by TUSD every year since 2006-2007? The rep I spoke with couldn’t, and there are only so many hours you can devote to getting the sort of run-around you get when you try to interact with state-level government to answer a simple question like, “Is it true that you are requiring TUSD to provide the type of reporting required in ARS 15-910?”
I looked into all this because I’m familiar with one of the sites required to comply with the desegregation order, and I’ve seen with my own eyes that there are serious student support needs not being met there. My investigations gave me the impression that TUSD is not high functioning enough to be (or does not want to be?) fully compliant with reasonable reporting requirements on how deseg funds are applied, and that the State Department of Ed has no effective way to (or does not want to?) require them to be. Laws (and court decisions) are ineffective without enforcement, and our Arizona “leaders” seem to have a consistent attitude of “see if you can make me” when it comes to enforcing any law or complying with any court decision that would protect students enrolled in public district schools. Safier writes of Basis in the above blog, “we have no way of knowing how that money is spent because it’s hidden behind a for-profit firewall.” What a shame. What would you call the transparency firewall I ran into on the issue of how deseg money is spent, David? An “incompetence” firewall? An “unwillingness to comply with the law governing public institutions” firewall? Whatever you want to call it, it produces the same effect: lack of transparency.
The more dysfunctional public districts are allowed or encouraged or forced (through underfunding) to become, the more the for-profit charter operators and voucher supported privates benefit. The more bad PR the deseg case gets because the district is chronically mismanaging its proper role in applying funds and evaluating and reporting on their application, the more public support there will be for the legislature’s wish to eliminate deseg tax levies entirely.
That the Grijalvas and their allies advertise themselves as progressives while they badmouth the plaintiffs and special master in the desegregation case and allow the Superintendent they brought into town to engage in expensive legal battles with the desegregation authority and cooperate with the Arizona legislature in reducing and / or phasing out desegregation funding in a district that still has serious problems with integration is a travesty. Those currently running the TUSD Board and those supporting them (like Safier) like to complain about charters and blame public district schools’ problems on the charter sector. The fact is that the TUSD Board majority’s ongoing failures to properly govern the largest public district in Tucson and to require the right administrative behaviors of the district’s CEO is one of the largest single factors enabling charters and voucher-supported privates in this region to succeed to the degree that they are currently succeeding. The number of “Democratic” politicians and union reps — Farley, Wheeler, Freed and their ilk — who actively excuse and cooperate with this bungling of the management of the largest public school district in this region is discouraging indeed.
This is a very good development – actually seeing budget info that shows how much money charter administrators award themselves. But when you read that taxpayer money is still “hidden behind a for-profit firewall” it is nauseating. What loopholes must be closed before we all really know where our taxes go? Publish ALL administrative salaries for ALL publically funded charter schools that use average daily attendance of students to make money. Many of us want to see such data printed out routinely and accurately on a variety of media sources.
How much good does it do you, Thinking_Aloud, to know that the Superintendent of TUSD has a compensation package that will channel over $400,000 of taxpayer money into his pocket this year? Does having this information allow you to force beneficial change in compensation levels?
Or how much did it help us to know, after public records requests forced the information out
http://threesonorans.com/2014/07/23/ht-sanchez-gets-caught-multiple-lies-tape-breaks-elders-hearts-video/
that this Superintendent awards $10,000 bonuses to members of his administrative cabinet in a district where teachers make poverty-level wages and where they were awarded only a paltry $500 salary increase this year, a salary increase that was 1/20th of the amount of the bonuses being awarded to cabinet members whose annual salaries are much, much higher than teachers’ annual salaries?
The information about the bonuses (and the fact that it appears the initial idea was not to be clear with the public about the fact that they were being granted) came out several months before the November 2014 TUSD Board elections. Did the public having this information do any good in changing the district’s leadership of forcing more responsible behavior on the part of the board and the administration? Was this fiasco with the bonuses, which was very relevant to voters understanding how best to vote in November 2014, reported in the Arizona Daily Star or the Tucson Weekly? If not, why not?
Please explain why it’s more important to force charters to report than it is to force public districts, after reporting administrative compensation levels, to stop behaving irresponsibly in how they budget the sadly limited amount of money available to fund our struggling public district schools. Public district schools still handle more than 80% of our young people’s educations. Statistically speaking, requiring them to be responsible is going to have greater impact than forcing charters to report administrative salaries hidden behind “for profit” firewalls. And even if you can force charters to report, what we’ve seen in TUSD for the past two and a half years does not encourage me to believe that knowing inappropriate allocations of funding are being made will enable the public to require that beneficial change take place.
You, Q-F-T-A, certainly stray with many words from my only point, which is that: you and the rest of us KNOW what TUSD’s extravagant superintendent makes because the budget with his salary is published and available to us in legit public notices. Why are charter administrators exempt? What have they always been exempt? Publish salaries of ALL schools’ administrators that are paid by taxpayer money. We all pay income tax in this state, so we are all involved here. I contend that until it is done, principals in easy little charter school operations may be siphoning off more money than most hard-working school superintendents earn in our state. They write up their own budgets in the dark and no one publishes them. Corporate operations from out-of-state may even be worse. Now – if you are a charter school administrator, then I can understand why you want to change the subject. As for TUSD – TUSD is strangely unique and does not represent the rest of the school districts in AZ.
I agree with you, Thinking_Aloud, that charters should be required to be transparent. No, I am not a charter school administrator. I am a teacher by profession. In my roles both as a teacher and as a parent, I have been inside many classrooms in Tucson, both public (TUSD) and private (independent schools, Catholic schools, and one charter school, which happened to be a high functioning, relatively responsible one). Politically, I am an active Democrat. I currently have the misfortune of having one of my children enrolled in a TUSD school which has been severely impacted by the administrative mismanagement we’ve witnessed in the district for the past 2 and 1/2 years, and throughout this period I have observed some of the elected officials, journalists, and union reps affiliated with my party failing to hold the Democratic politicians running the district accountable, and, in many instances, failing to report information highly relevant to voters being able to make informed choices in elections.
You responded to my post, but you didn’t answer any of the questions I asked. Perhaps you would like to try again.
–What good will it do you to have information on administrative compensation in charters? How will it allow you to force beneficial change?
More to the point:
–Have you (and any friends of yours who share your concerns about rates of administrative compensation in charters) done anything to get the inflated salaries and extravagant bonuses in TUSD changed? If so, what have you done? If not, why is publishing this data in charters or in any other public institutions important? Surely the point is not just to say, “Ha! Thought so!” and then walk away.
You say TUSD is “strangely unique” and does not represent the rest of the school districts in AZ, but PUSD has had some of the same problems with integration and social justice. Whatever else these massive poor urban districts may be, their combined enrollment numbers (between 70,000 and 80,000) would seem to suggest that forcing them to be responsible in how they administer their schools and how they allocate funds will have an impact on the quality of our communities and the quality of our economy in Arizona.
Last post from me M-Q-f-T-A: When institutions and corporations take tax money for profit and/or individual salaries, they should (be able to) account for every cent. The title of this article says a study has reported “Excessive Administrative Expenses at Charter Schools Cost Taxpayers” and I think this just may be the tip of an iceberg.
You may have an ax to grind with TUSD (not alone there) but throughout the state, every superintendent and principal in a public school district receives a salary that is legally on record – check the board minutes on any district website. Private or Catholic schools may or may not publish, but they can do that if they want to because they do not take the taxpayers’ money. The Jesuits are wonderful teachers and prep schools can be fantastic, but they have their own student base. Charter schools and public schools are competing for the same students – students whose daily attendance guarantees that the money keeps flowing.
Making sure that individuals and out-of-state corporations are not “excessively” rewarding themselves financially is the reason you ask for, and it is unto itself an ethical reason, posing a simple moral question: why are publicly supported operations allowed to avoid public disclosure of their taxpayer supported payrolls? Payrolls are by far a schools’ most major expense. Break out the books everywhere for everybody all the time.
Yes, as I said, I agree with you, Thinking_Allowed, that charters should be transparent.
Though we are both concerned about consistency — about all public institutions having the same standards applied to them — it seems we disagree on what the purpose of transparency is. In my opinion, the point of transparency is to force change in leadership when improper spending occurs. When I see people like Safier (who has neither been the ally of transparency nor the enemy of those who have voted in favor of bloated administrative spending in TUSD) yammering about the compelling need for transparency in charters, that looks an awful lot like hypocrisy — or diversionary tactics — to me.
Safari’s posts take place in a certain political context. When we don’t relate them to that context, in my humble opinion, we’re missing important dimensions of their meaning and import.
Wonder how many of ’em were funded from bonds by the Pima County Industrial Development Authority?
http://www.pimaida.com/bond-financing/all-…
Cynthia Weiss, I would like to know exactly where you get all your “not fair” data, and also wonder who you work for. If your contention that charters have uniform reporting and spending is true, this article is unnecessary and our concerns would really go away. Standards and uniformity in reporting are not evident, and operating costs and administrative costs should always be separated.
Here is info from a education blogger with some decent credentials named Diane Ravitch:
“A comment from a reader in Arizona who read the earlier report about the private schools for children with disabilities that fleece New Jersey taxpayers. The reader writes:
‘ AZ has just as much, if not more, corruption. The administrators for BASIS schools (a charter school, most likely invading your area) make six figures and created a for profit corporation to run their schools, so now no one knows how much they make. The bookkeeper for the school is related and lives in the Czech republic. Similar to other charters, they cherry pick their students.’ “
http://cloakinginequity.com/2013/04/19/wha…
Really?
Hi Thinking Allowed,
You can get summary financial data here…
http://www.azed.gov/superintendent/superintendents-annual-report/
The link to the charter DIFFERENT account systems is here..
http://www.azauditor.gov/sites/default/files/USFRCS.pdf
I work for no one.
Your quote above is from Diane Ravitch herself quoting an anonymous comment on her blog. Take it with a grain of salt, just like everything I post. Check the datarequirements yourself. I am happy to provide the links.
Enjoy!