I think this caught most people by surprise. It certainly surprised me. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that charter schools are unconstitutional. The reason they gave is, charters don’t fit the definition of “common schools” and so they can’t be publicly funded.
In the ruling, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote that charter schools aren’t “common schools” because they’re governed by appointed rather than elected boards.
Therefore, “money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools,” Madsen wrote.
Charters weren’t allowed in Washington until they were approved, barely, by the voters in 2012. The ruling puts the nine charters which have been set up, and their students, in jeopardy.
I’ll be surprised if this ruling stands for long. People are already clamoring for a special legislative session to fix the problem. And some heavy hitters put up lots of money to help pass the charter school referendum, including Bill Gates ($3 million), Alice Walton of the Walmart family ($1.7 million) and Amazon’s Mike Bezos ($750,000), and they’ll likely bring some serious pressure to bear. Just today, the schools stated they’ll stay open this year using private donations if necessary.
Whether or not the legislature figures out a way to keep the schools open, and regardless of the constitutionality of the law, the issues raised in this fight are important. Charters are only marginally accountable to the public which supplies their funding. Financially they’re far less transparent than school districts. Here in Arizona, government oversight of the schools is minimal, and according to one of the most comprehensive looks at charters, the CREDO studies out of Stanford, charters are most successful in states where there is sufficient oversight to close bad schools, something that rarely happens here.
The schools’ appointed boards are often stacked with members of the charter holder’s family and friends, meaning they aren’t directly accountable to the public or even to the parents of the kids at the school. In Arizona and most other states, we know very little about how the charter’s money is spent. We rarely know teacher salaries or the details of their purchasing policies. The problem is compounded when the schools are run by Education Management Organizations which suck up the state funds and hide them behind a for-profit firewall where the money becomes the property of “the invisible hand of the marketplace,” which can dole out the money as the hand sees fit without all that pesky government oversight getting in the way.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2015.
All I can say is, “Yay” … even if it is a shaky victory.
I agree that all schools using taxpayer money should be required to be fully transparent in how they apply those funds. How is it that no one seems to have found a way of requiring this of charters?
Wait a minute, though…now that I take a minute to think about it, another question comes to mind: how is it that voters allow some public districts, which have elected boards and are legally required to be transparent, to get away with throwing up so many obstacles to transparency? How is it the elected boards approve unbelievably inflated salaries and bonuses for central administrators, tamper with audit committees and job descriptions for internal auditor positions, shut down public access to formerly accessible online data and fail to fulfill public records requests?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in that best-of-all-possible-worlds where having an elected board actually guaranteed transparency and appropriate use of taxpayer funds, as those behind the Washington suit seem to believe it must necessarily do?
Guess these Washingtonians haven’t been to Tucson recently.
Does TUSD have adequate oversight? No mas for me. Charters are working. So let’s try to destroy them? Choice in education is imperitive.
Some charters are working better than some district schools. Some district schools are working better than some charters.
TUSD needs to be more transparent, but that doesn’t mean charters shouldn’t have to be.
Why can’t we require ALL schools that apply taxpayer funds to be transparent? Good question. Might it be because the money interests try to throw up obstacles to transparency in everything they get their grubby hands on…public districts, charters, privates, you name it? Constituents’ rights mean less and less these days. Increasingly, the only people with “rights” are those who can pay for them, and an “elected board” doesn’t protect us from that any more than any other type of governance structure does.