Charter Schools In Arizona: What The Public Isn't Told

What the public isn’t told about high-performing charter schools in Arizona

This post details issues with charter schools in Arizona. It was written by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. She has been chronicling problems with corporate school reform for years on this blog, and this post is part of her occasional series about troubled charter schools in California and other states.
Source: The Washington Post
By Valerie Strauss 30 March 2017

While some charter schools are well-run and high-performing, others aren’t, and some states that allow charters have little or no oversight. A 2016 audit by the Education Department’s Inspector General’s Office found that the department — which awards multi-million-dollar grants to states for the creation and expansion of charters — had failed to provide adequate oversight of some of its relationships with charter management organizations.
Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. She was helped with this piece by Jim Hall, an elementary and middle school principal in Arizona for 23 years who, in 2014, founded Arizonans for Charter School Accountability. He is quoted in this post.
Burris attempted to contact officials at the BASIS charter school network she writes about in this post but received no response.
There are very big differences between what we have come to accept as public schools and charters:

• Democratically elected school boards govern most public schools; charter boards are appointed and not accountable to parents or the community.
• Charters control the number of students they have, and they do not have to take students mid-year, like traditional public schools do.
• Transparency laws, especially in spending, that public schools must follow can — and often are — ignored by charter schools.  
• Many conflict-of-interest laws that regulate public schools can be skirted — and sometimes are — by charters.
• And in some cases, when a charter school is closed because of poor performance or another reason, the school building and property is not returned to the public who paid for them, but is retained by the charter owners themselves.  And, by the way, charters can shut their doors whenever it suits them.

They only thing truly “public” about charters, is that taxpayers foot the bill. Calling charter schools “public schools” because they receive public tax dollars is like calling defense contractors “public companies” because they also depend on public funding.

One of the best illustrations of the “non-public” nature of charters is the much heralded BASIS charter schools that began in Arizona, a state with extremely lax charter laws. A close look at BASIS provides insight into how charter schools can cherry-pick students, despite open enrollment laws.  It also shows how through the use of management companies profits can be made — call hidden from public view.
There are now 18 BASIS charter schools in Arizona, three in Texas and one in Washington D.C., all managed by the for-profit corporation, BASIS Educational Group, LLC. The same LLC also manages five for-profit BASIS private schools in the United States and one private international school.
There is no doubt that BASIS provides a challenging education. What is questionable is just how “public” their charter schools really are.

Critics of charter schools have long observed the differences in school populations that charters serve, and charter schools counter that that is not by design. A quick look at the demographics of the 18 Arizona BASIS charter schools compared with the demographic profile of all Arizona students in the public and charter systems, however, should give pause that such differences are not accidental. The following enrollment figures are from the 2015-2016 school year.
 

	Asian	American Indian/Alaska Native	Black	Latino	White	Mixed
Arizona	3%	5%	5%	45%	39%	3%
BASIS	32%	0%	3%	10%	51%	2%

 
The proportional over-enrollment of Asian-American students and under-enrollment of Latino students in BASIS charter schools is startling. But differences in the students served do not end with race and ethnicity.
In 2015-16, only 1.23 percent of the students at BASIS had a learning disability, as compared to 11.3 percent of students in the state. BASIS schools had no English Language Learners. And in a state in which over 47 percent of all students received free or reduced- priced lunch, BASIS had none.  Although BASIS may have some students from qualifying households, it chooses not to participate in the free or reduced-priced lunch program.
Not getting any response from BASIS, the author of this report called the BASIS Educational Group twice to get answers about the financial status of BASIS. My calls were never returned.  So I turned to Arizonan Curt Cardine, a former East Coast superintendent and former charter administrator.
Discouraged by the unethical practices he says he has observed in Arizona charters, he left the charter world and has spent the last three years conducting an extensive study of charter financial health and financing in Arizona. According to Cardine, “Once money goes to the BASIS Educational Group, the profits now belong to the for-profit to use as they please, including for expansion.”
Cardine then analyzed the latest audit for BASIS and he sees trouble ahead for the charter chain. “The most recent audit shows that BASIS School Inc. is now running a huge deficit in their assets of over $13 million.  The charter schools’ net loss for the 14-15 year alone was $3,074,317.”
Cardine said he was not surprised. “In the state of Arizona, the financial failure rate on charters is 42.79 percent. Over-leveraging is a huge problem,” said Cardine.  “Charters fail, but somehow folks leave making money. Charters like to say they are ‘for the kids, not the adults.’ That has certainly not been my experience — especially here in Arizona.”