I wrote earlier today about how disappointed the chair of the Senate Committee on Education in Arizona was when the charter school in her district was graded F. She felt sure this couldn’t be right. As chair of the Senate Committee on Education, she must have approved the wacky idea of giving letter grades to schools. Yet now this ALEC-Jeb Bush strategy has blighted the charter she insisted upon.
You should know more about Sylvia Allen.
You Don’t Know, What You Don’t Know
Linda Lyon, President-elect of the Arizona School Boards Association, writes:
“Yes, the AZ Republic called Senator Sylvia Allen “one of the best-known lightning rods in the AZ Legislature.” Her stated belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and her suggestion that church attendance be mandated as a way to “get back to a moral rebirth in this country” are just two of the reasons for her notoriety. I was shocked when I heard of her appointment as Chair of the Senate Education Committee, but it shouldn’t have surprised me.
“After all, I doubt her religious fervency is the reason AZ Senate President Biggs selected Allen to be the person who will control what education proposals make it out of the AZ Senate. Rather, I suspect it is her support of charter schools like the George Washington Academy she helped found in Snowflake. Listed as the “Administrative Program Manager” on their “GWA Teachers and Staff” page, Senator Allen’s employment with this school makes me wary of her ability to be impartial when it comes to legislation that favors charter schools over public district schools.
“Please know that I am not a charter “hater.” I recognize there are charter schools that fill critical needs. What I am, is realistic about the impact the diversion of tax payer dollars to privately managed charter and private schools is having on our public school districts and their students. Make no mistake; this is a zero sum game. When charter schools win, public district schools, often the hub of small communities, lose.
“Senator Allen’s George Washington Academy may be located in the community of Snowflake, but it is managed by Education Management Organization (EMO) EdKey Inc., a for-profit management company that operates 18 schools in Arizona. Although its schools are technically “public” there are numerous differences between them (and all charters) and your average community district schools.
“For starters, the requirements for accountability and transparency are very different. Public district schools have locally elected governing board members that are accountable to the public. Not so with charter schools. In looking at the George Washington Academy website, they had no information about the school board on their school board page, and under school board agendas, only a statement that says: “Sorry, but that directory is empty.” I had to go to the corporate website (sequoiaschools.org) to see the names of their six governing board members, but there was no access to board agendas or minutes.“
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Linda Lyon said she is not a charter hater. I also don’t hate charters when the follow the original concept and are still part of a community based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit, traditional public school district and unionized teachers are in charge.
To fit the original concept. these non-corporate charters would only take the children that are the most difficult and challenging to teach.
And there are many schools in school districts across the country that fit that description, but they are not always called charters. Sometimes they are called alternative schools. The district where I taught for thirty years has had an alternative high school for decades and it is or was organized around the original charter school concept. At least it was when I retired in 2005. The teachers were mostly in charge back then. I hope they still are today.
THIS truth certainly gets carefully hidden in the modern-day “choice” school push.
Senator Sylvia Allen’s stated belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and her suggestion that church attendance be mandated as a way to “get back to a moral rebirth in this country” are just two of the reasons for her notoriety.
If she thinks that way, then she probably also thinks the Earth is flat and the universe revolves around it.
In that case, the reformers like Allen don’t want to return to the 19th century. No, they want to go back much further than that to the 17th century when the Vatican forced Galileo to recant his theory that the Earth moves around the sun. It took the Church 359 years to admit they were wrong to do that. I’m sure that Allen and her peers cursed the Vatican when it did that.
Steve Bannon, Betsy DeVos, and Value Voters must love Senator Allen.
Mike Pence too.
Ms. Lyon nails it when she describes the early history of the charter school movement as a potential good. That is how they were originally conceived. And then the loopholes were weaseled in. Diane Ravitch (thank you Diane for this wonderful, sanity saving blog) gives a very complete picture of the subsequent perversion of this very good idea in her books, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” and “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools”
As a former teacher in Arizona, I can attest that Senator Allen’s views are far from rare. In my autobiographical novel, “Naked Teaching: A Love Story,” a teacher and her kids show what it’s like to live and learn in a classroom stripped bare when meager resources are redirected to “Choice” schools. There were 13 such schools in addition to the neighborhood schools for the immediate area in which I taught.
After leaving a state (Maine) where resources were adequate and “Choice” had not yet gained a poisonous foothold, it was a total shock to teach in rural northern Arizona. And that was before the budget was cut another 25%.