E.J. Montini, a regular columnist for the Arizona Republic, wrote an opinion piece wondering whether taxpayer in Arizona care that charter schools are wasting their money, closing without notice, discriminate against kids they don’t want, and are not subject to state laws requiring accountability or transparency, not even required to avoid conflicts of interest.
Lawmakers don’t care.
Not long ago the ACLU of Arizona published a report outlining how a number of Arizona charter school manage to discriminate against students they’d rather not have in their classrooms.
This would include minority students, kids with disabilities, special education students, discipline problems and children who weren’t as advanced as other academically…
The centrist Grand Canyon Institute has produced lengthy reports on the lack of financial accountability for charters.
Remember, these are public schools.
They use your tax money. Lots and lots of it.
They spent your money how?
But they don’t have to share financial information or be monitored by the state Auditor General like regular public schools.
They don’t have to be transparent about how much they pay their administrators, or anyone else.
There is no competitive bid process, so nepotism runs rampant.
And even when the charter board finds out that a school is failing financially, like the Discovery Creemos Academy, it doesn’t have to power to intervene.
It’s a crazy system.
Ripe for abuse at every level.
And that situation exists only because the people currently in control of state government allow it to exist
They’ve gone nowhere.
Charter schools spend more on administrative overhead than public schools. So?
Does anyone care?
Or do Arizona voters like to be ripped off?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
EJ Montini
Auto-correct doesn’t like his name.
Not sure whose thought this as I can’t tell from the post but. . .
“Remember, these are public schools.”
NO! They are privates schools using public monies originally intended for true community public schools.
Correct, and though they love to call themselves public for marketing reasons, when you drag them into court they wave a huge NO WE ARE PRIVATE banner around and hide behind it.
A better name for private school using public monies are PIRATE Schools.
We have to NAME it. These DAZE because in situations like this where “SPIN” words are used in actuality … “UP” means “DOWN.”
Yvonne Siu-Runyan:
“PIRATE Schools”— touché!
A while ago someone on this blog suggested that we refer to the charter heavyweights as “government contractors.” That is, like Boeing and a host of others, they receive public monies but are run as if they are private profit-making entities.
But, I must say I like your rendition more!
TAGO!
😎
important point: WE HAVE TO NAME IT.
PERFECT! Just totally perfect, way to go Yvonne! I just have to get into the habit of using this now.
Too many parents and the general public know very little about the war on public education. While the public’s awareness of the attack has improved thanks to Diane and other bloggers, many remain in the dark. The media, mostly owned by conservatives, ignores the problems, waste, fraud and the harmful effect of privatization on most students. The appointment of DeVos has been helpful in spreading the word as there has been an anti-privatization backlash. Decisions on privatization generally are backroom deals between politicians and the wealthy, and the public rarely gets a chance to voice their opinion or vote on the issue. When the public does get to vote, wealthy conservatives dump lots of money into the election to buy the vote. Too many politicians are for sale!
I thought Arizona was the so-called libertarian republic of the Koch-ALEC, wild-west, shoot-em-up, kleptocracy.
After all, Arizona is 83.3 percent white and its government is totally controlled by the GOP, and there are more than 1.26 million registered republicans + more than 31k (about 10-percent of the nation’s total) registered libertarians to a little more than 1-million registered Democrats.
In fact, the voters in Arizona were given the choice to turn MLK day into a paid holiday and those voters turned it down losing the Super Bowl that year because of it. In another election, after losing the Super Bowl, the voters approved it as a state-level holiday.
Does that mean that back then, the football god was more powerful than ALEC?
Like his dad, Charles Koch was and probably still is a Bircher.
http://progressive.org/dispatches/like-dad-charles-koch-bircher-new-documents/
And … “Charles Koch Hijacks Martin Luther King Jr. To Pitch His Vision For Low-Wage America”
Koch revealed that he is against regulations designed to protect workers’ safety, ensure fair pay, provide for clean air and water, eliminate dangerous consumer products and other benevolent results. …
Through Koch’s personal lens, anything that stands between workers and the specter of imminent hunger, illness or homelessness “undermines people’s will to work.” This means supplemental nutrition programs, Medicaid and Medicare, the Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment insurance. Koch believes these programs and others have “created a culture of dependency and hopelessness. This is most unfair to vulnerable citizens who suffer even as we say they are receiving ‘benefits.’”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charles-koch-america_n_5655669.html
Taxpayers would care — if they knew about it. Today, most people get their news through their personalized “news feed”, and none of the news feeds pay any attention to charter school scams. Even traditional moderate and liberal print and broadcast media don’t bother to report the scams, let alone Fox News. You seldom find any mention of charter school financial scams in The Los Angeles Times because The Times has allowed a pro-charter school billionaire to finance the paper’s reporting on charter schools.
The algorithms on social media news feeds can be tweaked into providing more news on charter school financial scams: Get everyone to request such news and that kind of news will be recognized by the computers as “trending” and will be included in feeds and the “trending” notifications.
When facts about charter scamming trend, people in the tech world, Campbell Brown over at Facebook for instance, probably set up algorithms to overcome the trending. She blocks Steven Singer! I think the best way to make people aware of the problems with privatization is to encourage Betsy DeVos to speak publicly as much as possible. Tech doesn’t want to make algorithms against the name of one of privatization’s biggest billion-heiress supporters, and no one in the privatizing game brings negative attention to charters like Betsy ‘Grizzlies’ DeVos. Her association with Trump and therefore fringe, right wing nationalists is toxic to the charter brand in cities where they make their bread and butter. In fact, I would love for The Donald to tweet some charter love.
From everything I’ve read and heard about Arizona, the public doesn’t care how their tax dollars get spent as long as it doesn’t require them to pay higher taxes… and the beauty of privatized charter schools is that they can operate at a lower cost. Why?
=>Because the total compensation for their staff is lower than that typically paid by public schools. Whether they are unionized or not, the privatized schools can pay “market value” for teachers and since they generally operate at the elementary level the supply of teachers is plentiful. Better yet, they can hire “teacher-consultants” as 1099 employees thereby sidestepping the need to pay their social security costs.
=>Because they are brand new they have no legacy costs for retirees
=>Because they are not overseen by the state and they are deregulated, they do not have to contribute to state retirement funds or budget anything for retirement.
=>Because they are deregulated, do not have to build schools or operate schools in accordance with state guidelines…. and if the schools are “virtual” they don’t need to budget anything for maintenance, food service, transportation, or utilities.
=>And given all the money a shrewd entrepreneur can save the taxpayers, their high compensation packages are their just rewards for their innovative thinking… and here’s the good news for those entrepreneurs: those rewards can be determined without any public oversight!
In the end, the Arizona voters don’t care because most of the voters believe the ALEC-driven notion that public education is a commodity that users should pay for themselves and, as a commodity, it should be subject to market-based competition. That’s why they embrace ideas like “choice” and “deregulation”…
And the legislators DO care about the voters a lot more than they care about children— not only in AZ but in most states in our country. Until legislators and voters care more about the future than they care about their tax bills those of us who support public schools face an uphill battle.