Arizona is an amazing state. Taxpayers don’t care how their money is spent. You could collect it and burn it and they wouldn’t care.
That’s the impression you would get if you read this story about Primavera Charter School.
The online high school is a failure but the CEO is getting a bonus of $8.8 million.
“By most academic measures, Primavera online charter school is a failure.”
“Its student-to-teacher ratio is 215-to-1 — 12 times the state average — allowing little or no individualized attention.
“On recently released state standardized tests, less than a quarter of its students passed math and about a third passed English, both below the state average.
“And 49 percent of Primavera students end up dropping out, 10 times the state average.
“But by another measure, Primavera is an unmitigated success: making money.
“Beginning in 2012, the school began shifting large shares of its annual $30-plus million allotment of state funding away from instruction and into stocks, bonds, mortgage-backed securities and real estate.
“That year, 70 percent, or $22.4 million, of its state funding went into its growing investment portfolio — instead of efforts to raise test scores, reduce class sizes, or address an exploding dropout rate that is now the state’s third-highest.”
That’s in line with the usual formula for online charter schools. They fail but they are profitable. State legislatures authorize them despite their consistent record of failure. Usually they do so because a key politician or two received a campaign contribution of a few thousand dollars. Think ECOT in Ohio, which paid off important pols to the tune of a million a year, assuring a return of hundreds of millions every year.
Do taxpayers care? It’s their money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would hate to be a public school family in Arizona. That state is so completely captured by the ed reform “movement” public school students and families are the dead-last priority.
All these cheap ed reform gimmicks get all the funding and all the attention, while the public schools quietly die of neglect.
Ohio was like this for a decade and then the public finally started to get wise to it, and fired some of the ed reformers in state government. We’re seeing a renewed focus on public schools.
First you need to clean house of the captured group of politicians and then the second step should be to hire some new voices from OUTSIDE the ed reform echo chamber.
I’m hoping Ohio gets to Step Two after November. Our public schools have been neglected for 20 years while politicians chased these fads and gimmicks. Time to get back to work.
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IN OHIO, Finally, “the Attorney General in court to seek $62 million from Bill Lager, his companies and some of his former ECOT employees.” For profit online programs are a ripoff K12 is another example with huge advertising for students in the two weeks before school started–abundant use of “free” in the advertising.
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Lara
Thank you for your considerate and thoughtful response. I agree that both a more robust public system and a more accountable charter system would benefit the students. I also hope Mr. Lofthouse can overcome his rage issues.
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Wrong! It isn’t rage issues. It is reasoned thinking leading to reasoned conclusions.
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Any suggestions on how to convince parents to stop choosing charters? My district is being charterized to pieces by BASIS and Great Hearts. My kids’ neighborhood elementary enrollment dropped by over 80 kids this year. This is a beautiful little elementary school filled with experienced certified incredible teachers. It has an A rating from the state (I get those ratings are garbage, but it’s not like parents are fleeing some neglected delapidated school). I hope the dark underbelly of the charter movement makes it into widespread media outlets before it’s too late.
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Many of those kids will be kicked out and returned to the public school because they couldn’t pass 10 AP exams.
What state are you in?
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Lara: I’m sorry to hear that your school has reduced enrollment, I hope that school budgets can be increased to keep the system whole.
I enrolled my kids at the nearby Basis school because of the reduced expectations that I sensed from the local public schools. When we checked out The local elementary school, the teachers advised me to redshirt my oldest son even though he was academically well ahead just so he could be a better athlete or grow taller .. what silly advice. We left the public school and took all of our kids away. We tried again to look at the local big high school but they didn’t like the Basis credentials, would have to repeat AP world history, maybe geometry and algebra, and they don’t allow freshman to take AP
Classes … reduced expectations. At Basis, he’s on track to take 16 AP’s by junior year and that would definitely not have occurred in the public school system as it is in AZ. So my advice is to allow (encourage?!) for a greater level of academic success in public schools and that would diminish the need for parents to look elsewhere.
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Basis has very few Latino, black, or special ed students, or ELL. It is a charter chain for the gifted only.
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And that tells me that “AZ parent” is an elitist and/or a racist, in the closet or out in the open, even if AZ parent denies it.
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I’m in Arizona. The charter industry is aggressively targeting affluent communities here. This worries me because once districts with “good” reputations are dismantled, the rest could fall like dominoes. School shopping and hopping has become normalized. It is commonplace to put your prekindergartener on every charter lottery around, and attending your neighborhood school starts to feel like the result of “not winning the lottery.” Some families leave the district for cause, but so often people tell me they’re happy with their district school but want to try out BASIS or Great Hearts. Educated people are electing to leave really nice public schools that they’re happy with to send their child to schools that hire young inexperienced uncertified teachers. You hear the charter sales pitches repeated back to you. The district is forced to chase charter gimmicks to compete. The free market is king here. You regularly hear the test scores of BASIS and GH used to justify more school choice. No nuance, no critical thinking, just BASIS is the best school in the country therefore we need more choice.
We have some incredible public education advocates in AZ and in my district, but right now by necessity the fight is focused on vouchers and improving funding for all publicly funding schools including charters. Meanwhile charters are replacing good public schools for the affluent. All in the context of a state with desperately underfunded schools. It’s sickening.
I live in a tricky place to argue against school choice because in an affluent microcosm, it appears to work. I just keep trying to emphasize the quality of my teachers in the public school and to challenge what makes a quality education. The equity argument doesn’t seem to work as well with some and its hard not to come off as judgmental.
If you look at the Glassdoor reviews of former employees of GH, in addition to complaints of disorganization and unqualified staff, there’s a recurring theme that the place has a Christian conservative political agenda. I hope this gets more widespread coverage.
Sorry for the long reply. Just trying to paint the picture here. There are public ed advocates here. How can we best convince people that it is in their best interest to choose their public school?
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AZ parent
Thank you for the information regarding your public school experience. Those are issues that need addressing. I know district schools have their issues and gifted students certainly deserve a challenging education. I understand your choice to pursue an education that emphasizes rigor and accelerated academics. I just wish these schools were run by districts. I’m sure many district teachers would jump at the chance to run a school with the kind of bright and motivated students that attend BASIS. The for-profit part is problematic, as I’m sure you’d agree.
I’m not so worried about my particular school or even my children. They’re going to be ok regardless because they have a family with the resources to get them what they need. It’s the bigger picture of school privatization that deeply worries me, the trajectory of disinvestment from neighborhood schools that the vast majority of kids rely on.
Handing over public education to corporations and some pretty scary ideologues seems like a bad idea, but that’s what I’m watching happening.
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AZ parent: I hope you based your decision on more than what one teacher recommended for your eldest on kindergarten round-up day — yet that is a very easy trap to fall into! I was furious when I was told that about my youngest. My kids came out of Montessori PreK; I favored mixed-age classes & hated how public-schools marshaled the kids into narrow conformist groups, fomenting competition/ bullying.
My advantage, w/2 kids already attending there [she was new to the school, didn’t realize that]: I knew the place, & knew one teacher’s assessment of one kid doesn’t represent its MO. But this teacher made some good points: instead of suggesting something spurious about athletics she’d said: you need to look at these kids, they are all twice his size — and the K curriculum is like the 1st-gr curriculum from 20 yrs ago. I began thinking how my youngest started smaller, grew more slowly, & started talking later than both his brothers. And had good friends younger than himself. Still I dismissed her advice & enrolled him anyway – only to have the school strongly recommend having him repeat K a yr later.
The saving grace was, youngest’s closest PreK friend had been told the same things before K, & got the same advice later; repeating K turned out fine when shared w/bff.
Other moms in that position made a decision similar to yours. They put their kids in the reasonably-priced Lutheran K to let them “grow.” None of them fared well back in pubsch 1st. In our case the school knew best.
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All hail Mammon!
THE God of our times!
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Some people say that Americans believe people with money are better than they are, which is the same as saying that people without money believe the same thing as the people with money. In such a world, only the poor can ever break the law. This is the psychological soil that nourishes free market ideology. Arizona is the land of Goldwater.
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Virtual charters get the worst results for the most money. It is a form of legalized theft. That is why people like Michael Milken flock to them to make their easy money. He knows this time he won’t wind in an orange jumpsuit.
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Correction: wind up in an orange jumpsuit.
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“Do taxpayers care? It’s their money.”
If these dense taxpayers follow the same really-fake, conspiracy theory producing media that Trump follows for his lying intel briefings, they have no way of knowing what is happening to their money.
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I don’t think AZ Parent is either of those things. It sounds like he/she has an exceptional student. AZ has plenty of “gifted” students well served in our traditional public schools too however. I’m not convinced that the accelerated academics pushed by BASIS is developmentally appropriate in the younger years for the majority of kids attending.
That aside, no publicly funded charter should be allowed to solicit families for $1500 for teacher bonus pay. That and a couple dozen other bad charter laws that rig the game against traditional public schools need to end. We have some awesome teachers running for office. I have hope.
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BASIS enrolls mainly white and Asian students. All are welcome but only those with the highest scores survive.
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