Arizona blogger David Safier reports that an investigative team of reporters at the Arizona Republic has won a prestigious Polk Award, one of the highest honors in American journalism, for its fearless reporting about charter school scandals in the state.
Safier writes:
The Arizona Republic’s thorough, ground-breaking stories about charter school corruption and profiteering have received scarce press coverage in southern Arizona from anyone but your faithful education blogger. That’s a serious omission. Though the stories tend to be based in Phoenix-area charter schools, they speak to statewide problems stemming from the lack of adequate charter regulation and oversight. One of the bad actors discussed in the series, for example, is state representative Eddie Farnsworth, who is making millions by selling his for-profit charters, which run on taxpayer dollars, to a non-profit company. That piece of news is definitely relevant everywhere in Arizona.
Also nearly absent in local reporting (I can’t say it hasn’t been reported, but I haven’t seen it) is the team of reporters who put together the articles that won the prestigious Polk Award in Journalism.
So let me be [among] the first in the southern Arizona news media to congratulate reporters Craig Harris, Anne Ryman, Alden Woods and Justin Price for sharing the honor, as well as the investigative editor Michael Squires.
The reporters received the Polk Education Reporting award, one of 14 Polk awards given in 2018, for:
“disclosing insider deals, no-bid contracts and political chicanery that provided windfall profits for investors in a number of prominent Arizona charter schools, often at the expense of underfunded public schools that educate all but 30,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million students.”
This is one of those series that demonstrates the power of the press.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“often at the expense of underfunded public schools that educate all but 30,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million students.”
That to me is the key. Investigating charters is great and good for them for the award, but that part of the picture is underexplored.
And it’s a big part of the picture! “All but 30,000” shouldn’t be ignored.
Within every story about charters and vouchers is another story, and that one doesn’t get told. What happened to the public schools during the same period?
I think we’re seeing some of the effects of that not getting told- the teachers strikes. But should they have to WALK OUT to get elected officials to pay attention to public schools? How did this happen? How did we end up with so many publicly-paid employees who care not a WHIT about the schools the vast majority of students attend?
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I hate to mention it to lawmakers in Indiana and Ohio, but the “phantom students” at online charters are probably skewing their numbers.
If they’re counting these kids as “in school” and they’re actually not in school then they have a higher drop out rate. If they’re phantoms in those charters then they’re not being counted and no one knows where they are. The same goes for “homeschooled” children who no one is tracking. The graduation gains might be wholly imaginary.
Ed reform “results” could be much worse than we think. They don’t have good numbers and the more reformy the state the less reliable the numbers are. They could be going backward.
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“ground-breaking stories about charter school corruption and profiteering have received scarce press coverage in southern Arizona”
This seems to be the rule and not the exception. Most of the mainstream media and the Alt-Rights misleading, always lying, conspiracy theory generating fake media machine have avoided giving this issue the attention they should.
I think this is intentional. The media is a private sector, profit-generating machine and/or it is a paid propaganda machine and the autocratic billionaires paying for that propaganda are also behind the destroy public education movement.
But I think it is a lot more than that. I think what is happening to public education in the United States and other western countries that have been allies for generations is a focused, concerted effort by people like Putin to destroy not only the United States but the EU.
I think this recent piece in POLITICO helps explain what is going on. The public schools are not the only target. Our Constitutional Republic and democracy are the targets and so are other constitutional and/or parliamentary republics and democracies.
Destroy a democracy’s public education system and you destroy the foundation of that democracy.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/20/2020-candidates-social-media-attack-1176018
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Thanks for the link, Lloyd. During the past two years the Republicans have been in charge, they have done nothing to protect our elections from outside interference. They are inviting the disinformation campaign in to interfere with our democratic process. Like climate change, cyber warfare must be fought, not ignored. We need more cyber guardians.
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We need someone to investigate Utah charters.
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