Craig Harris of the Arizona Republic is part of the Polk Award-winning team that investigated charter school frauds, scams, and abuses.
This is the second part of an article in which he describes the mistreatment of students and the state’s failure to investigate complaints.
He writes:
“Charter and district schools are both publicly funded schools, but they are vastly different in how they’re governed.
“School districts have boards elected by local voters. Those boards hire superintendents who are responsible for personnel and policies. Board meetings are typically held at least monthly and are open to the public.
“Charter schools boards, meanwhile, are appointed by the charter owner, who in some cases is also on the board. Some Arizona charter schools have only two board meetings a year, each lasting 10 minutes. In some cases, a charter owner determines who is allowed to address the board.
“A Brown University study from 2014 found charter schools, in general, because of their autonomy face less scrutiny of their finances, and the lack of oversight has led to numerous cases of fraud across the country.
“Anabel Aportela, a research director for the Arizona School Boards Association who had a similar role with the Arizona Charter Schools Association, said members of district school boards are “accountable to their communities and voters in their districts,” but charter school board members are not.
“A bill advancing in the Legislature would change the governance and financial oversight of charter schools, but critics say it does not go far enough toward true, independent oversight.
“The proposed changes would not necessarily help a situation like the Georges’ because the bill does not guarantee parents access to a charter school’s board of directors. It also does not prevent a charter owner from stacking a board with friends and relatives.
“The bill has passed the Senate Education Committee and is working its way through that chamber.
“In Arizona, with minimal access to a local charter board to air complaints, typically the public’s only recourse is to appeal to the state Charter Board, an 11-member body mostly appointed by the governor.
“The Charter Board, with just 11 employees, is tasked with monitoring more than 500 Arizona charter schools. That means only a small fraction of complaints are investigated, The Republic has found.
“An analysis of 89 public complaints to the Charter Board from the past four years released to The Republicunder the state’s Public Records Law, showed only 12 percent were investigated. The rest were closed after the charter operator responded in writing, often denying the allegations.
“Among the cases that went without investigation were complaints of bullying, refusal to provide student transcripts, a 5-year-old boy leaving campus unsupervised, violations of the Open Meetings Law, failure to provide special education services, classroom temperatures being too cold, and a teacher cutting a girl’s hair without parents’ permission.
“In some instances, schools changed course following a complaint to the Charter Board. The student who was unable to get his transcripts from Arizona Call-a-Teen Center for Excellence obtained them after he filed a complaint.
“The state’s Charter Board not only investigates few cases, it also lets parents see little information about the complaints themselves. The Charter Board does not make public on its website the number of complaints against a charter school, nor does it post them online even though complaints are public record.
Viewing complaints requires submitting a formal public records request with the Charter Board. The wait for those requests to be fulfilled can be indefinite.
“Gov. Doug Ducey — following a yearlong investigation by The Republic that found widespread financial abuses, profiteering, and insider deals at charter schools — has proposed adding 10 additional regulators to the Charter Board. The additional staff could result in more complaints being investigated.
“Ducey’s office estimates the new Charter Board staff will more than quadruple the number of visits to schools to investigate fraud. Currently, just 15 percent of Arizona’s charter schools receive a site inspection each year to make sure a school is accurately reporting its finances and enrollment to the state.
The kinds of cases the Charter Board doesn’t investigate
“After a 5-year-old boy wandered away from Mesa Arts Academy on Aug. 15, 2016, while on “time out” his parents complained to the Charter Board.
“In its response to the August 2016 complaint, Mesa Arts Academy confirmed the child had left campus, and that police had been called before a staff member found the child. The school added it had since installed security cameras.
“The Charter Board elected not to investigate further.
“The Charter Board also took a pass when a 15-year-old girl at Heritage Academy Gateway said a male classmate put his hand under her shirt and groped her.
“The girl told her parents about the alleged incident in early September, and the parents notified the school. School officials, in turn, reported the incident to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
“The Republic typically does not disclose the identity of alleged victims of sexual abuse.
“The day after the incident was reported, the boy transferred from Heritage Academy to another charter school.
“The girl’s family said that allowed the boy, whose mother is a Heritage administrator and member of its board, to avoid discipline.
“According to the girl’s parents, the boy continues to visit the Heritage Academy Gateway campus every afternoon.
“Calls to Heritage for comment were not returned.
“The girl said the incident has caused her to see a therapist for anxiety.
“I don’t like seeing him on campus,” she told The Republic. “It’s kind of scary to see him in that situation.”
“Her father said the family asked Jared Taylor, Heritage Academy’s charter holder, CEO and board chairman, to keep the boy off campus.
“It’s pretty little what we have asked for,” the father said in an interview.
“Records the school provided to the Charter Board in response to the complaint indicate Heritage Academy denied their request.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think eventually ed reform has to narrow the “right to a free public education” (state level) to “the right to a voucher to purchase educational services, subject to the contractor’s sole discretion”
Which could end up playing out a lot of different ways, many of them much more “inequitable” than the public school systems we have now.
LikeLike
We’re already running into system inequities with College Credit Plus in Ohio. If a certain number of high school students opt for the college math course over the high school math class, they won’t be able to offer the advanced high school math class at small rural high schools, which means the 25% of kids who didn’t test into College Credit Plus will have no advanced math class available.
They had one. They will lose it. So College Credit Plus could come with real tradeoffs and no one considered the trade offs. No one considered the downside, because they were all busy cheerleading and yelling “plus/and!” when really it’s gonna be “either/or” for the kids in the middle of the pack.
LikeLike
Any privatized company is more interested in protecting their brand than finding the truth of a problem. If there is a concern in the public sphere, there are procedures in place to address the problem. If there is no resolution at the school level or even school board level, there is a hierarchy in place to appeal a decision allowing the complainant to take the matter to the state, if necessary. I recently read that Texas is planning to privatize child protective services, which is a poor idea, because the health and safety of children are at stake. https://news.utexas.edu/2017/02/28/privatizing-child-protective-services-would-be-bad-for-texas/
LikeLike
Good GAWD. What is wrong with this picture? Answer: EVERYTHING.
Seems this is just what the deformers want.
Dear Higher Being, Please SAVE our young from the deformers.
Today, I went to my neighborhood elementary school and gave away great picture books and chapter books along with some calendars from Hawai’i with beautiful pictures, and fresh Plumeria leis.
What joy! I told the teachers and students that I appreciated them and our public schools. Parents got leis, too, if they were close by.
If people would just walk into a public school, thenLOOK and talk to students, teachers, and staff, they would know our public schools are great.
LikeLike
Unsurprisingly, a state charter board charged w/oversight of hundreds of charter schools has insufficient [public] money to address individual complaints. [Small wonder if an 11-member board could “oversee” 500+ schools in any meaningful way.] Gov Ducey proposes doubling the charter staff– which he claims will quadruple the number of site visits to investigate fraud complaints etc [allowing them to check out 60% vs the current 15% of schools each year]: where did he learn math?
Let’s go down a rung… Oops. The only rung between one school principal and state board “overseeing” 500+ schools is… the individual school’s charter board. Which currently is free to be staffed w/ relatives & “friends” [investors?]. Brophy McGee proposes a law that would cut relatives back to 50% of board– but that won’t apply to charters farming out ops to for-profit charter mgrs [nor would any of her other rein-ins on purchasing from relatives etc – & still OK to no-bid-contract major work to founder]. And is silent re: “friends.” ….Which is all moot anyhoo, cuz nothing proposed by Ducey or McGee makes the local charter board “accessible” to parents w/a complaint.
Anything wrong w/this organizational chart? It’s essentially tyranny, plus license for fraud [if you don’t mind gambling w/15-30% chance of audit].
Are charters overreaching? AZ was doing fine [/sarc/] while charters were for poor kids, whose families will shut up & go w/ the flow. But as of 3 yrs ago– after the latest 6% annual jump in enrollment– AZ’s charters enrolled 17% of its pubsch students [maybe higher now]… So, oops: now we’ve got a middle-class white kid making the news w/a strip-search complaint. –Oh, all of a sudden, proposed change by gov & [lip-service] proposed [air quotes] rein-in [close air quotes] by a major Rep legislator.
AZ is a charter petrie dish, & resulting data just hitting airwaves.
LikeLike
This particular post really gets under my skin. I think it’s because of the personal stories told here. It doesn’t take much imagination to project these larger-scale assaults on kids– microscope-like– back down into the minutia of daily injuries to dignity and sense of self that kids undoubtedly sustain in such schools…
And even if they don’t today, they could tomorrow, because here’s no underlying structure that promotes high teacher qualifications, or encourages best classroom practices, or provides a path to punish bad acts and appeal bad decisions that sometimes occur even in the best of conditions. And for what? So parents can buy into “choice” in exchange for relinquishing civil/ legal rights provided by pubschs– a deal sold to them by private companies whose only interest is profit. Backed by their state govt .
Shame.
LikeLike
Good word: SHAME.
LikeLike