Arizona’s charter industry is riddled with fraud and corrruption, meticulously documented by a year-long investigation in the Arizona Republic and by Curtis Cardine of the Grand Canyon Institute.
The Republican-dominated felt that it needed to pass a “Reform” bill, even though it was full of loopholes that would protect charter fraudsters and grifters.
And so it did. The fake reform bill passed on a party line vote, supported by Republicans, opposed by every Democrat.
So meaningless was the bill that it won the vote of charter operator Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, who made $13.9 million last year when he converted his for-profit charter chain to a nonprofit. Farnsworth gave a speech about why no reform was necessary.
The bill now goes to the House, where Republicans hold a 31-29 advantage.
Republicans rejected amendments from Democrats “to crack down on conflicts of interest and to provide tighter financial transparency on how charters spend tax dollars.
“Sen. Kate Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, pushed the bill. It had overwhelming support from Arizona’s $1 billion charter school industry, whose lobbyist helped co-write the bill.“
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Sen. Kate Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, pushed the bill. It had overwhelming support from Arizona’s $1 billion charter school industry, whose lobbyist helped co-write the bill.”
Another legislative session where the PUBLIC schools in the state are completely ignored by these public employees.
Has anyone checked on Arizona’s public schools? Are they still open?
When’s the last date the Arizona legislature added any value or provided any benefit to students who attend PUBLIC schools?
Public school students are the dead-last priority in ed reform. None of these adults work for our students or our schools. If they’re not protecting charters from oversight, they’re pushing vouchers. It’s ALL they do.
Charters got another big gift and public school students got nothing.
We should think about hiring some adults who have some interest in working on behalf of public schools. They’re not contributing anything to our students and schools.
I teach in an AZ public school–title 1 school. The poverty in this school is astonishing. This is my first year teaching in AZ after moving here from another state. I taught almost 20 years in a public school that was also a Title 1 school before moving to AZ. I have a lot of experience teaching in poverty schools. I have never seen anything as dysfunctional and as underfunded as the school I teach in currently. The whole district is in dire straits as it is funneling money away from public schools into charters. The lack of resources in this school is stupefying and confounding. It seems that the people in AZ are automatons and that this “cheating” of public schools is the new-normal. It’s not that people don’t care about education, its just that most people who can leave the poverty schools behind do so without realizing the impact they have. And to be honest, if I had children I don’t know if I would want them to attend one of these public schools. The discipline problems and lack of support for teachers is driving parents and teachers away. Buildings are falling apart. Just today part of the roof caved in at the school library. And then the corruption in the state legislature is driving the drain of resources.
You have a front row seat seeing the impact that a corrupt government has on poor students. We are betraying the notion that our country has opportunity for all. We need a systematic change in the laws that allow this to happen, and we need to vote out the complicit representatives. We need to stop putting public money in the hands of greedy corporations.
a SAD reality: years of using test-score-based “accountabilty” as an excuse for invading schools and intentionally blaming rather than supporting teachers leads to situations where discipline cannot occur, thus opening the door for even more ‘reformers’ to jump in arguing that the school has clearly failed and must be invaded or closed.
This news makes me ill.
The entire charter industry is a national tragedy and embarrassment.
Good gawd..more than stupefying.
Around the corner from my daughter’s family a new (2nd year open) charter school was built to a tune of 8 million dollars. The middle school football team went to Hawaii to play a game this year. Hawaii! How is that being paid for? Your tax dollars probably. The owner of this school 9which has multiple campuses) was the subject of a 3 page investigation in the newspaper, so I would guess there is a lot of “wheeling and dealing” going on. I retired from a public school where I scrambled to get pencils and paper for the kids. Something is wrong here.
on the nose