Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider interview Arizona Republic reporter Craig Harris about the charter school scandals in Arizona, the “wild west” of charters.
Harris was a member of the investigative team that won the prestigious George Polk Award for its coverage of charter schools in their state.
You can listen here.
Or, you can read the interview here.
Here is a small excerpt, where they begin to interview Craig Harris:
Craig Harris: It started about a year ago on two fronts. One, there was a relatively prominent charter school, a notorious charter school that abruptly closed on the west side of Phoenix in a town called Goodyear. And the reason that school had gained some notoriety is because a few years earlier, one of the students had gone missing and died. And what happened, now we’re finding out later, is that the school was being fraudulent on its attendance in order to keep it running because people had left the school because of the tragedy. And so the school got shut down. And that piqued our interest.
And then I live on the east side of Phoenix in town called Gilbert, which is kind of like ground zero of where charter schools are. They’re very, very popular out in my neck of the woods. And part of the reason is that a lot of the operators that run the charter schools belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They’re Mormons. And so a lot of them have developed charter schools and they’ve been able to grow because they have pretty good academics, but they also focus on morality and wholesomeness and things like, so that, that gets a lot of parents to enroll their kids at those schools.
Berkshire: Well, we are obviously here to talk about some of the less wholesome aspects of Arizona’s charter school industry over the last year. You’ve written one unbelievable exposé after another about the edupreneurs, as I like to call them, who are getting rich off of running charter schools. I know it’s hard to choose, but I want you to pick your favorite scandal for us and just sort of break down for us the nature of the scam.
Craig Harris: Well, Arizona, depending on how you look at it—if you’re a charter organizer Arizona is considered one of the best states in the country for charter schools because it has some of the fewest and weakest oversight and regulations of any of the 44 states that have charter schools. And so one of the stories I wrote about was a guy named Eddie Farnsworth. And coincidentally Eddie is my state senator. We actually live within two miles of each other. And he ran a series of charter schools called Benjamin Franklin Charter Schools. They built them from the ground up. So what happened is that Mr. Farnsworth, who’s also a legislator who’s been in the office for like two decades, created a nonprofit company with three friends of his, two of whom were lobbyists who got votes from him to favor their clients to buy his schools, and they paid top dollar for those schools.
And he made about $14 million in profit on the sale of his schools, which were privately owned, to a nonprofit company that he set up. And then that nonprofit hired him as a consultant and then also agreed to lease buildings from him and agreed to hire his brother as the chief executive. And so he has gotten extremely rich from this. And then during his time when he was in the legislature, we went back and look and he repeatedly voted on bills that increased funding for charter schools. And at the same time he blocked bills that would have brought more restrictions and oversight on charter schools.
The legislature responded to the series of exposes in the Arizona Republic by promising to pass a law reining in the wrongdoing. But, here’s the catch: the charter lobbyists wrote the “reform” legislation!
Harris said:
The Charter Association, which is a nonprofit business that represents the 500 plus charter schools, their lobbyists wrote most of the bill. And so what happened when the lobbyist for the Charter Association or basically the charter industry wrote most of the bill is the legislation is what critics call window dressing. It doesn’t stop any of the self dealing. It doesn’t stop organizations like another one wrote about, which is an online school called Primavera. Their CEO, he paid himself $10 million over the last year and a half, while having incredibly high dropout rates and very low test scores.
The bill also doesn’t stop self dealing from giving no-bid management contracts that are worth tens of millions of dollars.
It’s useful to compare the news reports with the cheerleading from the echo chamber:
“States that are enacting laws for the first time and states that are overhauling their laws are bypassing states that were previously more highly ranked, such as Arizona, Louisiana, and New York. That doesn’t mean that the laws have gotten weaker in the states being bypassed. They remain strong. What it does mean, though, is that more and more states have better and better laws across the country, a good place to be if you believe that all states should have high-quality charter school laws.”
Everything is great in charterland! No problems at all! Super fabulous, on every measure!
That’s why we get huge scandals like ECOT. They created a mutually reinforcing cheerleading squad. ECOT was IMPLODING in Ohio and the ed reform echo chamber within the Obama Administration was POURING money into Ohio charters. A complete disconnect from reality. Jeb Bush promoted ECOT, along with every other high profile ed reformer.
“More and more states have better and better laws across the country”. Rah! Rah!
This is the extent of the “analysis”. It’s understandable from the lobbyists- that’s what lobbyists do, after all, but what is the academics excuse? Why are they mindlessly promoting these schools? Aren’t they PAID to ask questions ?
https://www.publiccharters.org/latest-news/2019/01/23/measuring-ten-years-charter-school-law-rankings
I sometimes think ed reformers are afraid to properly regulate these schools or develop a system of “good government” for the contractors, because if they do the systems they will end up will look A LOT like existing public school systems, and then they’re exposed as simply wanting to replace existing systems with the privatized systems their ideological beliefs dictate.
And then people will ask why we got rid of public schools just to replace them with contracted, privatized systems that aren’t “an improvement”.
They’re now demanding facilities funding. What they will find out when they get it is the public is going to demand a role in deciding where and what they build with public money. The public is going to ask “hey- do we really need a new high school to compete with the high school across the street?” There will be questions about sustainability and demand and number of students and cost- questions public schools have to answer but the charter sector has not.
We built a new school here. It took three years and 2 ballot issues to get a plan the public approved. If I’m an ed reformer I think that’s “red tape”.getting in the way of my unilateral decision-making. If I’m a member of the public I think it’s my right.
And that’s not even touching the issue of publicly-funded private schools.
DeVos thinks she’s clever with her political rhetoric about how private schools are “public” if they’re publicly-funded but that’s not true, and people will find out it’s not true when their kid gets booted from or denied entry into a private school.
Then the public will ask why they’re funding schools they have no input into or control over. Who owns the new building on a private school campus if the school is publicly-funded? Does the public have a right to know if (fungible) school funding is going to a church? Can the private school expel a pregnant girl? Can the private school deny entry to a gay student?
They haven’t grappled with ANY of this, yet they are privatizing as fast as humanely possible and not a one of them ever, ever dissents. It’s a recipe for disaster. Disaster is all but guaranteed. They have no earthly idea how any of this shakes out. None. They don’t even discuss it.
They already over-built. They had under-enrolled charters in Toledo almost immediately. They vastly over-stated demand and no one was checking their work, at all, so the schools opened and then closed.
No one knows where the “wait list” claims come from and then no one explains why there are so many under-enrolled charters if the demand is so high.
You heard DeVos at the hearing last week. Her POSITION is “open more charters”
If I went to my local school board and said “I want to open a new elementary school” I would have to back that up! I would need population studies and a budget and actual plans for what I’m building with public funds and I would have to get the consent of the public. They would deny my petition and they would be right! We can’t afford an extra school! We can’t sustain that. We’d end up with two weaker schools.
I just read a huge report put out by USA Today along with Az newspaper staff on model legislation, ALEC, Goldwater etc. They actually touched on vouchers!!! Maybe the information in this article will get people really riled up about how legislation gets introduced and passed by the people that we elect to represent us. It seems that those elected don’t even read the bills….they just believe in the nice name that has been given to the bill without realizing that it’s actually an ALEC anti-people/pro-business proposal. I am not shocked at all. Seems USA Today doesn’t really support the Koch Bros/