Archives for category: Arizona
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Arizona: CEO of Failing Online Charter School Gets a Bonus of $8.8 Million

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
19

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.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Failure, For-Profit, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Arizona: #RedForEd Gets “Tax the Rich” for Education on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2018 //
7

The #RedForEd movement in Arizona succeeded in getting an initiative on the Arizona ballot to tax the highest income people to pay for education. Arizona is one of the lowest-spending states in the nation for education.

A judge has slapped down efforts by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry to block people from voting whether to hike income taxes on the rich to generate $690 million a year for education.

In an extensive ruling Thursday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge James Smith acknowledged that, strictly speaking, hiking the top income tax rate from 4.54 percent to 8 percent for those earning more than $250,000 a year actually increases the tax rate on those earnings by 76 percent. Similarly, taking the tax rate for earnings above $500,000 for individuals to 9 percent is a 98 percent increase over the current rate.

But Smith said that did not make it inherently misleading for organizers of the Invest in Ed initiative to describe the tax hikes as 3.46 percent and 4.46 percent, the absolute difference between the current rate and the proposed new ones.

It is true, Smith said, that technically speaking, the 100-word description of the key provisions of the measure, required by state law, should probably have said it was raising the tax rate by 3.46 and 4.46 “percentage points,” respectively.

“While that likely would be more precise, the existing summaries are not fatally misleading without that verbiage,” the judge wrote, meaning the use of the smaller numbers is not enough to block a vote.

Attorneys for the chamber had argued the use of 3.46 and 4.46 percent was misleading, causing some people to sign the petition to put the issue on the November ballot who would have balked at a measure described as hiking tax rates by 76 and 98 percent, even just for the rich.

Smith conceded that initiative organizers crafted the description “undoubtedly … to appeal to potential voters.” But he said that does not make it inaccurate or misleading.

Anyway, the judge pointed out that the full text of the initiative — including the current and proposed tax rates — were attached to the petitions, so those who might have been confused could check for themselves before signing.

Categories Arizona, Funding

Arizona is Building Tiny Homes for Teachers Instead of Paying Them a Living Wage

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2018 //
63

This is something new. The state of Arizona is building tiny homes for teachers since teachers in many districts can’t afford to buy or rent a home in the district where they teach.

Some charter-friendly districts have built “teachers’ villages” to house teachers from Teach for America.

But this is the first I have heard of tiny homes. A tiny home is 400 square feet. It includes a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. No living room. A tiny home for teachers who don’t expect much in life.

Categories Arizona, Teachers

Gene V. Glass: The Books That Are Too Dangerous for AP Students to Read

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2018 //
11

Gene V. Glass was stunned to discover that a book he wrote with David Berliner, “50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools,” had been removed from the summer reading list for AP English students.

Too controversial.

About a decade ago, I wrote a book about censorship in texts, tests, and assigned books, called “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.”

Plus ça change, plus ce la meme chose.

Categories Accountability, Arizona

Jan Resseger: Teachers Are Leading the Fight for Funding in Red States

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2018 //
19

Jan Resseger reports here on the role of teachers in Oklahoma and Arizona in leading the fight against tax-cutting Tea Party ideologues whose cruel zeal is hurting children and denying them a decent education.

She begins by citing an article in “The Nation” about Oklahoma, where taxes had not gone up since 1990 until the teacher protests this spring:

“Covert [the author of the article] introduces us to Scott Helton, a high school English teacher whose school opted to save money with online textbooks instead of buying the printed copies. But the school hasn’t enough computers and its Wi-Fi is inadequate. He has been forced to spend his own money to provide readings for his students. Ten years ago, his classes averaged 20 students; today they are packed with 35, and in once case 40 students, many of whom sit on the floor. We also learn about underpaid workers in other government agencies including Gail DeLashaw, a family-support worker in the Department of Human Services, whose salary is $30,000, 60 percent of the national average for someone like DeLashaw with an advanced degree. Her case load—once 500 or 600—has risen to 1,200 families.”

In Arizona, teachers and parents gathered 270,000 signatures to put a referendum on the ballot to raise taxes for education. Gov. Doug Ducey and his allies, of course, will fight it. Ducey is up for re-election. Democrats will choose his opponent in a primary next month. The leading contender on the Democratic ballot is David Garcia, a strong fighter for funding education. Garcia is a professor of education at Arizona State University. Polls show him tied with Ducey, or even ahead of him.

Categories Arizona, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Oklahoma

Arizona: Why You Should Vote NO on Prop. 305! No Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2018 //
0

Save Our Schools Arizona is a group founded by public school parents to fight the expansion of vouchers.

Prop 305 is a referendum that will appear on the state ballot in November. It calls for the universal expansion of vouchers so that all students can use public money to attend private and religious schools with taxpayers’ dollars.

Parents are fighting this. They fought the Koch brothers in court to get this referendum on the ballot.

This video explains what the issues are and why you should vote NO to support public schools, the schools that belong to everyone.

Voucher schools are not transparent and not accountable. Every dollar that goes to an ESA is taken away from public schools.

Vote NO!

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Koch Brothers, Support for public schools, Vouchers

Why Arizona Voters Should Vote NO on Voucher Expansion

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2018 //
1

After a long and bruising battle, voters in Arizona will have their first chance to vote on vouchers in November. Arizona has vouchers now for specific groups of students, but last year the legislature enacted an e passion that would make vouchers available to all. Arizona is beloved by ALEC, the Koch brothers, and the DeVos family due to its choice programs. After passage of voucher expansion, supporters of public schools gathered over 100,000 signatures calling for a referendum. The Koch brothers sent in lawyers to try to block the referendum (Prop 305), but the state courts ruled that it could go forward. Then the Koch operatives pushed the idea that the legislature should repeal and re-enact the voucher expansion law, which would force the opposition to start over. But, in the days after the mass protests of the #RedForEd movement, the legislature was unable to gather enough votes for repeal.

Why are the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Childre so frightened of a referendum? Vouchers have lost every time they have been put to a vote.

How do vouchers work in Arizona?

This article, published a year ago, says that oversight of public money is nearly a sham.

“As the program expanded, resources to scrutinize the expenditures — made using state-provided debit cards — never kept pace. The Legislature gave the Department of Education money for the program butwouldn’t authorize spending much of it.

“The warnings of lax oversight and little accountability proved prescient. Money was misspent but the state recovered almost none of it.

“For example, some parents transferred all of their scholarship money into a 529 college-savings account and then left the program — preventing the state from recouping the funds.

“Others pocketed the money and sent their kids to public schools.

“Some purchased books or other materials using their state-issued debit cards and then immediately returned them. The refunded money was put on gift cards, allowing parents to spend it with no scrutiny.

“And despite the Legislature’s vehement opposition to public money paying for abortions, the ESA program became one of the only state programs to allegedly fund the procedure. In 2014, payment to a health clinic led education officials to believe ESA money had been spent on an abortion.

“These illegal expenditures of taxpayer money have sparked little outrage and no widespread calls for changes from either the Governor’s Office or the Legislature.

“State leaders’ apathy is in stark contrast to their condemnation of and crackdown on abuse of social-welfare programs. Arizona has in recent years implemented among the nation’s most restrictive rules for lower-income recipients of cash assistance.

“Chris Kotterman, lobbyist for the Arizona School Boards Association, said that “double standard” reflects the special status Republican state leaders afford school-choice programs.

““Private-school choice is much more favored than cash assistance to the poor,” Kotterman said. “If it’s a welfare program, then strict accountability is necessary … On the school-choice side, there’s an inherent assumption that parents, no matter what, are able to make the best choices and the government should get out of the way.”

Categories ALEC, Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Fraud, Koch Brothers

Linda Lyon: Can Arizona Reclaim Its Schools?

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2018 //
6

Linda Lyon, president of the Arizona Schools Boards Association, knows that the privatizers have had unfettered control of the state for years. On the NPE-Schott state scorecard, Arizona was one of the worst states in terms of its leaders’ policies. Now the parents and educators are fighting back against the Koch brothers’ machine in a referendum this fall. The time to fight for public control of public schools is now.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Is the BASIS Charter Chain a Financial Pyramid Scheme?

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2018 //
18

Mercedes Schneider thinks she has figured out the BASIS financial model by studying its tax returns over the years. She writes that it’s owners, Michael and Olga Block, keep expanding because the chain needs more revenue.

She goes through the BASIS returns year by year. Every time they open a new school, they get more revenue—and more debt.

“That seems to be the secret to its financial sauce: Use the revenue generated from opening new schools to make money while forestalling the crash of snowballing debt.”

She writes:

“What do you call an investment where you have to keep bringing in more investors?

“A fraud.

“Consider the following from Investopedia regarding pyramid schemes:

The process continues until the base of the pyramid is no longer strong enough to support the upper structure, and there are no more recruits.

“The problem is that the scheme cannot go on forever….

“The fraud lies in the fact that it is impossible for the cycle to sustain itself….

“In the case of Basis schools, Michael and Olga Block cannot go on opening new schools ad infinitum.

“If they are dependent upon opening new schools (as they seem to be), they are setting up all Basis schools for financial collapse.

“Basis Schools:

“$274 million in long-term debt as of June 30, 2017, according to its FY 2017 audit.”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

What You Need to Know About the Top Charter Chain in the Nation

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2018 //
38

The highest ranked charters in the nation, based on graduation rates, test scores, AP courses passed, etc., are the BASIS schools of Arizona.

Two articles tell you what you need to know to understand their “secret sauce.”

Carol Burris reports here on their demographics and attrition rate. Their top-performing schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian, with few Hispanic, African American, or Native American students, and few students with disabilities. They lose most of their students between 7th grade and 12th grade.

Craig Harris of the Arizona Republic details the BASIS business model here. The charters are owned by a private, for-profit company created by the founders Michael and Olga Block. They collect a sizable portion of the schools’ revenues (“According to an agreement between Basis Schools and Basis.ed, the Blocks’ private firm keeps 11.75 percent of all school revenues — state, federal and local tax dollars — for management fees”). They recently bought an $8.4 Million condo in New York City to be closer to private schools they own there. Their company, the article says, received $14 million in management fees last year. The charters pay their teachers less than the average Arizona teachers’ salary, but they are less experienced. Teachers get more money because parents are asked to donate $1,500 per student per year, which is a bargain compared to private schools. Teachers get a bonus of $200 whenever a student gets a 5 on an AP exam. The average BASIS student takes a dozen AP exams and passes nearly all of them.

A reader on the blog added this comment:

Basis, the #1 school in the nation by Newsweek Magazine, 2017, graduated 44 students. 18 whites, the rest mostly Asians. No ELL, No Special Ed. Less than 8% Black/Hispanics. No free or reduced lunch. So, basically we’re saying privileged, upper socio-economic, gifted students.
In my last year of teaching, I had 45 in one room with 30 desks, not enough old texts to teach. Didn’t stay that way all year, but enough to impact teaching & learning.

Basis only teaches the gifted. Look a little deeper.

There you have it. The secret sauce. Accept everyone who applies. Get rid of the students who are unlikely to pass AP exams. Hire young teachers and pay less than underpaid public school teachers. Pay a bonus whenever students get a 5 on an AP exam. Create a culture of testtaking. Drop those who can’t do it. Solicit money from parents to pay teachers more.

Is it a model for public education? No. Public schools must keep all students, not just those most likely to pass tests.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization
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