Education at Charters is Spotty, Oversight Lax ~ 8/16/09
While charter schools like Basis are known for their excelling programs, many other charter schools have not met their promises. The Arizona Daily Star has completed an investigation which shows that many charter schools have serious issues. Because the office overseeing charter schools is understaffed, they lack oversight. Further, poor performance is seldom addressed, administrators receive salaries that don’t seem to be tied to performance and, most troubling, information about how these public schools spend funds is difficult to obtain. To read the full investigation click the article below.
Education at Charters is Spotty, Oversight Lax, Arizona Daily Star, August 16, 2009
To view the performance rankings of all Arizona Charter schools on the AEN website, click here.
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There’s another specific example of charter school funding fraud at: http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/misuse-of-state-funds-at-north-star-charter.html
The “office overseeing charter schools is understaffed”….5 people charged with overseeing 502 schools? Yeah, I’d say that’s more than “understaffed”, that borders on gross negligence.
You bias against charter schools seems to be showing and you must have missed this in the article…
“Students in charter schools score slightly higher than traditional public school counterparts overall in the AIMS test in lower grades.”
Is AEN all about the money or are you concerned at all about student academic performance?
This comment…
“administrators receive salaries that don’t seem to be tied to performance”
is intellectually dishonest. Could you point to some administrators in district public schools who receive salaries tied to student performance? Ever see a superintendent take a pay cut because the students lose ground on test scores? Not likely.
AZ Ed Watch:
Thank you again for commenting. The parent who contributed this article is actually an active charter school advocate. However, she felt the link to this article was significant, due to some alarming regulatory issues that we have also found in some of our independent research.
The synopsis above is a summary of the Arizona Daily Star article. I’m sure once you read the article, you will see that the above post is a summary only, not an opinion. The actual quote from the article by Rhonda Bodfield is:
• “Some administrators make salaries that don’t seem on par with academic performance, and some have salaries that rival superintendents of much-larger districts. Taxpayers are in the dark about how much some operators make because budget information submitted to the state Education Department is sparse. And 12 percent of the schools are for-profit ventures that don’t file federal forms required of nonprofits that would provide more details on their operations.”
In regards to your comment about being intellectually dishonest…we don’t think it’s dishonest to provide information and we are concerned about some of the pay salaries reviewed in this article. The article that we referenced in our post is not a condemnation of charter schools in AZ, it simply points out that there is some serious oversight issues. In a quick analysis, the superintendent of Sunnyside school district earns $150,000/year with 18,000 students. The superintendent of La Paloma Academy earns $171,000 for overseeing 1200 students. That’s an administrative cost of $142.50/student at La Paloma, versus $8.30/student in the Sunnyside example.
As we have mentioned elsewhere in the site, we are not only about the money. The type of mismanagement alluded to in this article drains fiscal resources from excelling charter and district schools. At the end of the day, it is definitely about the student academic performance and we fail to see how the disproportionate salaries and lack of oversight is helpful to children — we feel it is imperative to insure a quality education for EVERY child in the state.
We commend the work being done by the Arizona Charter School Association, which is working to address these issues.
Linda
linda@arizonaeducationnetwork.com
AZ Ed Watch, you might want to check out the editorial written in today’s AZ Daily Star. http://www.azstarnet.com/opinion/305278
“The success stories make the disappointments all the more frustrating. While performing charter schools have been able to offer their programs because of flexibility allowed under the Arizona charter school legislation, that same freedom has allowed problematic schools to keep their doors open for years.”