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Education in America

Charter Schools: What Could Go Wrong?

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Interested in charter schools as an alternative to traditional public education? Well, that makes sense, especially in a backwater like Arizona, where schools are shamefully underfunded and the resulting national and international academic rankings are similarly shameful.

Are charter schools The Answer? I don’t know.

Certainly here in the Wild West, where ethics run as short as water, it’s highly debatable. If you’re thinking about a charter school for the kids or the grand-kids, think carefully, and take a long look before you leap. With permission from the Grand Canyon Institute, Funny about Money is reproducing a response to a little firestorm that arose after publication of a report suggesting that over the past 20 years, more than 3/4 of Arizona charter schools have indulged in questionable uses of taxpayer money. If you’d like to read the full 90-page report, which is quite the jaw-dropper, you can download the PDF here. There’s a separate executive summary online, too.

As you can imagine, this report elicited loud squawks of protest from various quarters, some of which contain some fairly heavy hitters, especially within the present political infrastructure. If you care at all about the future of education in this country — and about the use of your taxpayer dollars therein — you need to take a look at this.

Fighting Fire With Data

No substance in critiques of charter school finances report

Oct. 5, 2017 – On Sunday, Sept. 17 the Grand Canyon Institute (GCI) released a policy report that tracks the financial practices of Arizona’s charter schools over the past 20 years. It found that 77% of charter schools use taxpayer money for questionable financial practices. Of the more than $1 billion charter schools received in public funds each year, almost half is paid to related parties – the charter holder’s own for profit business, corporate board members or relatives of either.

Last week, charter sector leaders criticized GCI’s policy report, Following the Money: Twenty Years of Charter School Financial Practices in Arizona, with no substance behind their arguments. The president of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools (ASBCS) responded to GCI’s policy report by labeling the organization as anti-charter and claiming that charter schools are well-regulated. She was joined by the vice chairman of the Arizona Charter Schools Association, who is also the CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He stated that charter schools are held to a high level of accountability and argues that a school’s academic performance should be the ultimate determination of its fiscal responsibility.

GCI is pro-school-choice

The Grand Canyon Institute is pro-school-choice.  The recommendations that we make in our report are to ensure that well managed, fiscally responsible charters create true school choice among all publicly-funded schools. Greater accountability will provide charters that do not engage in such activities a competitive advantage, allowing them to thrive and ultimately improve the academic performance of Arizona’s charter and public district schools.

 The misconception about the superior performance of charter schools

The claim by charter proponents that charter school students’ performance is superior to public district school students is a misconception. Comparing similar students in the two systems tells the story differently. This superior performance claim is based on comparisons of aggregate charter school and public district school scores on standardized tests. Charter schools attract proportionally more higher-performing, advantaged students and tend to “weed out” the lowest performers. Because charters rarely provide transportation, they enroll comparatively fewer students from lower-income families. They also enroll comparably lower numbers of students with special needs. The result is higher aggregate test scores.

GCI’s policy report cites the only recent studies that used student-level data to compare district and charter students of similar socio-economic and demographic backgrounds. Those studies, one from a research center affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the other contracted by the Goldwater Institute, both found that overall Arizona district schools modestly outperform charters. Some charter schools, no doubt, do perform better than district schools, but that is not the case for most charters.

Simply put, aggregate data perpetuates the misconception that charter school students perform better than public district school students.

 Academic success does not equal fiscal responsibility

One common critique of GCI’s findings and other research that focused on charter school finances is that academic performance should be the metric indicating whether a charter school is practicing fiscal responsibility. Data that indicates related-party transactions, excessive executive compensation, and shareholder payouts despite a lack of profitability has been routinely dismissed.

GCI does not see why academic performance and financial accountability should be mutually exclusive.  Charter schools that engaged in related-party transactions that led to cost-savings were not included in the 77%. As taxpayers, why should we turn a blind eye to whether our money is being used inefficiently or unethically simply because of strong academic performance by students at a select few charter schools? Is it too much to ask that charter schools engage in both strong pedagogical practice and proper handling of taxpayer dollars?

GCI probed the prevailing economic theory referenced in the charter school marketplace. The theory is that once the state has given taxpayer money to the charter school the charter is free to spend it as they deem fit. Moving large sums of public money to a related party, a for-profit corporate entity, diverts taxpayer funding to companies that do not provide audited accounting to the state or the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. This does not change the fact that the money came from public sources.

 Arizona’s charter schools are not well-regulated

The Grand Canyon Institute’s comprehensive financial analysis found that charter schools were rampant with related-party transactions, a practice where charter school operators did business with for-profit companies owned by the charter holder, members of the school’s corporate board, or relatives of either. While this activity is illegal for public school districts, it has been allowed for charter schools to create cost savings. However, GCI found that 77% of charter schools engaging in this practice do so in a manner that does not create costs savings for the charter entity. Therefore GCI concludes it is not in the best interests of students or the taxpayer. While charter schools are required under state law to disclose such activities, the Arizona Daily Star reported that the ASBCS does not keep track of such conflict-of-interest disclosures.

Furthermore, stringent oversight of charters at the school level is a dubious claim when the current law allows governing boards for charters as well as, when applicable, parent corporate boards that oversee multiple charters to be composed of the following related-party combinations:

  • One person, the charter holder.
  • Two people, husband and wife who also hold the charter.
  • Two charter holder couples.
  • Relatives and owners of related party businesses.
  • Charter holder serves as the board chair/president.
  • Corporate Boards that are the same for related-party businesses dealing with the non-profit charter. Salaries, bonuses and distributions from these subsidiaries are not reported on the Audits. Money moving to the subsidiaries is noted in the Related-Party section of the Audit.

In addition, 113 charters did not post notices of upcoming board meetings or meeting locations on their websites as required by law.  As a result, a complaint was made to the Arizona Attorney General for their failure to comply with Arizona Open Meeting Laws.

With no aggregate records kept of charter school financial activities, GCI researchers were forced to dive into financial documents charter-by-charter to determine how widespread the practice was. All charters from 1994 to 2015 were financially evaluated using forensic accounting. The result is a database with financial information pulled from Annual Financial Reports, audits, and IRS 990 filings from every charter school that reports to the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. This information was collected with cooperation from the ASBCS and the Arizona Department of Education.

GCI found that charter governing and corporate boards composed with the above related-parties invite the wolf to watch the hen house. Current charter law enabled the following examples of related-party transactions:

  • Renting from a for-profit business or individual
  • Purchasing goods and services from a related for-profit business or individual
  • Leasing employees from a related party for-profit company or individual
  • Loans and notes to a related-party for-profit company or individual
  • Paying a related party for “board” services on the corporate board
  • Consulting contracts to a related party, and a host of other dealings with parties related to the owners of the charter.
  • Multiple related-parties on the payroll.

GCI also found that charter schools paid teachers on average 20% less than public school districts while paying administrators significantly more (about 50% greater than their counterparts in similar-sized public school districts). This lack of regulation has created an environment where those who control the purse-strings can enrich themselves and their families at the expense of students and teachers. For example, when a charter elects not to participate in the Arizona State Retirement System, the retirement contribution from the employer will likely be less than the ASRS 11.1%. Does that savings go to teachers as additional compensation or into the pockets of charter holders?

Next steps

Charter schools in Arizona, including the one-in-four with good business practices, face a real danger of becoming associated with corruption instead of student success.  That is not in anyone’s interest. The Grand Canyon Institute wants to work with the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools and the Arizona Charter Schools Association to create a highly competitive environment that creates high-performing charter schools.  We suggest starting with the report’s key recommendations that charter schools must:

  • Conduct public competitive bid processes similar to public district schools.
  • Ensure consistency among Annual Financial Reviews (AFRs), audits, and IRS 990 filings, including using the same accounting method, Cash, Accrual, or Modified Accrual across all reports.
  • Adopt executive salaries comparable to similarly sized public district schools.
  • Be subject to annual audits by the state Auditor General similar to public district schools.

These policies will foster high-performing, fiscally responsible charter schools, which will give Arizona what it has strived for: true school choice.

If research like this matters to you, please consider a tax deductible donation to the Grand Canyon Institute,  a  501(c) (3) nonprofit organization and an independent, nonpartisan think tank led by a bipartisan group of former state lawmakers, economists, community leaders and academicians. Donations can be sent to the Grand Canyon Institute, PO Box 1008, Phoenix, Arizona 85001-1008. Or donate online here.

And no, my little chickadees, there’s not a single paid link in this entire squib.  ♥

Yipe? The Perp?

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This morning as the dogs were circumnavigating the ’hood with the human in tow, we came across a gent who looked very much like the fellow in the video who jumped over two walls to get at a couple of small children playing in their backyard. The instant I saw him, I thought holee crap! That’s the guy!

He and another BoB (Burglar on Bike) came out of an alley here in the poor folks’ section, riding bikes and bearing backpacks, and proceeded toward Richistan. They crossed Feeder Street N.S. and rolled into the area where the incident occurred. The character in question rode a bike with distinctive bright green wheel rims.

So I called CrimeStop. But I doubt anything will come of it. A cop would have had to be in the ’hood already to catch up with them. They were probably across Main Drag North and well into Methland before a cruiser showed up.

Oh well.

Beautiful weather: great morning for casing a neighborhood. This is the reason we live in Arizona.  🙂

I should do some gardening, but have actual Work work to do before taking time for anything pleasurable. The mâche I planted in a pot never sprouted, so I imagine the seeds were too old. Need to drive up to Home Depot and pick up some chard seeds to fill that pot.

Yesterday La Maya pointed out that the Great Desert University’s much ballyhooed and very ambitious online program (they’re ripping off the University of Phoenix’s business plan) has attracted thousands of would-be majors in subjects no one in their right mind would dream of selecting in the past: psych and history, for example. All of these online courses are taught by adjuncts.

GDU pays adjuncts a little better than the community colleges do ($3300 per course, vs. about $2800). However, adjuncts are limited to two sections per semester. On the other hand, the online courses are only about nine weeks long, so you’d only be teaching one course at a time. But on the third hand, they have no caps on those courses, so a course that meets a gen-ed requirement could dump 400 students on you.

$3300 x 4 comes to less than I was earning in the junior college. But it would amount to a lot less work, especially if you were teaching something other than freshman comp. A course that’s not writing-intensive can be assessed almost solely with machine-graded T/F/Multiple-guess quizzes. Creative writing courses can be set up in BlackBoard or Canvas to ape the “workshop” style that’s been popular for decades: students read and comment on each others’ efforts. Yep: for credit. All the instructor has to do is check in once every week or ten days to be sure each classmate is actually posting the required creative squibs and the required number of comments.

GDU’s courses now sell for around $500 to $1100 per credit hour. Plus (contrary to what that link says) assorted fees.

Here’s one in the English Department: three units of upper-division credit for scoping out the literary journal marketplace. Got that? You pay us to do about four hours of work you could do on your own in a library or at a halfway decent bookstore.

Heh heh heh…speaking of perps… You thought used car dealers are con artists? You aint’ seen nuthin’ yet!

Art: A New Venture

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Drawing1roseSo I signed up for a drawing class at the Shemer Art Center, a city-operated museum and artists’ center in a historic home in the ritzy Arcadia district.

My friend La Maya, who has considerable talent as a painter, started taking classes there some years ago. Since then she’s studied with artists from all over the world, and she’s really developed to the professional level.

I don’t expect to accomplish any such thing. But I did once draw and paint when I was a young thang — took lessons from an artist up in Wickenburg for awhile. But I’m not very good.

That notwithstanding, I happened to drive by the Shemer a few days ago and thought…why not?

It’s not real cheap: $175 for five weekly three-hour sessions. But it surely isn’t as much as a vacation. And I haven’t gone on a vacation for many years, indeed. So: think of it as a kind of mini-vacation, and the price doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Drawing2poppyWhile I was still teaching at the Great Desert University — lo! those many years ago — I took a drawing class at Phoenix College. Not very successful: the instructor left something to be desired, yet some of the young things were so talented and so far beyond what was offered in the course that I felt totally out of place. Nothing was presented that I didn’t already know about, the assignments were uninspiring, and the one skill that I could have used some help with — perspective — was glossed over.

PC charges $86 per credit hour. For a three-credit course, that’s $258, plus a $15 “administrative” rip-off, for a total of $273. Makes the Shemer course sound like a bargain…except that a three-credit course running over a full semester meets three hours a week for 16 weeks. That’s three times as long: $175 x 3 would be $525.

To take such a course at the Great Desert University apparently would cost so much the administrators dare not make it clear. Searching through a half-dozen Web pages, you discover that they charge “$480 to $543 per credit hour,” for godsake. But whereas the junior college inflicts only one extra rip-off on its students, GDU lists ELEVEN of them, among them a gouge for those who take more than an approved number of credits before graduating, the usual gouge for the athletic department levied on everyone whether they’re sports fans or no, a cryptic “financial aid trust fee” whose nature is about as clear as mud, and a brand-new “resident surcharge fee” imposed in response to the idiot legislators’ having cut state funding to the university.

Huh. No wonder my son doesn’t want to take an MBA there. He could get one from Stanford for less cost, and get a decent degree, too.

So anyway, the cost of the course is midway between a community college’s and the endlessly annoying university’s. In fact, I could take the equivalent of a full semester-long 3-credit course at the Shemer for less than GDU would charge me to take one credit.

What a place.

At any rate, this will blow away the new budget, which allows for all of $15 for entertainment. Ohh well. Just have to spend less on a few other categories. I guess.

Got a Kid Going to College? Read This

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If your kids attend a college or university — or if you do — you need to read this book.

IMG_3006College students or their parents face endless tuition increases. Do you know what their tuition is buying — and not buying?

Sixty to eighty percent of college instructors are not professors at all. They’re underpaid, often marginally qualified part-time adjuncts. In the brave new world of academe, few American students get what they pay for when they arrive at college. Meanwhile, graduate programs churn out thousands of would-be college faculty with master’s and doctoral degrees, few of whom ever land full-time jobs in higher ed.

Full-time faculty are systematically being replaced by part-timers with no office, no computer, no phone, no insurance, no retirement, no representation, and sub-minimum wage pay.

This book explains the consequences, short- and long-term, of replacing professors with part-timers and chronicles one adjunct’s semester in America’s largest community college district.

For a handsome print copy, inquire in the comments section below — be sure to leave a real email address so we can get in touch (will not be shared!).

Check out all the offerings at Plain & Simple Press here!

Considering Grad School? 8 Things to Think About

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Come on over to the Plain & Simple Press blog, where I just posted eight guidelines for people who are considering graduate school, especially a Ph.D. program. Or any degree that might lead to a job in higher ed.

Cruising Amazon for another purpose, I happened to run across a book on the same general subject as Slave Labor, apparently (judging from the comments) one whose author shares my jaundiced view of academe.

This led to a rumination: Do I regret having acquired a Ph.D.?

Well, yes and no.

If I had put the same amount of energy and time into climbing the corporate ladder as it took to jump through the Ph.D. hoops, by now I’d own Phoenix Magazine, my first employer in journalism. Or when my boss left Arizona Highways, I could easily have acceded to the throne…and believe me, I’d still be there today, had that been the case.

On the other hand, it did help me get into a few decent jobs, and at Highways it let me enter at the top of my pay grade. And ultimately, I did end up with a full-time, decently paying job in academe, even though it wasn’t on the tenure track. I got an offer for a tenure-track position…declined, because I didn’t want to move to South Carolina. Certainly not for $10,000 less than I was earning here!

If I had it to do over again, I would choose a different discipline: one that would open more doors to employment and that would pay better.

Such as…?

• For the mathematically challenged: a doctorate in educational administration will get you into an assistant or associate deanship or a vice-presidency at any number of colleges and universities. At the Great Desert University, these are decently paying, 12-month jobs, and some of them are even non-exempt. Obviously, such a degree would also buy entrée to a for-profit, proprietary school, if you don’t mind ripping off students even more extravagantly than GDU does.

• For those who can handle courses in statistics: the Ph.D. in economics renders you eligible for all sorts of national and international jobs in corporations, governments, and nonprofits. Think high-level banking jobs…

• A Ph.D. in psychology will let you hang out your shingle as a psychologist and also qualify you for other jobs outside of academia. These are rather more difficult to find than one would like. However…if you combine an M.A. in psych with an M.A. in nursing, presto-changeo! A psychiatric nurse-practitioner! Nurse-practitioners in general are highly sought after, and those with a specialty can easily earn six figures.

• For those whose eyes don’t glaze over easily: a Ph.D. in accountancy. At GDU, a brand-new, fresh-out-of-grad-school assistant professor can come on at six figures. Noooo problem.

• Microbiology could be promising: government jobs, and possibly some corporate jobs in agribusiness, environmental science, public health, or genetic engineering. Back in the day, I would cheerfully have majored in microbiology, except that women were not welcome in the sciences. Conspicously not welcome. Fortunately, that has changed.

It’s something to think about. Preferably before you start a program…

Would I Have Done This? Would You?

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Y’know, sometimes I look at what my students do, often out of simple self-defense in a world fraught with absurd bureaucratic demands, and wonder if I would have done the same thing as a freshman.

Would I refuse to buy the textbook for a college course I was paying to take? If I did buy it, would I refuse to read it? Would I turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or, in my day, from a magazine or book)? Would I beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because I had a full-time job and was taking 18 credits? Would I need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?

Well, off-hand the answers would be No, Probably not, No, Not a chance, and No.

BUT…on reflection…

The truth is, there’s really no comparison between today’s student’s experience and my college experience a half-century ago.

In the first place, I did not take English 101 and 102, the two-semester iteration of the high-school English that apparently does not “take” for most Arizona kids. I didn’t go to school in Arizona, thank all the Gods and Goddesses that be: California schools, even the lesser schools of southern California where my parents moved after three years in San Francisco, went so far as to teach basic literacy and basic expository writing. My SAT scores got me into a one-semester substitute for the advanced dumbbell English most students had to take, and that was a course in modern literature — it wasn’t a composition course at all. So it should be noted that there really was no comparison. With that in mind, let us consider:

Would I refuse to buy the textbook for a college course I was paying to take?

No, certainly not. In the first place textbook publishers did not gouge students upwards of $80 for what really are nothing more than $20 trade paperbacks. So buying a semester’s textbooks did not mean I’d have to skip paying the rent that month.

And in the second place, it never even occurred to me not to buy a required textbook — or even one of the optional texts. Of course you bought the text. What would be the point of taking the course at all if you didn’t buy the books?

I remember being absolutely shocked when a third-year student bragged, in the moments before a particularly boring history class convened, that he  hadn’t bought the course textbook and that in fact he had never purchased a textbook for any class in his major, and he had a B+/A– average.

Tellingly, he was an education major.

Speaking of that history course…

Would I refuse to read a textbook that I’d bought?

That history course was taught by a dry, monotone professor who required a heavy, thick, equally dry and monotone textbook. It’s hard to make history boring, but this guy did it. That book was the most tedious piece of published anything I’ve ever read this side of a journal article in higher mathematics.  It was almost unreadable.

I didn’t refuse to read it — I tried to read it. But if he’d sat me down and asked me what I’d read, he’d probably have concluded the answer was “nothing.”

These comp textbooks are similarly boring and tendentious. They’re excruciating to read, and I know the subject matter. No. I live the subject matter. And I find them perfectly awful.

I would not have read it because, at the age of 17, when I entered college, I knew all this stuff. I had been writing sourced (i.e., cited and documented) expository papers since the seventh grade. By the time I left high school, a textbook like the ones we require for today’s freshman comp courses would have nothing to offer me. I certainly could have passed a 2015 freshman comp course without ever looking at the text.

Being the little doobie that I was, I probably would have looked at assigned readings. But I wouldn’t have studied them carefully, because I would have considered it a waste of time.

However…it must be remembered that for today’s students, the material is not a waste of time. Many, many high-school graduates entering your comp courses will tell you that they have never written any researched paper in all the 13 years they spent in Arizona’s K-12 schools! Some will tell you they’ve never written a piece of exposition at all. Any piece of exposition, like “what I did on my summer vacation.” They do not know how to find research sources. They do not know how to distinguish, in terms of credibility, between something they read on Faux News and something on the same subject that emanated from the New England Journal of Medicine. They cannot recognize when they’re indulging in a fallacy. Some of them don’t know what the word “fallacy” means. As many as a quarter of them do not write in coherent paragraphs — they can’t organize their thinking in rational blocks of copy.  About a third to a half habitually write in fragments and fused sentences.

Although the average American high-school kid did not score in the 99th percentile on the SAT’s verbal section, nevertheless a good 80 percent of them were capable of writing a coherent paper without a lot of basic grammar and logical thinking errors.

So: not a fair comparison. Quite.

Would I turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or, in my day, from a magazine or book)?

No. I was too scared to pull a stunt like that. Nor did I need to: I knew how to find information and how to synthesize it from several sources into a single coherent argument. I left high school knowing how to do that — it was as natural as breathing.

Over the decades, a sea change in attitudes toward honesty has taken place. People in general — including young people — have discovered that it’s very easy to get away with things. Keep a straight face and no one is likely to question you, first because most people are too busy to be bothered and second because few instructors want to go through the hassle of flunking you out of their course for plagiarizing.

That’s a function, I think, of the number of bureaucratic rules that now afflict us all. We have restraints and demands coming at us from all directions. And one of the things people have figured out is that nothing much happens if you quietly neglect to obey. Or that the chances that you’ll be caught out and hassled are relatively low.

I knew a young woman who indulged in a fair amount of insurance fraud. She’d become expert in navigating insurance claims and would even offer to help her friends maximize collections. A couple of times, her scams were pretty damned transparent. But you know what happened? Nothing. She collected. She got not one but two houses completely rebuilt (questionable whether the fire that burned down the second house was actually a fraud or a genuine attempt on the part of her psychotic husband to murder her — probably the latter, IMHO, but that was never proven). Neither of these people — the crooked wife or the equally unethical demented husband — have ever had to account for their scams in any meaningful way.

Young people aren’t fools. Students can see this stuff going on. And when they attempt their own small frauds, they learn the same thing: getting caught is a very, very long shot.

If I’d been functioning in this environment, who knows what I would have done? It’s a different social ethic altogether.

Would I beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because I had a full-time job and was taking 18 credits?

Never would’ve entered my mind. You did not challenge your teachers. Or your parents. Or a cop. Or a principal. Or the IRS dude. Or anyone else.

The kid who asked to turn in a major paper three days late did so not once but twice — she actually came back after I said “no” and tried to change my mind.

But once again one has to ask: is there really a comparison here?

Except for reading texts to a blind student once or twice a week, I didn’t hold a job during the entire four years of my undergraduate training. People didn’t. No one expected kids to go to school full-time and also go to work. For a student, your job was to study. That’s what you did. You didn’t go out and sell furniture or wait tables. The very idea would have been frowned upon.

And sign up for 18 credits? Are you kidding? Sixteen units was considered a heavy load. I doubt if the university would have allowed me to take 18 credit hours in a single semester. I would have had to get some kind of special permission to pull it off, and you can bet that if an adviser had a clue that I was working on the side, no such permission would have been forthcoming.

Tuition at public universities was almost free. Families did not have to damn near bankrupt themselves to send a kid to college, and students were not saddled with a lifetime of debt to get a degree that is now considered indispensable for white-collar employment.

Blue-collar jobs that would support a family existed in those days, so a college degree wasn’t regarded as non-negotiable for entrée to the middle class. For that matter, the middle class still existed, too…

So again, there’s really no comparison. College kids were not subjected to unreasonable demands or exploited mercilessly. They didn’t have to work as wage slaves while they were trying to take classes, and so they didn’t have to beg dispensation to turn in assignments late. And instructors were full-time faculty on the tenure track, not wretched part-timers juggling two, three, or four mini-gigs to put food on the table. So they could afford to fit an occasional late paper into their workload.

Would I need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?

Sure. We used footnotes back in the Dark Ages.

But the principle driving the practice was the same. And I’d been using footnotes since the seventh grade. No one needed to take my little hand and sit me down and explain to me what sources to cite, when, where, or why. Today’s  poor little things haven’t a clue.

How’z about you? Would you refuse to buy the textbook for a college course you were paying to take? If you did buy it, would you refuse to read it? Would you turn in a paper that was copied whole cloth from the Internet (or from a magazine or book)? Would you beg for an exception from the no-late-papers rule because you had a full-time job and were taking 18 credits? Would you need to be taught how to acknowledge a source in-text?