New BfA Series: Peeking Into Charter Schools

by David Safier
I've written quite a few posts about charter schools in the past. Sometimes they've been based on newspaper articles and sometimes on my own research, but the best material has come from information people have sent me.

It's hard to find out much about what charter schools are doing unless you get it from an insider. Charters live in a kind of netherworld between the private world of private schools and the public world of traditional public schools.

The purpose of the series, Peeking Into Charter Schools, is to shed a bit more light on the subject. I chose the word "Peeking" rather than "Looking" because it's so difficult to get a complete picture of how the schools are run and the ways they educate our children. At best, we only get glimpses. And that's the problem. Charters use tax dollars to educate our children, so we have the right, and an obligation, to know more about how the money is being spent and how the children are being educated.

To help peek through the half closed doors, Jen Darland has agreed to put her formidable research skills to work on the task. Darland is the private citizen and mother of two young children who put together the initial research about problems with tuition tax credits and School Tuition Organizations (STOs). Using her work as the starting point, the Republic and the East Valley Trib have written important articles on the topic, which led to Democratic legislators forming a bipartisan investigative committee to look into the situation.

We're at an important juncture in the 15 year history of Arizona charter schools. The world of charter schools is going through a transition here and across the nation. They're growing in size and in number and beginning, but only beginning, to come under public scrutiny. To improve the schools, we need to understand the legislation, the regulatory systems and the schools themselves to see what's working and what's not.

2 thoughts on “New BfA Series: Peeking Into Charter Schools”

  1. Ben, I’m going mainly with the bad.

    Here’s my reason. I know some charters are doing a great job. Almost any school filled with people dedicated to children’s education is going to be a good school, and there are plenty of those among traditional, charter and private schools. The successful charters won’t change much if we have better regulation. They’re doing just fine. And I’ve said many times, I’m a supporter of charter schools, so I don’t have to reestablish that fact.

    However, our under regulated, Wild West world of charter schools encourages profiteers and slipshod charter operators to run school with little financial or educational oversight. That hasn’t been brought to light adequately, and that’s what I want to do. I consider it my contribution to the effort to ensure that we have well run charter schools which are held accountable for the money they spend and the effort they put forth to educate our children.

    That being said, if great stories fall in my lap about charter schools, I’ll post about them. But that’s not where I’m going to put in my time.

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