Arizona Charter Schools: The Good, The Bad, and The Costly, Part 2: Meet Arizona Virtual Academy

by David Safier

A building on Palo Verde just north of I-10 is the home of Arizona Virtual Academy. It’s a Charter Cyber School that gives online education to Arizona students all over the state. Because it’s a charter school (if you’re confused about charter schools, here is a primer), the students pay nothing. The state pays AVA for each student enrolled.

Arizona Virtual Academy is part of a publicly traded company, K12 Inc. The company was co-founded by William Bennett, Reagan’s Education Secretary and author of “The Book of Virtues,” though he left the company in 2005 when he posed “a thought experiment about public policy” on his radio show suggesting that if black babies were aborted, the crime rate would go down (He had offered to resign a few years earlier when his gambling habit came to light).

In 2007, according to K12 Inc.’s prospectus, it brought in $14 million in revenue from Arizona. In other words, $14 million in taxpayer money was collected by Arizona Virtual Academy. That was 10% of the company’s total revenue.

Nothing wrong with making a profit. Nothing wrong with publicly traded companies (it’s trading at about $23 right now, by the way). But this for profit company makes its money by charging Arizona and other states to educate their children, and we have a right to know how the money is spent, and how much of it goes for profit and for expenses not directly related to education.

AVA has no school buildings to house its students. They work from home — though this isn’t “home schooling,” which is not state funded and is something else entirely. The students are furnished with books and online materials. They’re even given a laptop computer to use and an internet hookup if they need it. They have interaction with teachers, though I don’t know how much, or how frequently. Since the students are spread all over the state, I doubt if there is much in the way of regular face-to-face contact.

So, should Arizona Virtual Academy get as much money per student as a charter school with a building and teachers who meet with their students on a daily basis?

My answer is no, unless they can convince the state and people like me that they are using our tax dollars for the purpose of education and not to make large profits at our expense.

This post has an accusatory tone to it, and I admit there’s a lot I don’t know about AVA and the other Arizona Charter Cyber Schools, so maybe I’m being unfair. But these are questions haven’t been asked much by the traditional media or, so far as I know, by the state legislature, and they need to be asked, and answered.