Arizona Charter Schools: The Good, The Bad, and The Costly, Part 7: Rep. Lujan is Mostly Correct

by David Safier

(Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.)

After reading over Lujan’s explanation of HB2816 in last night’s post a few times, I was ready to blast him for dancing around the issue I raised. But this morning I read it a few more times and went back to the actual bill, and I realized that I had made an incorrect assumption. (Remember in an earlier post, I gave myself the blogger’s right to jump to conclusions? Remember I said I would correct any errors?) The bill does not give any extra funding to Cyber Schools as I thought it did. The inclusion of a possible 125% funding per student refers only to students who also attend a Joint Technical Education District program, which offers vocationally based education. (Thanks to HikerDave for pointing that out to me.) That’s a perfectly legitimate exception in my book. Students who attend both a Cyber School and a traditional bricks-and-mortar school still only have a 100% allotment, to be split between the two. Fair enough.

Lujan was also right to say, “HB2816 also addresses concerns raised in the Auditor General’s Report about academic accountability by making TAPBI programs more accountable to state standards.” The new bill insists on proctored exams for students. Some Cyber Schools have allowed students to take their exams without supervision. The bill is unclear about how many and what kinds of exams are proctored, but it’s a step toward greater accountability.

So, Rep. Lujan, thanks for clearing up my confusions about the nature of the bill. But I can’t let you off the hook completely. You say the bill clarifies that the Cyber Schools can’t get more than their rightful share of state funding, implying the earlier version was unclear. Uh uh. The original bill was perfectly clear on that score. All this bill does in that area is add the possibility of 125% funding when a JTED is involved.

If the original bill was perfectly clear, then where did the $6.4 million mistake originate? Why were Cyber Schools given more money than the law allowed when their students also attended bricks-and-mortar schools? The answer, according to the October, 2007 Performance Audit, is, the Arizona Department of Education screwed up. “The Student Accountability Information System (SAIS), ADE’s computer-based program that calculates ADM, currently does not have the capability to adjust for concurrent TAPBI enrollment.” So the ADE created a spreadsheet to deal with TAPBI, but it was a really crummy spreadsheet that didn’t catch the dual enrollment problem.

So there was nothing wrong with the original law when it comes to the proper, proportional distribution of the funds. The problem was with the well trained, highly skilled folks working under Tom Horne’s watchful eye. Well, maybe not so highly skilled. And maybe not so watchful eye.

I found more of interest in the audit that I want to write about in future posts, especially the question of whether Cyber Schools are being funded at a higher level than they need, but I’ll end this post with a question I don’t know the answer to:

Were the Cyber Schools that were the beneficiaries of the $6.4 million dollar overfunding from the less-than-diligent ADE required to return the extra funding? If so, no harm, no foul. But if they were allowed to keep the money, I have a problem with that.