Keegan chimes in on ed funding lawsuits

by David Safier

If you haven't been following, two lawsuits have been filed under the guidance of the AZ Charter Schools Association. One is to equalize funding among public school districts, and the other is to get the same amount of building funds for charters as traditional public schools.

The Charter Schools Association is a private group whose Board is heavily populated with conservatives. That's important to know, because a group's political affiliations is an indicator of its agenda.

The heaviest conservative hitter is Lisa Graham Keegan. As a state legislator, she shepherded through Arizona's original charter school bill. As state Ed Supe, she set up the organization overseeing the state's charters. Then she went into the education privatizing/free market/choice world, which was heavily funded by Bush's Dept of Ed. She had to leave the organization she headed when it was found the organization privatized misappropriated some government funds. She says there's nothing to the allegations. Most recently, she was McCain's ed advisor on his presidential campaign (their association goes way, way back). Now she's with the AZ Charter Schools Association, though I suspect she's got more going on than that. She's too nationally wired in to limit herself to one state.

Keegan wrote an op ed in the Republic talking about the two lawsuits. Reading it, my first thought was, don't conservatives complain when a judge legislates from the bench? Isn't that one of Horne's big complaints about the ELL lawsuit that he took all the way to the Supreme Court to stop a judge from dictating how much the state has to spend on ELL funding? Isn't this school funding lawsuit an attempt to have the courts change legislation?

And I always thought today's conservatives tried to keep an internal philosophical consistency. (Sarcasm alert, in case you think I'm being serious.)

I'm going to ignore the lawsuit about public school funding equity. I think that's just a distractor to make it look like they care about more than getting more money for charter schools.

What they want, basically, is for charters to be able to use property tax overrides and bonding to pay for building construction, like school districts.

I have some questions about that. School districts ask for money to construct new buildings when their schools are over crowded. A charter wants the same kind of money just because it wants to put up a new school regardless of population growth. It may even pull students away from less-than-full public schools, which ends up being a drain on the district budget. Building for a district and for a charter are not the same things.

When a district builds a school, there's an assumption the district will be there pretty much forever and the school will house students in perpetuity, unless population changes make it unnecessary, at which time the district can sell it or use it for other purposes. When a charter sets up shop, no one knows whether it will survive a year, 5 years, 10 years or 100 years. If the state gives money to build the school, that building may be empty very soon. The state has made an enormous financial outlay — and since the charter designed the school for its purposes, it might not fit anyone else's needs — and the state is left with an expensive white elephant on its hands.

Charter advocates always say, charters aren't like other public schools. That may go for their "right" to building funds as well.