Star’s article on Charter School study

by David Safier
Rhonda Bodfield has an article in the Star on the Stanford Charter School study I posted about a few days ago. It's basically a good, thorough article, which I've come to expect from Bodfield's reporting, with commentary from people on both sides of the issue.

But Bodfield made one strange choice. She mentioned this finding:

It's true, but she left out a more important finding for Arizona: states with "multiple authorizers" — a number of agencies that can give shools a charter — had lower academic results as well. The reason I find her choice odd is that the study said the multiple authorizer situation has almost three times the effect on charters' academic results as the caps.

Arizona has no caps. We have multiple authorizers. That's a potential positive in one area, but a potential negative of almost three times the weight in the other.

NOTE: I left the cap information out of my post, along with lots of other information, meaning I chose the other way. But if the idea is to see how we can improve our charter schools, it's important to point out areas of deficiency so they can be improved. Arizona has more charter schools and more charter students per capita than any other state (unless those figures have changed recently). In other words, we are the most cap-less state around, yet we were in the group where the charter scores were lower than at traditional schools. We need to exercise more oversight. One area would be in granting schools charters.