Report: Education at charters is spotty, oversight lax [AZ]

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Who'd a thought, eh? Cross post from the education forum. This is about Arizona charters

Education at charters is spotty, oversight lax
15-year report card: Problems can persist for years with no action

By Rhonda Bodfield and Enric Volante
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.16.2009


One couple made more than $337,000 last year to operate their charter schools, even though the schools don't rank among top academic performers.

Instructors at another charter school failed to keep students in class long enough and couldn't prove they'd met graduation requirements or that the staff was qualified to teach.

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... an Arizona Daily Star investigation has found that state regulators rarely visit charter schools, that sporadic oversight sometimes allows academic and financial issues to continue for years, and that information about charter schools is difficult for parents to come by.
Among the Star's findings:

• Students in charter schools score slightly higher than traditional public school counterparts overall in the AIMS test in lower grades. But there is a 30 percentage point gap in how many of their students pass the high school AIMS test compared with district schools.

• While it's clear that some charter schools do excellent work, problems at others can persist for years. The state has revoked charter licenses only 14 times — and poor academic performance was specifically identified in only one case.

• The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools has only seven staff positions — and only five are filled — to oversee 502 charter schools. Regulators visit a school once in each of its first two years and may never go back.

• Information about how schools spend public dollars and about complaints and other problems is difficult to obtain. Instead of going to your local school district office, you must drive to Phoenix to look at records. In Arizona, you can go online to check whether gas stations pass inspection, but not charter schools.

• Some administrators make salaries that don't seem on par with academic performance, and some have salaries that rival superintendents of much-larger districts. Taxpayers are in the dark about how much some operators make because budget information submitted to the state Education Department is sparse. And 12 percent of the schools are for-profit ventures that don't file federal forms required of nonprofits that would provide more details on their operations.

• The charter board isn't required to weigh in on complaints to determine their validity in the same way that, say, the boards that oversee doctors or lawyers are. The board does investigate if it gets a complaint that a school is charging tuition, for example, or if the school is endangering the health and safety of students. But, generally, complaints and the school's response just get put in the file for public review.

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/mailstory-clickthru/305160....