Charter Schools

The Phoenix open enrollment campout

Matthew Ladner January 13, 2020

Matthew Ladner

In what has become an annual ritual, parents once again camped outside Sunnyslope High School in north-central Phoenix recently, seeking an open enrollment spot for their children.

Sunnyslope, part of the Glendale Union High School District, is an example of a high-demand district school. It’s obviously doing many things right if people are camping out every January. (You can watch a news story about this year’s campout here.)

While Arizona law requires charter schools to use a random lottery when applications exceed seats, it only requires districts to have an open enrollment policy. The open enrollment policy for Sunnyslope apparently works on a first come, first served basis. If the school employed a lottery, there would be no advantage to camping out over a weekend to be an early applicant.

Sunnyslope is an interesting case because many of the high schools in adjacent districts are substantially better funded on a per-student basis. Nearby Phoenix Union High School District, for instance, has an average level of per-student funding 31 percent higher than Sunnyslope. Nevertheless, parents line up outside Sunnyslope.

Arizona charter schools also have lower than average levels of per-pupil funding, and long wait lists. The lottery requirement thankfully prevents campouts, because if everyone on charter school waitlists showed up early, their presence would cover acres, as there are tens of thousands of students on charter school waitlists.

In a reasonable world, Sunnyslope would expand to meet demand, or even replicate itself to create a second Sunnyslope. Districts don’t tend to follow this path for fairly basic political reasons, namely their incumbent interests. Replicating high-demand schools can disrupt the enrollment of other schools in the district. Districts also face intense community opposition to closing low-demand schools, even when they’re more than half empty. This latter tendency tends to draw resources out of classroom use, and undersupply families with the schools they want.

Arizona has a growing number of innovative districts that actively participate in open enrollment and that are actively expanding their facilities in order to accommodate demand. School replication, however, represents a line that even innovative districts have yet to cross.

The wisdom of crowds is apparent in the average performance level of Arizona’s charter schools. High-demand schools have managed to replicate over time, and Arizona parents have not been shy about closing undesired charter schools. This process accelerated at both ends during the Great Recession, with harsh conditions and funding cuts helping to close several schools, while the availability of inexpensive property allowed high-demand charter organizations to expand and/or replicate. When demand drives the creation of highly-desired schools, and leads to the closure of undesired schools, amazing things can happen.

Take a look at this chart, which shows NAEP eighth-grade math scores and gains for district systems around the country and for Arizona charter schools. The eighth-grade reading chart shows similar results.

Arizona charter schools educate a majority-minority student body, unlike districts in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Massachusetts that show similar scores. The process of closing low-demand schools and replicating high-demand schools, especially in the speeded-up environment of Great Recession Arizona, produced very impressive academic results.

Now just imagine if Arizona districts got into the business of replicating high-demand schools like Sunnyslope. As John Chubb and Terry Moe explained in their book, “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools,” politics create a major problem in K-12 education. Districts failing to replicate high-demand schools at the behest of the people working in other district schools is a prime example of the problem.

January 13, 2020 2 comments

Charter Schools Education Choice Featured News School Choice

Nonprofit charter school company to open four schools in Jacksonville

Lisa Buie January 10, 2020

Lisa Buie

Students at IDEA Bluff Springs show their school spirit on one of IDEA Public Schools Austin’s newer campuses. The campus is located in the heart of one of the most economically-disadvantaged areas of Austin.

At least 900 more students in the Jacksonville area will get an additional education option when IDEA Public Schools opens four schools in 2022.

“We are excited that IDEA Public Schools is expanding to the Jacksonville area,” said Jose Luis De Leon, executive director of IDEA Jacksonville. “Our mission is to prepare students for success in college and citizenship. At IDEA, our goal is to provide families in Jacksonville a high-quality school option. IDEA Jacksonville is excited to engage with the community, recruit top-notch principals and educators and create high-quality schools for the Jacksonville community.”

The nonprofit, Texas-based organization officially announced the move Wednesday, though officials say plans have been in the works for seven months.

IDEA Public Schools primarily serve minority students who qualify for free school lunches. It currently operates 80 schools across the country, typically in communities served by public schools rated as failing.

In a news release, IDEA Public Schools promised to provide “an additional education option to help close the opportunity gap and increase levels of achievement for students and families in Jacksonville.”

This is not the first announcement IDEA Public Schools has made about expansion plans in Florida. In May, the Hillsborough County School Board unanimously approved for IDEA to begin operating schools in the area in 2021. Company spokeswoman Jennifer Flores said then that the network plans to launch four new schools in the area by next year, eventually growing to 20 schools at 10 campuses in the Tampa Bay area by 2028. At full scale, IDEA will serve almost 15,000 K-12 students in Tampa Bay annually.

Four months after receiving approval in Hillsborough County, the company got a boost with a pledge of a $5 million gift from the Vinik Family Foundation. The gift will help launch new schools in Hillsborough, Polk and Pinellas counties.

The Vinik Family Foundation is a private foundation created and managed by Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and his wife, Penny. The foundation has donated more than $100 million to nonprofits working in the areas of education, human services, health care and the arts since it was founded in 1997.

IDEA Public Schools, a network of tuition-free, college preparatory public charter schools, serves nearly 53,000 college-bound students in 96 schools across Texas and Louisiana. The program’s founders chose the name IDEA, an acronym for “Individuals Dedicated to Excellence and Achievement” and the motto “No Excuses!”

IDEA’s vice president of growth Dan Fishman told redefinED in a July interview that the company is expanding into Florida due to the state’s need for more educational options for low-income students.

For more than a dozen years, 100 percent of IDEA Public Schools’ graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges and universities, and IDEA alums graduate college at five times the national average, according to Flores.

January 10, 2020 0 comment

Achievement Gap Advocate Voices Charter Schools Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured School Choice

archivED: With liberty and justice for some

Keith Jacobs December 30, 2019

Keith Jacobs

While the nation’s leaders say they want all children to receive a free, first-class public education that will prepare them for college or a career, the current system neglects the specific needs of minority and low-income students.

Editor’s note: During this holiday season, redefinED is republishing our best articles of 2019 – those features and commentaries that deserve a second look. Today, we offer this first-person commentary from Step Up For Students’ manager of charter school initiatives Keith Jacobs, which originally published May 2.

The most polarizing aspect of the traditional public school system is that students encounter extensive and troubling variations in their school experience based on their socioeconomic or minority status. This aspect has for decades produced discriminatory practices.

Minorities and low-income families, for whom education is the link to success and escape from generational poverty, have suffered the consequences of a system that does not understand, nor adjust to, their needs. Nationwide, an achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students has persisted for nearly 50 years.

So, what role should the government play in ensuring that these rights are restored to all children?

It took federal government intervention in the case of the Little Rock Nine and Brown v. Board of Education to combat discriminatory practices, such as Jim Crow and the concept of separate but equal, which were established by state and local governments. The government had a duty to ensure the equitable rights of all students regarding their education. At the time, these interventions were considered unpopular and brazen, but as we review the historical context, we revere the pioneers who had the gumption to stand up for what was right.

As we survey the education landscape, we hear our leaders say they want all children to receive a first-class, free public education that will prepare them for college or a career. Unfortunately, the current system neglects the specific needs of minority and low-income students while also failing to ensure equity of resources, standards and support across all schools.

In my experience, I was repeatedly told that a student’s ability to compute would lead him or her to a higher-paying job and ultimate success. This line of thought has led many school districts to curtail their curriculum and limit career, technical and arts education. Escaping from low-income situations is far more complicated than our current system would acknowledge.

Students in low-income neighborhoods also typically need support to combat socioeconomic deficiencies such as insufficient sleep, poor nutrition and inadequate clothing. These students are prone to physical and cognitive consequences that can lead to despair and render them apathetic toward education. Educational choice options can be tailored to address these obstacles.

The innovative response to this problem has been to create choice options that allow all students to receive an education that is best suited for their specific needs. Charter schools provide a variety of important benefits, such as innovation and specialization. But they remain controversial because choice opponents believe charter schools compete with, and remove funds from, traditional public schools. Such erroneous thinking has resulted in widespread discrimination toward families who exercise choice by attending charter schools. These families deserve the same rights and protections from the government as any other group.

Florida is at a unique crossroads. Choice opponents have been focused on funding for traditional public schools, standards and accountability, but have paid insufficient attention to equity learning for all students. This leads to discriminatory practices – such as restricting access to necessary funding — toward charter schools, two-thirds of whose students are black or Hispanic. State lawmakers can end these practices by ensuring that charters receive their fair share of revenues from tax referendums.

As President Dwight D. Eisenhower demonstrated in 1957 with the Little Rock Nine, and as Lyndon B. Johnson demonstrated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Florida’s state government is obligated to recognize and eradicate any practices that discriminate against students.

Eisenhower famously said, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” This sentiment is just as relevant today. How often have we heard charter opponents berate the merits of a bill strictly because it varies from the established system – a system that has failed to meet the individual needs of the families who need it most? As opponents continue to fight over which system is best, the students lose.

Education choice is the social justice issue of our time, and Florida officials need to consider how they want history to remember them. Just as Eisenhower is lauded today for sending the Arkansas National Guard to Little Rock, Florida officials can be revered tomorrow for passing a landmark bill that establishes equity for all students.

It’s up to those lawmakers to decide if they want to continue to propagate inequitable systems that will prolong and exacerbate the achievement gap. Before they vote, they need only look to our history.

December 30, 2019 1 comment

Analysis Charter Schools Education and Public Policy Featured Funding School Choice

Arizona’s anti-fragile schooling system

Matthew Ladner December 23, 2019

Matthew Ladner

We tend to think of K-12 schooling systems as delicate. Cut their funding a bit and their performance falls apart. But what if we were to envision a K-12 schooling system that is anti-fragile, using the concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

Under Taleb’s definition, systems that are anti-fragile aren’t necessarily hard to break; rather, they simply get stronger when placed under stress. Exercise is a ready example of an anti-fragile system. Exercise tears down muscle, but then that muscle grows back stronger than it was before.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush appeared to place his state’s education system under a policy-induced stress during his two terms from 1999 to 2007. The Florida Education Association didn’t much care for it, mortgaging its Tallahassee headquarters in a (fruitless) effort to defeat Bush’s 2002 reelection bid. Florida academic outcomes, however, clearly improved during that period.

The Obama-era effort to incentivize states and create a teacher evaluation system based on test scores was another effort to create a healthy stress for the K-12 system. Alas, I am unable to create a broadly encouraging national chart similar to the one above (national performance was flat on both NAEP and PISA), but what may loom increasingly over the next decade is a severe competition for public dollars. It may, in fact, more closely resemble the Great Recession than a purposeful K-12 strategy.

Arizona has the best example of an anti-fragile K-12 system. The Great Recession drop-kicked that state’s housing-heavy economy with a steel-tipped boot. State general fund revenue dropped 20 percent in 2009 and the rapid enrollment growth Arizona had enjoyed since World War II suddenly stalled.

Despite Obama stimulus money and a temporary sales tax increase, K-12 per-pupil funding experienced some of the largest cuts in the country. Arizona charter schools already received less funding per pupil than Arizona’s (modestly) funded districts, and then those funds were cut along with everything else. As an Oxford debate is to a punk rock mosh pit, so is 1999-2007 Florida K-12 to the Great Recession in Arizona.

So, what happened with academic outcomes in Arizona charter schools during this difficult period?

At around 200,000 students, Arizona’s charter sector is about the size of a large American school district and more than twice the size of the Wyoming public school system. It also educates a mostly minority student body at a level of per-student subsidy compared to systems nationally. This chart shows eighth-grade NAEP reading absolute scores and gains/declines for Arizona charters compared to state district systems from 2009 to 2019.

Math looks very similar, as do the Science exams. Arizona charters also show high achievement on the state AZMerit exam, and an analysis of transfers shows that on average, they send students to districts with above-average AZMerit scores and receive from districts transfers with below-average scores.

So: This system is looking anti-fragile; funding got cut, but achievement rose. This anti-fragile system of schools draws its strength from the fragility of undesired schools.

The Great Recession hit Arizona’s economy early and hard. Charter operators with long waitlists and strong track records who were able to access capital financing despite the downturn found inexpensive facilities in abundance. Charters that had been struggling with parental demand before the downturn folded under the weight of their difficulties. The Arizona charter school sector overall grew rapidly in size and simultaneously in average levels of achievement.

Far from extraordinary, this is perfectly normal in most human endeavors. Firms with services and products in high demand grow to meet demand, while those with low demand close. When placed under severe stress, Arizona charter schools became much stronger (as did Arizona K-12 education as a whole; Arizona alone made statistically significant gains on all six NAEP exams during the 2009 to 2015 period). It’s very rare in public education, however, that districts routinely face community pressure to keep under-enrolled schools open and school boards routinely fold under this pressure.

Likewise, many districts have high-demand schools with waitlists, but those schools commonly are kept as niche players rather than scaling to meet demand. The dynamic here is the same. Incumbent interests would see a scaling high-demand district offering as a threat to the employment/operations of other schools in the district.

Few districts, therefore, display antifragility; undesired schools remain in operation despite diverting funds from classroom use, high demand schools don’t get the opportunity to replace low demand schools, and frustration abounds for decades as we try – and largely fail – with top-down schemes to spur greater productivity from a system that largely lacks the ability to dynamically improve.

Winston Churchill once noted that Americans will always do the right thing once they have exhausted all the other possibilities. Education is not an exception.

Happy holidays, and see you in 2020!

December 23, 2019 0 comment

Charter Schools Education Equity Education Politics Featured School Choice

Let’s begin listening to the voices that really matter in ed choice conversation

Keith Jacobs December 3, 2019

Keith Jacobs

Mary McLeod Bethune Day Academy is one of 123 schools in the Washington, D.C., area under the oversight of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Founded in 2003, the PreK3-8 academy is an IB World School that offers world language, art and music in addition to its core academic curriculum.

While attending a recent event hosted by D.C. Public Charter Schools, I stood in the lawmaking core of our country where landmark decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education promised education equality and closed my eyes.

I imagined what it would be like to celebrate the success of all students without focusing on the particular setting that allowed them to achieve this success. That’s when I realized we’ve been going about this all wrong.

Education choice reformers often focus on the wrong “face of the education choice movement.” We look at lawmakers, activists or orators declaring their unwavering support of education choice who are surrounded either by supporters or by the opposition – teacher unions and school district leaders.

All those faces have one thing in common: adulthood.

Yes. The only faces we see, the only voices we hear, are those of adults. But those faces and voices cannot convey that education right now, particularly in cities like Washington D.C., is a life or death choice for students.

As a choice organizer from the same background as many of our students, even I struggle to communicate for our kids. Grownups are sometimes too far removed. Opponents of education choice who would deny students the means to escape the shackles that have burdened their families through generational poverty, despite their inability to effectively support these populations, must hear from students directly.

I opened my eyes and looked around. The event I was attending was meant to celebrate the accomplishments of charter school students and highlight the fact that more than 12,000 are waiting for a seat in those charter schools.

In most instances across the country, waiting lists are tied to funding access, but in D.C., the problem is far more egregious.

In 1995, the District of Columbia School Reform Act stated that charter schools would receive right of first choice to vacant buildings. Today, Mayor Muriel Bowser literally has closed the door on minority students by refusing to allow this. Refusing to allow the expansion of charter schools keeps students beholden to the randomness of the charter school lottery and forces them to remain stuck in ineffective and unsafe schools.

Over the past 20 years, D.C. public charter schools have effectively served low-income and minority students by implementing dual-language, technology, arts, inquiry-based and project-based schools while also focusing on diversity and innovative learning models. These schools are safe, effective and thriving.

This was evident in the thunderous drumline of Mary McCleod Bethune Day Academy Public Charter School as participants marched through a standing-room-only crowd. Students as young as 8 showed pride and mastery musicianship representing a charter school that caters to their unique abilities.

The worth of these schools also was evident in an exhibit in which students shared their journeys and inspirations through original works of art. One student stood before his drawing of Emmett Till, the teenage boy brutally lynched at age 14 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. This student’s portrait reminded me of the sins of our history and how the grotesque and untimely death of a child catapulted the civil rights struggle into a mainstream movement.

Till’s casket is memorialized right up the street at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but what has our country actually learned from years of oppressive practices against minorities and the fight to do better? Today, instead of denying access to diners and buses, our country limits the access of our most vulnerable children to quality education options, continuing oppression that began long ago.

In the days of the Civil Rights Movement, we didn’t focus on children until tragedy struck. Until the death of a child galvanized a nation.

Education choice is the social justice issue of our time.

Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

December 3, 2019 0 comment

2020 Presidential Election Charter Schools Education Equity Education Legislation Education Politics Featured School Choice

Howard Fuller went down to Georgia looking for a party’s soul to heal

Matthew Ladner November 27, 2019

Matthew Ladner

Democratic candidate for president Elizabeth Warren speaking at a rally Sept. 16 in Washington Square Park, New York City. Warren caused a stir last week when speaking to black and Latino charter school parents and supporters in Atlanta.

A recent protest of Elizabeth Warren’s education plan staged by a group of charter school parents at an event in Atlanta – which happened to include civil rights activist and education reform advocate Dr. Howard Fuller – resulted in a conversation between the senator and the parents that caused quite a stir. You can view the entire conversation here.

Go watch the video. I’ll wait.

Okay, good.

So, the big story coming out of this meeting has been Warren’s far-less-than-truthful denial about sending her children to private school. Her campaign subsequently admitted that her son attended public school “until fifth grade,” at which time he apparently attended a couple of different private schools.

But there were plenty of other interesting items in this conversation.

Warren protests at one point that Massachusetts and New Hampshire have good public schools. This, of course, is true, but Massachusetts and New Hampshire are two of the small handful of states with average six-figure incomes for families of four. If you examine data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University on student learning gains by poverty status, this is what Massachusetts and New Hampshire look like:

School effectiveness vs. free/reduced-price lunch eligibility; Massachusetts schools, all students, grades 3-8, from 2009-2016, sized by number of students

School effectiveness vs. school district socioeconomic status; New Hampshire districts, all students, grades 3-8, from 2009-2016, sized by number of students

On both maps, dark green represents high academic growth, and the right side of the charts signify a low percentage of students eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch. So, unless my eyes are deceiving me, the high academic growth schools in New Hampshire and (especially) Massachusetts cluster in the high wealth areas.

These schools may very well be “good,” but they aren’t exactly accessible.

Several of those high-poverty green schools on the left side of the Massachusetts chart are (you guessed it) charter schools. Just in case any of you are thinking this might be unfair and that every state’s growth chart is going to look like Massachusetts’ chart, take a look at this.

Warren claimed a few different times that she doesn’t oppose charter schools; she “just wants them held to the same standards.” Charter schools, however, because they are public schools, teach state standards and give state tests and get rated by the same metrics in all states.

Warren specifically mentioned Michigan as a state where charter schools don’t follow the same rules.

I suggest we exempt Michigan district schools from whatever “rules” Michigan charter schools have been exempted from. Michigan district schools have shown a big dose of academic stagnation over the last decade, whereas students in Michigan charter schools at least show improvement over time despite clustering in what may be the most economically challenged urban area in the country.

There’s more than one way to hold school sectors to the same standards, and it would be a better idea to free Michigan districts than to shackle Michigan charters.

It’s pretty clear watching the video that Howard Fuller has read the senator’s education plan, but the senator graciously offers to review it for him. Fuller, a former superintendent with the Milwaukee Public School System, sagely warns the senator that absent structural changes, many districts simply will absorb the funds she speaks of without improving.

The senator agrees, and cites a childcare block grant program for which she increased funding that suffered that precise fate; the money never reached the teachers. This experience perhaps ought to have informed the senator’s plan more than it appears to have done thus far.

The richest quote from this entire episode may have been one drawn from a New York Times piece about the issue, which quoted charter school operator Margaret Fortune:

“What would be happening in a fair society is we would be asked for our opinions, rather than having candidates saying, ‘I have a plan for you’ — to shepherd you into the very schools that you left on purpose.”

An especially interesting take coming from a black, lifelong Democrat.

November 27, 2019 2 comments

Charter Schools Customization Education Equity Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Parental Choice School Choice Vouchers

A no-loser solution?

John E. Coons November 15, 2019

John E. Coons

The City School District of the City of New York is the largest school system in the United States, with over 1.1 million students taught in more than 1,800 separate schools. The department covers all five boroughs of New York City and has an annual budget of nearly $25 billion.

New York City’s “public” schools offer many parents a choice among providers – if their child happens to be gifted as measured by scores on a test.

The five most elite of the “choosable” schools require a score in the 99^th percentile for admission. According to the New York Times (Oct. 11, 2019), “ … [D]ozens of other gifted programs … throughout the city generally require students to score in the 90^th percentile.”

Parents of smart kids – and they alone – enjoy what amounts to a voucher. Their choices, it is claimed, can in many lower-income neighborhoods, intensify the racial segregation of those local schools as they are abandoned by the more brainy; or so we learn from the Times.

Any unnecessarily segregated system will be disfavored by many of the public, including those, like myself, who marched in Selma, authored several federal reports on segregation in Chicago and Evanston public schools and served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Panel on Education – and would do it all again.

If New York’s very selective system of parental choice effectively segregated by race, it seems imperative to ask whether this is the only way to respect and preserve the very real value of high intellectual aspiration. Are integration and quality incompatible?

For critical consideration by the professional educator or critic, I cite the half-dozen model statutes and popular initiatives published over three-plus decades by Stephen D. Sugarman and myself. For the curious but busy, it may be more convenient to stick with our explanatory addendum or “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control” (1978). I regret that this sounds vain; blame it on my age and the despair of watching the city schools and their hapless victims.

Somehow, this society must find ways of protecting the moral, intellectual and stylistic integrity of participating schools while treating both racial and economic integration of families as equally important and compatible with parental authority, which for this observer is paramount. Devices to serve all these values will, of course, require some compromise.

For example:

The school could be free to fill 75 percent of its seats as it prefers; the balance would be selected by lottery among unchosen applicants.

The schools must provide basic information about itself in a public manner.

If the school is private or charter (the teacher unions insist that charter schools are private schools; I agree) it could teach religion to all pupils but could not require an unbeliever to assent or participate in ceremony.

The school could enforce a minimum standard of learning by dismissal (with hearing). Ditto for behavior.

As for tuition imposed by the school above the value of the governmental support for the parent, there are various approaches. One is simply to disallow it for low-income parents, permitting graduated add-ons for those above. Of course, the basic grant should match, or at least approach, an amount sufficient to sustain a “common” school.

Enough. Let the union rise in horror. There is nothing in all we have written that would discourage the formation of strong teacher unions of the sort common to the private sector. There is everything to be said for tough teacher organization that can insist upon a fair share of the good stuff, always aware that, if they get too greedy, their own jobs will cease to exist.

Today’s “public” schoolteachers do not face that risk. They should.

November 15, 2019 0 comment

Charter Schools Education and Public Policy Education Equity Education Politics School Choice

Arizona’s success with charter schools a model other states would be wise to follow

Matthew Ladner November 11, 2019

Matthew Ladner

Editor’s note: This commentary by redefinED executive editor Matt Ladner appeared Nov. 8 in the National Review.

Americans remain deeply committed to the goal of a public-education system that promotes class mobility and equality of opportunity. We want such a system so badly that we have continued to support increases in public-education funding despite decades of disappointing academic results. The looming retirement of the Baby Boomer generation may mark the beginning of the end of these spending increases, as our desire for a strong public-school system is overtaken by our demands for more and more health-care spending. Increasing the learning bang for the education buck will be vital in years ahead. And Arizonans have managed to do so on a large scale with charter schools, open enrollment, and families taking the lead on accountability.

Year after year, glum news about American schooling repeats with a deadening regularity. Politics, as opposed to voluntary associations, dominate the current American K-12 landscape. Districts assign students to schools by ZIP code. Turnout in district school-board elections is notoriously low, often falling into the single digits. This leaves such elections highly susceptible to “regulatory capture” by highly motivated special-interest groups, particularly public-employee unions and district contractors. Well-meaning efforts by federal and state authorities have attempted to address this problem by imposing universal standards on our sprawling, decentralized system of schools from far away. These efforts have failed to substantially improve outcomes while draining local communities of control over their schools.

Arizona charter schools, an outlier experiment in liberty, provide the template for a better approach. Arizona is unusual in that it is both a border state and a retirement destination and has large average family sizes. The aforementioned retirement of the Baby Boomers and immigration have helped create decades of strong population growth in the state. In the mid-1990s, Arizona lawmakers found themselves financially struggling to build district schools fast enough to keep up with enrollment growth, and the academic results left a great deal to be desired. In 1994, they decided to roll the dice on charter schools.

Minnesotans had passed the nation’s first charter-school law a few years earlier. The state funded charter schools on a per-student basis, they were public schools governed independently from district boards, and any state resident could attend. Struggling to keep up with enrollment growth and frustrated by languishing academic performance, Arizona was drawn to Minnesota’s innovation, which created new school space without state funds. The idea of giving educators the opportunity to build their own schools also appealed to Arizona’s libertarian political culture. With little to lose and much to gain, a coalition of Hispanic Democrats and Republicans passed one of the nation’s most liberal charter-school statutes.

Arizona charter schools took root in urban, rural, and suburban communities across the state. This was a departure from most other state charter programs, which focused primarily on inner-city schooling. And it created unexpected benefits for inner-city children by helping to unlock opportunities for open-enrollment transfers to suburban districts.

Housing construction is a large industry in Arizona, and a national housing downturn that deterred people from selling their homes and moving to the state hit its economy early and hard. Times were very tough, but the dire circumstances led to a flourishing of charter organizations that could still access private financing and remained in high demand among parents. As property values dropped, the availability of high-demand places in charter schools grew to meet family demand. The main impact of this increase, ironically, was to make suburban district seats available through open enrollment.

Part of the 1994 Arizona reforms forbade districts to charge tuition to out-of-boundary students wishing to transfer to a new school. State law requires districts to have an open-enrollment policy, but that doesn’t mean there will always be a place at every school for whoever wants it. Competition from charter schools and to a lesser extent private-choice programs created a growing incentive for suburban public-school districts to participate in open enrollment. The first suburban open-enrollment participants increased the incentive for others to accept transfers to schools farther from their homes.

Today, unusually, almost all Arizona districts accept open-enrollment transfers. Scottsdale Unified, a district of 22,000 students, has 4,000 students who live outside the district boundaries. The 9,000 students who live within the district’s boundaries but choose to attend schools elsewhere have a great deal to do with the district’s decision to accept out-of-boundary transfers.

Arizona has the largest state charter sector in the country, but open-enrollment transfers between and within districts are larger still, outnumbering charter enrollment almost two-to-one in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Rather than withering under a theoretical tyranny of family autonomy, Arizona’s overall academic performance has improved across student subgroups. Arizona’s white, Hispanic, and black eighth graders demonstrated a mastery of math equivalent to what their peers would have shown as ninth graders in 2003, the first year the Nation’s Report Card exams included all 50 states. Arizona charter schools contributed directly to these gains.

The increase in academic diversity and pluralism is even more important than the improved test scores. Freed to pursue their own vision of a high-quality education, Arizona educators have created successful schools focusing on classical education, the arts, sports, and science and technology, as well as specialized schools for students with autism and other disabilities. Federal efforts to standardize American schools have had the unfortunate consequence of diminishing the autonomy of educators and the distinctiveness of the education that students are provided. States have dictated what teachers should teach grade by grade, homogenizing schooling in hopes of improving it. Arizona’s smarter, demand-driven approach has allowed schools to specialize and to meet the desires of families in the process.

Take, for instance, the closure of underperforming charter schools. In other states, whose charter systems don’t unlock open enrollment, competition is constrained. Elaborate accountability systems run into various roadblocks as educators and families (often understandably) resist bureaucratic school closures. Arizona’s system, by contrast, allows families to quickly and easily shut down charter schools based upon their own priorities, rather than those of the state. There are no appeals, no protests, no lawsuits: If Arizona families fail to develop confidence in their kids’ charter schools, those schools will quickly find that they lack the students necessary to operate.

Freedom is never more than a single generation away from extinction, of course. Arizonans must fight in order to prevent their schools from being undermined or smothered by unnecessary regulation going forward. If Arizonans rise to this challenge, a brighter future of schools led by educators and shaped by families awaits. Issues to work on include student transportation, transparency in open enrollment, and financially incentivizing schools to prepare students for post-secondary success whether in college or a career. The next frontier in Arizona’s story should be to liberate district schools rather than putting educators in regulatory chains.

November 11, 2019 0 comment