On the surface, it’s a simple and appealing concept.
Gov. Doug Ducey proposed in his state of the state speech Monday to let excelling schools with waiting lists use public-school buildings that are empty.
“Let’s make open enrollment and parental choice a reality and not just a talking point,” he said. “Let’s open the doors and make those empty seats available to our best public schools.”
Dig a bit below the surface, though, and you find a seething mass of interests and assets. It’s the sort of complexity that makes you ask: Why couldn’t you just pay the state’s education bill instead of messing around with these gimmicks?
As with most of Ducey’s proposals, the details are not clear yet. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that this and another of his proposals would mainly benefit the state’s highest-performing charter schools. In Tucson, think of the Basis Schools and Sonoran Science Academy. In the Phoenix area, Great Hearts Academies.
Ducey gave a second take of his state-of-the-state speech at the Hilton El Conquistador on Tuesday, in a packed luncheon hosted by the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. Afterward, in a brief press conference, Ducey emphasized that any school with a waiting list could benefit from his program, including popular district schools.
“What I want to do is take the state assets that are not being put to full use and allow those to go the better operators,” he said. “These are not people who we’re taking a risk on. These are folks that have already proven that they can do it and they can do it at a higher level than others.”
So I asked the superintendent of the most notoriously oversubscribed local school district what he thought of the idea. In September, Vail Unified School District Superintendent Calvin Baker announced the district would not allow students living in other districts to attend Vail’s high schools, even if they are open-enrolled as eighth-graders in Vail. The schools are simply too packed.
“Our immediate concern is finding enough seats for residents of our district,” he said. “If there were a vacant school near our boundary that we could use, it could solve that most important issue.”
Baker added: “The idea of Vail opening a school well beyond our boundaries only for students who live in a different district — that’s not something that’s on our radar screen right now.”
In the Tucson area, only Tucson Unified School District has schools that are partially or completely vacant, and those are miles away. What Vail needs is not a TUSD school. As Baker said, what it could really use is funding from the state School Facilities Board to buy property and build schools. But the Legislature has not funded the board adequately, so Vail is left to go to the bond market to finance piecemeal expansions.
Who could really use school buildings are charters such as Basis, the renowned chain of college-preparatory schools that started in Tucson.
“Facilities are the most difficult thing we deal with,” Peter Bezanson, the CEO of Basis Ed, told me. “It’s frustrating for anyone in the charter movement to drive by a district building that’s vacant.”
Charters often issue bonds, using entities such as the Pima County Industrial Development Authority to finance their purchases and construction. They don’t have much luck with districts, which hesitate to sell or lease their buildings to charter schools they view as competitors.
“It’s a fair way to view us because that’s what we are — competitors,” Bezanson said. “But those are public buildings.
“I’m more than happy to sign a lease that is at a fair rate,” he said. “The question is whether the districts need to be compelled to offer those buildings at a fair rate to another public school.”
But here’s the rub: While charter schools are publicly funded and open to the public, they are owned by private entities that in some cases are for-profit corporations. Even if they’re nonprofit, they can handsomely benefit their founders and operators. Bezanson, for example, is CEO of a for-profit management company that operates the nonprofit Basis schools.
So if the state forced TUSD to sell the closed Wakefield Middle School to Basis, for example, it would be forcing a local district to provide a structure built years ago with local taxpayers’ money to a for-profit corporation.
All this seems to violate the free-market spirit of educational reform in Arizona. While charter schools have a tough time finding and buying or building facilities, that’s the burden they assume to be in Arizona’s private business of public schooling. Forcing their competitors in the districts to sell or lease them school buildings removes the financial risk charters otherwise must assume in order to expand — and potentially profit.
A deeper problem is the underlying assumption in Ducey’s actions that poorer districts such as TUSD and Sunnyside have low-performing schools mainly because they refuse to innovate the way the most successful charter schools do.
This ignores the reality that students’ socioeconomic status is closely linked to their educational performance, which helps explain the struggles of schools in poor neighborhoods. Charter schools that enforce high academic standards can find ways to force out students who don’t keep up. District schools don’t have that luxury.
Now consider the underfunding of Arizona’s public schools. While district schools have empty space in part because they have lost students to charters, they also have been forced by cuts in state funding to economize — for example, by putting more students in fewer classrooms.
Ducey has refused to ask the Legislature to fund the full, court-ordered amount owed to schools — more than $317 million. When you consider that, what you’re left with is a governor willing to benefit the charter-school operators who support him politically at the cost of out-of-favor district schools, further aggravating the problem of empty schools that he is purporting to solve by helping his friends.
A simple saying captures the essence: To the victor go the spoils.
