Class acts: how charter schools are revamping public education in Arizona - and beyond

Reason, April, 1998 by James K. Glassman

The first of the country's charter schools opened its doors in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1992. Some 290 new charter schools were launched last fall alone, but the average state has only about two dozen, and in most cases established interests, led by the teachers unions, have placed restrictions on the freedom of educators to run the schools the way they want. These rules often go beyond the onerous; some even prescribe exact qualifications for teachers and micromanage how instruction is given.

In Arkansas, for example, the union "essentially wrote the charter law," says Joe Nathan, director of the Center for Social Change at the University of Minnesota. "And the Arkansas law is a joke." A joke, that is, on students and parents: Students can't move to a charter school; they have to be matriculating at a conventional one that converts. Also, all teachers have to participate in the statewide collective bargaining agreement. As a result, Arkansas has zero charter schools.

Arizona is at the other end of the spectrum. Students have to meet detailed statewide academic standards in math, language, science, arts, foreign language, and health. And schools have to be run on a sound financial basis and be audited annually. But as far as oversight goes, that's about it. Schools use their own forms of teaching, ranging from back-to-basics curricula to the Montessori method. They can concentrate on the arts or agriculture, on science or school-to-work programs. They have to be nonsectarian and can't display religious objects, but one school, Gan Yeladeem in Scottsdale, teaches Hebrew as a second language (though only about one-third of its 96 students are Jewish), and several Mormon schools have converted to charters (though no Catholic schools have done so). Arizona charters don't have to give preference to "at-risk" students (though there are special charter schools for the hearing-impaired and for pregnant teens and mothers), and they don't have to strive for racial balance. They do, however, have to admit all comers (the arts schools can't even hold auditions) and, if too many students want to enroll, admit them at random.

The key to Arizona's success is that charters for new schools can be bestowed not just by local school boards - which aren't eager to engender competition - but by a state board for charter schools or by the state board of education, headed by Lisa Graham Keegan, the elected superintendent of public instruction. By contrast, in most states, only local school boards - or county boards, on appeal - can charter a school.

The city of Mesa illustrates the importance of a multi-sited charter certification process: None of its 23 charter schools was approved by its local board (given entrenched interests, that's hardly surprising). Two, in fact, were chartered by boards from other parts of the state. One of the neat wrinkles in the law is that any board can charter schools anywhere in Arizona and receive a licensing commission in the process. Because of this open-door policy, four for-profit national chains have secured charters in Arizona: The Tesseract Group (formerly Education Alternatives Inc.), based in Minneapolis; Sabis Educational Systems Inc., of Eden Prairie, Minnesota; Leona Academies of East Lansing, Michigan; and Advantage Schools Inc., of Boston. Chris Whittle's Edison Project, which operates public schools enrolling 13,000 student in eight states (some in charters, others through management contracts with conventional public school boards), is another likely entrant in Arizona.