Charter Schools Urged For State Arizona’s School Chief Says Washington Has Nothing To Fear

Arizona’s school chief, described as the architect of the nation’s strongest charter-school law, on Thursday urged Washington voters to approve a similar system.

Lisa Graham Keegan, elected in 1994 on a reform platform, told Washington lawmakers and Capitol reporters that publicly funded independent schools are increasingly popular in her state and are making believers of former skeptics.

“Charter schools are an attempt to untie the hands of the professionals,” she told a news conference sandwiched between meetings with legislators.

She gave a ringing endorsement to Washington’s Initiative 177 and to similar legislation now awaiting a vote in the state House.

The initiative, sponsored by Fawn and Jim Spady of Seattle, would allow local school district voters to decide whether to become a “reform district.” That would open the way for chartering of one or more of the new kind of schools, either by the local school board or by a state appeals panel.

It’s an initiative to the Legislature, meaning lawmakers can approve it, send it to the ballot or send both it and a legislative alternative to the voters. Leaders say no vote will be taken on the initiative, and there’s doubt the two houses can agree on an alternative or a new state law that would take effect this fall.

Keegan, who wrote Arizona’s charter-school law when she was that state’s House Education Committee chairwoman, said parents and taxpayers have nothing to fear from a strong system of charter schools operating in tandem with public schools.

“It is interesting to hear the horrors of the imagining,” she said.

Some private schools are converting to publicly funded charter schools, but it hasn’t had a great impact on the state budget, she said. Parents, students and teachers like the creativity of “niche” schools, back-to-basics schools and other types of charter schools, she said.

Arizona has 51 charter schools, all authorized by the state Board of Education or the state Charter School Board. Keegan said she prefers the state charters to forcing local school boards to agree to secession of the charter schools’ students and teachers.

“It’s difficult to go to your local governing board and say ‘I don’t love you anymore and I want you to let me go,”’ she said.

She said it would be “just human nature” for local boards to resist and resent the upstarts.”Giving parents more public education choices by creating charter schools is not a radical, untested concept,” Jim Spady said.

The House bill endorsed by the Spadys still faces major hurdles getting out of the House, and the Democratic Senate is even more skeptical, said House Education Chairman Bill Brumsickle, R-Centralia.