Charter schools serve wealthier families, a detail missing from Dunleavy's charter school con job

Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, self-professed “data nerd,” has yet to correct her false claim on March 27 that 2,000 students are on waiting lists in Anchorage for charter schools.

The real number is about 200. Include neighborhood schools and the number is about 350.

The continuing refusal by Bishop and others to provide accurate data on charter schools is clearly intentional on the part of the Dunleavy administration, part of the campaign to divert more public education funds into private schools.

For more than a decade as a legislator and governor, Dunleavy has wanted to create the equivalent of private school vouchers, which runs contrary to the Alaska Constitution.

The false claims of massive waiting lists for charter schools is part of their sales pitch to Republicans in the Legislature and the general public.

The sales effort intensified Tuesday with the release of a push poll commissioned by Dunleavy by Dunleavy supporter, pollster Matt Larkin of Dittman Research.

It featured leading questions and false choices about education. It’s a piece of propaganda, though Dunleavy claims it proves he is right. I’ll have more on that in a later blog post.

The push poll mentions charter school waiting lists in one of its leading questions, but provides no numbers.

A Department of Education official testified this week that the state does not collect information on charter school waiting lists because it is not required to do so.

The Republicans who control the House Education Committee voted 4-3 against requiring charter schools to report to the state on waiting lists, class sizes, school capacities and other items. This was a proposed amendment to their education bill.

Reps. Mike Prax, Jamie Allard, Tom McKay and Justin Ruffridge said the state has no need for facts on charter school waiting lists.

The fact-free quartet sat there and smiled March 27 when Bishop said Anchorage had 2,000 kids on waiting lists each year.

Credit Reps. Rebecca Himschoot, C.J. McCormick and Andi Story for backing the amendment and calling for more information before making a major change in state policy on charter schools.

Bishop could have her staff collect this information in a single day, following the lead of the Association of Alaska School Boards, but that would contradict the invented numbers she is peddling.

The Dunleavy deception campaign also extends to an essential fact about the charter school population of students in Alaska that Dunleavy and Bishop don’t talk about—that the students attending charter schools overall tend to come from wealthier families.

In other words, neighborhood schools are dealing with a larger percentage of students from poorer families than charter schools.

This vital demographic information, and much more, is available to Bishop and the rest of the Dunleavy administration, but the governor and his allies would have you believe that the charter schools serve the same population mix as all public schools.

The only difference, they claim, is the charter school management model. Expand that, they say, and all students will benefit.

This is a complete con job.

For instance, in Anchorage about 54 percent of students in the entire district come from “economically disadvantaged” homes. For Anchorage public charter schools, about 36 per cent come from economically disadvantaged homes.

In Fairbanks public schools overall, about 35 percent of students come from disadvantaged homes. In the Fairbanks public charter schools this year, about 26 percent of students are from economically disadvantaged homes.

The statistics above are from the enrollment “dashboards” for the Fairbanks and Anchorage schools.

This is a link to the Anchorage page.

This is a link to the Fairbanks page.

Alaskans deserve an intellectually honest report from the state on the performance of charter schools, the makeup of the student population as compared to the general population, the reasons for different academic results and details on how much an expansion of charter schools could widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

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