“Have You Heard” Interviews Award-Winning Reporter about Arizona Charter School Scandals
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider interview Arizona Republic reporter Craig Harris about the charter school scandals in Arizona, the “wild west” of charters.
Harris was a member of the investigative team that won the prestigious George Polk Award for its coverage of charter schools in their state.
You can listen here.
Or, you can read the interview here.
Here is a small excerpt, where they begin to interview Craig Harris:
Craig Harris: It started about a year ago on two fronts. One, there was a relatively prominent charter school, a notorious charter school that abruptly closed on the west side of Phoenix in a town called Goodyear. And the reason that school had gained some notoriety is because a few years earlier, one of the students had gone missing and died. And what happened, now we’re finding out later, is that the school was being fraudulent on its attendance in order to keep it running because people had left the school because of the tragedy. And so the school got shut down. And that piqued our interest.
And then I live on the east side of Phoenix in town called Gilbert, which is kind of like ground zero of where charter schools are. They’re very, very popular out in my neck of the woods. And part of the reason is that a lot of the operators that run the charter schools belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They’re Mormons. And so a lot of them have developed charter schools and they’ve been able to grow because they have pretty good academics, but they also focus on morality and wholesomeness and things like, so that, that gets a lot of parents to enroll their kids at those schools.
Berkshire: Well, we are obviously here to talk about some of the less wholesome aspects of Arizona’s charter school industry over the last year. You’ve written one unbelievable exposé after another about the CONTINUE READING: “Have You Heard” Interviews Award-Winning Reporter about Arizona Charter School Scandals | Diane Ravitch's blog
