Lisa Graham Keegan

So John McCain's education policy advisor is Lisa Graham Keegan, who turns out to be a rather colorful figure in Arizona politics which included a stint as the founder and director of a group called the Education Leaders Council:

In a pair of 2006 reports, the inspector general for the U.S. Education Department said the ELC had used money inappropriately during the time Keegan was its chief executive. The ELC also had a poor financial-management system and inadequate written procedures for subcontracting, the reports said.

Even before the report, The Arizona Republic reported that some ELC board members were alarmed about Keegan's $235,000 salary and six-figure deals for other executives. During a three-year span beginning in 2003, eight members of the ELC's board of directors quit, along with four of its top executives, including Keegan, the auditors wrote.

But before she was an inept and possibly corrupt non-profit executive, she spearheaded the rapid growth of charter schools in Arizona in the 1990s. Her policies led to the creation of a lot of charter schools (nice), but did so with extremely sketchy oversight and accountability (less nice), leading to a situation where "accounts of charter schools gone bad in Arizona became commonplace" including districts selling charters inappropriately, unconstitutional religious instruction, illegal discrimination against disabled people, etc. and an eventual spate of reforms aimed at reigning the system in.

Comments

Charter schools in Arizona are nothing to boast about. There are a few good ones but for the most part, they're pretty awful. They have high drop out rates, many don't meet state standards, and they tend to perform worse than the traditional public schools.

Posted by Morg | May 22, 2008 1:39 PM

As the chair of the board of trustees of a charter school in Harlem, this sort of thing just drives me nuts. Lousy charter laws discredit the whole charter school movement. Thankfully, New York has a pretty good charter law, with tough standards for getting a charter and pretty rigorous oversight thereafter.

Posted by Noah Millman | May 22, 2008 1:41 PM

Matt, respectfully I should comment as a federal acquisition official that there are few nonprofits that haven't been cited for those things at some point or another. What the government often views as an acceptable financial management system and good subcontracting procedures are set at bars so high even enormous corporations with huge amounts of resources and people assigned to these areas often fall short.

Obviously other things about her are a little apalling, but poor management in nonprofits is more the standard than it is the exception. I know from having to do contracts with them that often they simply have a near impossible time meeting even the basic requirements, even those that do good work, so there's a lot of satisficing.

Posted by MrProliferation | May 22, 2008 1:49 PM

> a situation where "accounts of charter schools gone bad in Arizona
> became commonplace" including districts selling charters inappropriately,
> unconstitutional religious instruction, illegal discrimination against disabled
> people, etc. and an eventual spate of reforms aimed at reigning the
> system in.

Sounds like charter schools in Texas -- without that last bit about "reforms."

We have some really outstanding charter schools in Texas -- the various KIPP schools seem to embody the best of the charter school concept -- but against that, we have seen many, many disasters. Falsifying attendance records to retain public funding, embezzelment, incompetent management, poorly-qualified staff and just generally low academic performance seem to be far more common than in public schools. One may cite any number of individual exceptions, but on the whole, it sure doesn't look like charter schools in Texas do any better, and in many cases may actually be worse, than public school. While one may argue that the current public school structure is limited in how far it can take kids, it's also true that the system (read: bureaucracy) reduces or eliminates many of the really bad outcomes that are now beginning to appear in charter schools. With charters, the highs are occasionally higher, and the lows are sometimes much lower. For parents considering sending their kid to a new charter start-up, it's a total crap shoot.

Posted by Andy | May 22, 2008 2:11 PM

an eventual spate of reforms aimed at reigning the system in.

That's "reining...in." Exerting control-- as with a horse.

Posted by James Gary | May 22, 2008 2:11 PM

Keegan for education. Phil Gramm on the economy. Lieberman on Iraq and Iran.

Looks like it would be another administration filled with people who'll do a "heckuva' job".

Posted by LFC | May 22, 2008 2:22 PM

Just to set the record straight here, please take a look at Arizona Charter Schools actual academic and financial records instead of simply accepting this nonsense.(www.ade.az.gov)Right now, 14 of the 15 highest scoring high schools in the state are public charter schools. Newsweek just named one of our Tucson charter schools as the #1 high school in the country.

So Mr. Millman, I have enormous respct for your work in Harlem, and you can rest assured that Arizona's work is doing nothing but enhancing the charter school movement. As you know, it is never easy for our school leaders to set these schools up against huge opposition, and a desire from those who oppose them to consistently portray them negatively.

The good news is that you can check the record...there is a higher percentage of best performing schools at the highs school level in our charters, and the other schools are on par with the larger system when taken as a whole. But the outstanding models that have been created by our teachers is what I still find most promising. We have had a very small percentage of failures...fewer, in fact, than I thought there should have been as these are basically small business start-ups.

I hope if you are truly interested that you will look more closely at this, because while I expect to see this kind of unresearched commentary in lots of places, The Atlantic isn't one of them.

As for the ELC audit, the US Department has long since acknowledged that any deficiencies were settled, and there were never any allegations of money unaccounted for, intentional misuse or "fraud". The facts were straight-forward and the organization took very seriously our obligation to correct all of it, which we did.

We also served students in about 600 schools, where we were working with teachers to pilot new technologies in matching curriculum and instruction to state standards in ways that were easily supportable in the classroom, and could easily catch struggling students. It was and is an important piece of the real work we all have before us.

None of this work will be easy or easily accepted, or it would have been done by now. Innovative approaches that offend tradition deserve scrutiny and then support if they prove promising.

I am humbled by the work I see in every sector of education, even when I disagree with the philosophies that underpin the work...I rarely see anybody who is not trying to create a better future for our kids. So that is a privilege all its own, and I will keep at it, as I hope they will.

Posted by Lisa Graham Keegan | May 30, 2008 12:38 PM