State education officials invented their own numbers on charter school waiting lists

There are not thousands of students on waiting lists in Alaska trying to get into charter schools, contrary to claims by the Dunleavy administration.

Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, who calls herself a “data nerd,” testified Wednesday that she believed there are about 2,000 students in Anchorage alone on waiting lists to get into charter schools. The real number is about 350.

“The number, I don’t have the exact, but it sounds very appropriate, approximation from my experience in the Anchorage School District of about 2,000 children a year waiting on lists to get into charter schools,” said Bishop, the former superintendent in Anchorage.

Officials of the Anchorage School District say the application deadline has just passed and there are 347 kids on waiting lists for next fall. Of those, 199 applied only to charter schools. The rest also also applied to neighborhood alternative schools.

Bishop should have had some idea not only of the Anchorage waiting list, but how many students statewide are trying to get into charter schools.

She should explain to the Legislature and the public why she passed along false information and failed to survey local school districts.

I think her failure to come up with a real number was intentional on the part of the Dunleavy administration, as having no solid research to work from meant it would be harder to prove the imaginary numbers wrong.

She’s not the only one manufacturing false school statistics for political purposes.

Bob Griffin, an Alaska Airlines pilot, is a longtime Dunleavy supporter and right-wing political activist. Dunleavy appointed him to the state Board of Education. Dunleavy wants the Legislature to give Griffin and the other state board members the power to create new charter schools, bypassing local elected officials.

Griffin and the six other members of the state board all serve at the pleasure of the governor.

Dunleavy does not control local school boards and wants to increase the power of the governor’s office.

Griffin is the “senior education research fellow” at the Alaska Policy Forum, a right-wing group aligned with Dunleavy.

“Huge waiting lists of thousands of parents who are eager to participate in Alaska's innovative and successful public charter school models are frustrated because of statutory barriers that inhibit the growth of popular public charter programs,” Griffin wrote in a personal press release he distributed in mid-March.

Waiting lists are not the only charter school issue that the state did not research.

Expounding at length on her lack of information in a January hearing, Bishop said the state doesn’t know how many charter school applications are rejected by local school boards and why. But she said there might be some and there might be teachers and parents trying to start charter schools who wouldn’t want to appeal a local denial to the state board, the current process in state law.

She said this:

“I don’t believe that this legislation actually takes away local control. It adds another avenue, so it’s not a heavy hand to undo something that we already have. It’s to expand something that we already have and to grow it. Certainly there is a provision to move on to appeal at a higher level. I would say that just being in the education system, when you’re a teacher with an idea about—I have an innovation I’m working with my parents—and you take it to a board and you work for that school district, there is some kind of a, a lack of like wanting to move on because you don’t what to make trouble if someone doesn’t like something.”

“But yes, so there could be, oh I know, I just want to share too that there aren’t, we’ve had the law a long time and there aren’t very many charter schools.”

“And so the idea that doing a charter school is very difficult, to do the paperwork for it. There are high standards in our state and again, those standards are set by the state. The state board of education has set those standards, they’re in legislation. And when you, I would say, when you don’t go to the local level, what I have seen, in my tenure, is that the folks are just deflated and they just feel that so much work was put into it that they can’t muster up the energy to do the next level. And that, those were, I mean when you really want to ask about experiences, I mean those are just some of my own.”

The Association of Alaska School Boards has done some of the work that Dunleavy, Bishop, Griffin and others have failed to do.

“The purported ‘wait list’ of thousands of students does not exist,” Executive Director Lon Garrison wrote the other day.

The group surveyed school districts and came up with 975 children on waiting lists statewide, but cautioned that in some districts children are signed up for more than one charter school list, meaning the real number is lower.

Garrison began his column this way:

“Unfortunately, the campaign for increased funding for public education has reached an impasse with the governor’s insistence on reforming the charter school approval process. This reform would allow charter schools to bypass the approval of local school districts and instead go directly to the State Board of Education. It is the first and most significant step in a plan to reduce the power of local authorities and provide opportunities for private and religious schools to access public funds. AASB strongly opposes this reform through its resolutions.”

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