History of Arizona charter schools: 'I don’t think we realized what we’d done'

The Charter Gamble: In this series, we examine how Arizona committed 25 years ago to the then-untested concept of charter schools, and what the program has meant for the state. Today, Part 1, how it all began.

Fife Symington sounded defiant.

He had run for governor on a promise to overhaul Arizona's sluggish public education system. But by April 1994, three years into his administration, nothing significant had changed.  

Now he felt pressure from all sides. The public demanded change. His re-election was in doubt. His personal entanglements were beginning to make news. 

His best hope was to do something dramatic. 

So the governor called an ally. 

Lisa Graham, a Republican state representative and chairwoman of the House Education Committee, answered the phone. Graham felt defeated. She had poured years of work into an education-reform bill Symington had supported, and then watched from the Senate gallery as it died.

Let's go back, the governor told her. He would call a special session, and they would run the bill again. But this time without its most controversial component. 

We'll take out the vouchers.

Symington was convinced the bill's small voucher program — which allowed families to use public money to send their children to private schools — had doomed the legislation. Without it, Symington said, their reforms would sail through.

The rest of the bill seemed tame by comparison. It allowed "open enrollment," letting children go to schools outside their district boundaries. It created school report cards and expanded preschool for at-risk children. And it established a new breed of public schools designed to operate independently, with fewer rules and looser oversight than their district counterparts. They would fuel competition and parent choice.

They were called charter schools. 

It was more of an idea than a movement. Only a handful of states had passed charter laws, and in those, only a few schools had opened. 

Neither Symington nor Graham had ever visited one. 

Graham had doubts about the timing of a special session. She respected Symington's instincts, but worried it was too soon to try again. She tried to be tactful. 

"I don't know if you know this: People hate you right now. And they don't like me either," she recalled telling him. "I'm not sure if you want me to run this thing."

Symington was undeterred. The November election was six months away. Education reform could spark a rebound in his popularity and give fellow Republicans a talking point for their own campaigns. 

Their recent defeat, Symington assured Graham, was just part of the process. Though he wasn't exactly sure what charter schools were, he knew they would change everything. 

We're coming back, he told her. I'm not asking you. We're coming back.

The push for better schools was a nationwide concern.

In a 1993 report to Congress, the National Center for Education Statistics concluded that the country's lagging schools "continue to have serious implications." It detailed high dropout rates, stagnant test scores and wide racial gaps in American education. 

The concept of charter schools had floated in the education ether since 1974, when a college professor named Ray Budde proposed schools that were planned and operated directly by teachers. The idea gained little support until 1988, with a speech by the late Al Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teacher unions in the United States. Speaking to the National Press Club, Shanker built on Budde's idea, suggesting a sort of school-within-a-school, a proving ground where teachers could try new ideas and see what worked.

The idea, former Shanker associate Edward McElroy said, was not to build alternative schools. Rather, Shanker's charters would be testing grounds for solutions. Not the solutions themselves. 

"This proposal is not pie in the sky," Shanker said. "It's small. The reason I'm proposing it is that I think it is almost impossible to change an entire school system. Why? We've got the same schools today that we had 100 or 200 years ago."

This time, the idea stuck. The next day, Shanker's speech appeared in the New York Times. States began working on legislation. Within three years, Minnesota passed the country's first charter law, and by 1992 St. Paul-based City Academy opened as the first charter school. 

MORE: Charter schools are big business. Who's making money off public education?

Tom Patterson wasn't sure what he was doing. 

The state senator had never visited a charter school before he decided to bring them to Arizona. There were hardly any models to follow — the nation's first law had passed just a few years earlier. 

But Patterson felt the same public pressure the governor did, and came to the same conclusion: Whatever they did to fix the schools, it had to be big.

Arizona's public schools were underfunded and on their most recent round of standardized tests, Arizona students scored below the national average. The National Assessment of Educational Progress results showed just 21 percent of the state's fourth-graders scored as proficient readers and 13 percent in math. Eighth-graders tested barely better.

''It's terrible,'' C. Diane Bishop, then Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, said at the time. She blamed curriculum that emphasized drill and practice, not problem-solving. ''Our entire country is not producing students who can solve problems with mathematics."

Patterson considered himself a supporter of public education but believed politics and unionization had created a system resistant to change.

He wanted the kind of reform one former Republican staffer called "constructive disruption." Stronger competition. Bigger risks. More choice. 

Patterson believed he had found it all in charter schools. He wanted to bring them to Arizona. He just wasn't sure how.

"There wasn’t much in the way of models around," Patterson said. "We had the honor and privilege of flying by the seat of our pants." 

So he sat down with a Senate education staffer and started writing. 

The result was more of a wish list than legislation.

"It wasn't a complicated bill," he said.

It provided that charter schools could be established to improve student achievement and provide additional academic choices. At the recommendation of a friend in Colorado, it created the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools.

The board was given conflicting responsibilities: Not only would it oversee the new schools, it would also promote them.

Patterson left the rest of the bill as broad as possible. His rationale was that regulation could always be added later, but it was almost impossible to remove. He erred on the side of less regulation, even when charter advocates pushed back: Minnesota charter-school pioneer Ted Kolderie worried that Arizona's "wild West" approach would derail the movement.

Patterson didn't mind. He had a bill. Now he had to get it passed.

The 1994 legislative session offered an opening. Republicans controlled the Senate once again, and were using their reclaimed power to pepper the chamber with education-related bills, including Patterson's charter bill.

On their own, none of the proposals was enough. So Senate leadership combined them into a single, heavyweight bill.

It topped their list of priorities. But it was a long shot.

Republican leaders knew it would be almost impossible to pass anything that included even the smallest voucher program. The word "vouchers" ignited concerns about tax dollars flowing to religious schools, draining money from the public system and dropping it into private pockets. 

The opposition was loud and unified: Democrats would never vote for vouchers.

Former Republican leaders said the voucher proposal was never expected to become law. It was a decoy, a negotiating tactic: If their opponents focused all their time and energy trying to kill the vouchers, they could slip the other reforms through, underneath the noise.

"That was part of our strategy," said Symington, who resigned in 1997 after he was convicted of bank fraud. He later saw the charges overturned and went onto found a culinary school. "We very quietly moved the charter thing along. I don't think they recognized what the charters meant, in terms of challenging institutions."

As the massive bill worked its way through the Legislature, its backers made a full-frontal push to sell it. Symington and his staffers pitched school choice on radio shows. Graham cultivated votes for the bill in the House, and Patterson used his leadership role to promote the bill in the Senate. 

None of the bill's three chief architects — Patterson, Symington and Graham — had set foot inside a charter school.

But they had read enough to know they would appeal to parents looking for something different from the traditional neighborhood school. 

Support swelled. They were close.

Graham watched the final vote from the Senate gallery, doing the math as wavering legislators voted against it. Months of work, of preparing and planning and pitching policy, failed by a single vote.

"It was awful," she said. Even after 24 years, the memory still made her fight back tears. "It's still awful."

Symington was undaunted. He had assumed the bill would fail. He found encouragement in the narrow loss. He waited a couple days, then made the call to Graham, telling her to strip the vouchers and try again.

Symington's strategy cut two ways: Trying to slip charters through under the voucher decoy deflected opposition, but it also stifled support.

Charter supporters were a vocal but small group. If Symington and his allies were going to win, they needed to broaden their base.

They turned to the Democratic stronghold of south Phoenix. 

"We made sure that our folks from south Phoenix, our legislators, got behind it," remembered Armando Ruiz, a former Democratic state legislator. "That was the difference. That was the tipping point."

Ruiz had spent his entire life in the city's majority-Hispanic southern section. His was a large Catholic family that emphasized education. Though his parents weren't wealthy — Ruiz's father laid bricks and his mother was a school administrator — they refused to send their sons to the neighborhood's poor public school. They scraped together enough money to send Armando and his twin brother, Fernando, to Brophy College Prep, the thriving parochial school across town.

"That was the choice," Ruiz said. "If you wanted your kids to go to something better, you had to pay for it."

But he never left the neighborhood where he grew up. In 1981, he became the youngest Mexican-American ever elected in Arizona. He was 25 years old, representing his native District 23. Over the next decade, he gained a reputation as an outspoken lawmaker focused on improving the lives of low-income and minority youth.

Then, in 1992, he left politics. He felt God calling him to serve some other way. He took a job at his neighborhood YMCA and waited for God to show him the next step.

It came after a funeral.

A young man had been murdered, continuing a spate of killings in south Phoenix. After the service, Ruiz and his brother sat at their kitchen table and, one after another, listed names of kids they knew who had died too young.

They counted 36.

"That's not something that should happen," Ruiz said. "Why would a young person kill another young person? It doesn't make sense. There's something there. So you had to confront that."

The brothers had long been active in their community. But they wanted a way to reach young kids, to surround them with support and guide them toward opportunity. Something that would break the cycle that trapped so many young lives: a dangerous neighborhood, a failing school, a wasted life.

Ruiz found his solution in the newspaper.

The charter-school concept first appeared in The Arizona Republic around 1993. It was mentioned almost as an afterthought. Charter-school bills had become law in only two states, Minnesota and California.

Ruiz wasn’t sure what a charter school was, or how it worked. But the article said they would provide parental choice, and that was enough for him. A charter school, he thought, would allow him to influence generations of south Phoenix children.

The bill to allow charter schools in Arizona needed help from Democrats. And in 1994, Democratic support required Hispanic voices.

"I always say that Democrats ran the Senate, and the Hispanics ran the Democrats," Graham said. 

Ruiz still had Capitol connections from his time as a lawmaker, and he belonged to the Arizona Hispanic Community Forum, activists with big influence over Democrats in both chambers. His high-profile contacts helped elect most of the legislators representing south Phoenix.

He could also call on an old friend from Brophy — John Graham, who by then was married to Lisa.

Ruiz tapped all of his connections, and the neighborhood followed his lead. By the summer of 1994, Symington's education bill had the necessary votes to pass. 

When Symington called a special session, on June 15, 1994, there was only one thing left to do: 

"Focus. Nobody likes to fail in a special session," Symington said.

House Bill 2002 was almost identical to the failed reform bill from the regular session. Its supporters had spent the weeks since its failure asking a single question: If we cut the vouchers, would we have your vote?

When they agreed, there was nothing left to oppose.

"This thing was obviously going to pass," recalled Lisa Graham, who later remarried and now uses the last name Graham Keegan. 

Legislators were eager to go home. Summer vacations awaited and November elections loomed. Even opponents didn't want to be seen as roadblocks to reform. They stayed out of the way. 

Amendments were shot down — including one to nix a new state agency, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools — mostly because they hadn't been approved in advance.

Both chambers voted June 17. Votes spilled across party lines: In the House, the bill passed 40-13 while the Senate approved it 21-9. Symington signed the bill later that day, and later called it the product of "the most successful special session in our history."

"While our charter-school provision is not the first of its kind," Symington wrote in an op-ed later that month, "it is considered to be the most comprehensive."

In a single, 51-hour special session Symington and the Legislature flung open the doors to charter schools in Arizona. They had wanted change. But none of them knew how drastic the change would be.

"When I look back on it now," Graham Keegan said, "I don't think we realized what we'd done." 

Now that the bill was signed, no one involved could have predicted how quickly charter schools would take off — or how much controversy they would create.

NEXT IN THE SERIES: 'Like the Oklahoma Land Rush,' charter schools take root in Arizona

Reach the reporters at anne.ryman@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8072 or on Twitter at: @anneryman and awoods@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8829 or on Twitter at @ac_woods.

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