The school director at my favorite school straight up stole from us teachers. She found me on some job-seeking website where I had an active résumé and offered me a $41,000 salary to teach kindergarten.

Hers would be the third and final school I taught at during my tenure as Arizona’s greatest teacher. My first two schools paid the teachers on a 12-month schedule, which meant we received checks during our two-month summer vacation. This new school paid the teachers on a 10-month schedule, which meant we did not receive checks during our two-month summer vacation. It’s not really a big deal and you never really know how a school handles summer vacation until you interview. If you get paid over the summer, your school-year checks are a little smaller. If you don’t get paid over the summer, your school-year checks are a little bigger. The actual salary remains the same…

…unless your school director is stealing from you! I only needed a few pay stubs before I realized my new boss’s numbers weren’t adding up. I asked a veteran teacher if our pay schedule changed and we now get summer checks, and they told me no. They let me know our school director is cheap and probably stealing from us, but because she doesn’t function as a principal and never asks anything of us that a regular administrator would, everybody tolerates her malfeasance.

I saw another pay stub and checked my math one more time before confronting my income embezzler:

A $41,000 salary spread out over 10 months (20 checks) means $2,050 every payday.

A $41,000 salary spread out over 12 months (24 checks) means $1,700 every payday.

Except our school director paid us teachers the smaller amount for only ten months, which makes a $34,000 salary. SHE STOLE $7,000 FROM EVERY TEACHER EVERY SUMMER! She also had the audacity to drop photos from her exotic summer vacations into the school’s group chat. Ultimately, I decided against confronting her. The veteran teacher was right. Although our administrator was corrupt af, we weren’t subjected to any of the teacher abuse happening at other schools. Lesson plans? Pre-approved (just maintain a binder in case a state auditor visits). Professional trainings? Nah. Teacher evaluations? Perfect score. Report cards? Pass ‘em. Angry parents? Handwave. Clunky software? Google Docs. State testing? Get ‘er done. Random complication? She wanted all issues resolved to the point she could just sign her name and walk away. Her office manager was a real fixer, too. Life was stress-free and that’s worth something. Maybe not worth $7,000 of my own money, but if I knew my move to Oregon wasn’t going to be permanent then I sure wish I stayed teaching at this sham school.

Sham schools, at least in Arizona, are only possible because of the politics of School Choice. It’s such a huge campaign that we usually celebrate “School Choice Month” and generate a lot of propaganda to ensure nothing changes. The idea, in its base form, is that there are gaps and shortcomings in available education that the public school system cannot fill. If a predominantly Hispanic or Native American neighborhood sits in an underserved area, any sympathetic non-profit or business is capable of stepping in and opening what is called a Charter School. If a charter school provides all the same services, and produces the same results, as a public school then it is able to siphon dollars out of the public education funding pool. Before charter schools, we had what were called Magnet Schools. This is where the planning people would previously notice those underserved (mainly poorer) neighborhoods and decide to open the next school right there, but with one really cool feature that would attract families from overserved (more affluent) areas. Usually, the one really cool feature was a state-of-the-art computer lab. Parents could ask their kids, “Hey, do you want to go to a school with brand-new computers?” “Yayyy!” “OK, but it’s in the barrio!” Magnet schools lost their appeal because technology is no longer special or hard to come by. So we’re left with a big charter school problem.

My sham K-8 school was scattered across both sides of the street. Our school director had leased disparate buildings and assigned one building as the nursery, daycare and pre-school, the second building as the kindergarten through 5^th-grade campus, and the third building as the 6^th through 8^th-grade campus. If the upperclassmen needed to come to our lower campus to join the combined after-care program, their parents had to sign a consent that they could cross with the lights themselves. The students thought it was funny to steal shopping carts from the neighboring Trader Joe’s and ferry themselves between destinations. My K-5th campus was comfortable and mostly worked for what it needed to do, except for pickup and drop-off since there was no roundabout (only chaos), but shoving a whole school into a building that wasn’t built as a school does create a few challenges. For example, the P.E. teacher had to get super creative with no field or gymnasium, and we didn’t really have anywhere to easily go to the bathroom. We had one bathroom, accessible from the outside, that served as the playground’s bathroom. Another bathroom, accessible from kindergarten, that served as the kindergarten and grades 1-2 bathroom. This bathroom did not have a lock on it. And then the “main” bathroom that was accessible from the 4^th-grade classroom. The 5^th-grade classroom had a bathroom, too, but somehow that teacher wasn’t expected to share (boss bitch energy). Fourth grade had to put up with constant interruptions. If an administrator or faculty member needed to take a shit, they had to humbly enter 4^th grade and hope students weren’t taking a test in silence.

My dad engineered me a portable lock so eventually I could use my own kindergarten bathroom without asking a trusted student to stand guard outside.

By and large, charter schools are not good for what they were implemented to do, that is to say, making quality education more accessible to disenfranchised students. However, for mainstream kids, most charter schools are fine. Or at least not worse than public schools. One difference is, charter schools can hire any adult with a bachelor’s degree to teach while public schools can only hire adults who are state-certified to teach. I do not have a teaching certification, but I was a good teacher. Our 5^th-grade teacher (boss bitch again) was also very good. The other teachers those two years I was there were kinda sus. The new 4^th-grade teacher got arrested for drugs and human trafficking over the summer, so our school director simply combined the 3^rd and 4^th-grade classes (another salary to steal). Our 1^st-grade teacher didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree, but she was very old and probably not going to pursue more education. We skirted this requirement by saying she was in school. Guess who was asked to sign off on her student teaching? Yep. Yours, truly. Did I actually observe any student teaching? You already know I didn’t. Where charter schools actually do harm is when a child enrolls with special needs.

When a child with special needs arrives at a public school, there are already highly qualified specialists employed at the district level to ensure that child receives a commensurate education with all the supportive accommodations. When a child with special needs arrives at a charter school, the school director has to figure out what a public school would provide and then provide the same thing (in order to keep its charter). So if the public school would provide a speech pathologist and a one-to-one aide half the day, you better believe our cost-conscious leader is going to ask for bids from the local academy of hacks and then hire the dumbest mother fucker out there. Our school counselor was really, really bad. I used to joke around with her because I found her incompetence and revealing attire amusing, but then she created disruptions in my class and we were no longer friends. In one of her more harmless streaks, I had to ask her to stop pulling my most disruptive students outside for their counseling sessions, filling them with candy, and then sending them back to class with toy prizes I needed to take away after they used them to annoy their peers. You see, everything I’ve been saying coalesces around this one glaring reason charter schools will never work: When a businessperson owns the school, and whatever they don’t spend becomes their profit, they have an incentive not to provide quality education and services.

THE END, but I’ll say a little more. Doug Ducey, who served as the 23rd governor of Arizona from 2015 to 2023 (and as the CEO of Cold Stone Creamery from 1995 to 2007), was a huge champion of charter schools (because “businessman,” duh). In 2022, he signed AZ House Bill 2853 into law, creating the nation’s largest universal school voucher program. I’m not smart enough to beautifully explain school vouchers and tax credits, that would be an Arlen-tier article, but anecdotally, such things were very important to my school director’s bottom line. Vouchers and credits allow tax payers to use public education dollars for private school tuition, homeschooling, and alternative education. You can pay your portion of the tax bill to the charter school your kids already attend! Or, if you know what you’re doing, even pay your portion of the tax bill to the charter school you already teach at! You better believe my school director came around every tax season, like a shark in the water, with the forms already pre-filled for us. Her logic wasn’t flawed. I already paid my taxes, why not take this one additional free step to slightly enrich the school employing me? I still avoided her or accidentally lost the paperwork when it was due. Or if she held my feet to the fire, I told her, “No shade, but my son goes to a public school. I got you after he graduates, though.”

Suffice it to say, my real “school choice” was not sending my boss on another vacation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to drop a Ducey.

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If you want to read more about the collapse of public education, I wrote about “diploma mills” in my free book. Look for the chapters about high school and skip the parts that don’t interest you.

PS. I stole the “Drop a Ducey” joke from my nephew. His political humor was ahead of its time.