The Arizona State Board of Education (ASBE) released an improved grade for the state’s largest charter school operator.
Last month, ASBE awarded Primavera Online School a letter grade of “B” for the 2024-2025 school year.
The threat of closure of the state’s largest charter school operator attracted the attention of President Donald Trump allies and school choice advocates.
The corrected grading follows nearly a year of efforts by the charter school to overturn a charter revocation from the Arizona State Board of Charter Schools (ASBCS).
In a statement, Primavera Online School stated that ASBE’s latest determination validated their year-long defense of their performance.
“These findings confirm that Primavera’s academic performance has always been within the state’s definition of a performing school and is currently a highly performing school, consistent with its long-standing mission of serving at-risk and non-traditional students across Arizona,” said the school in a press release.
School choice proponents petitioned Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne to intervene in the threat against Primavera Online School.
However, Horne clarified last spring that he had no power or influence over charter school revocation decisions, even with having a seat on ASBCS.
“The legislature chose to divide jurisdiction regarding charter schools between the Arizona Department of Education and the Charter Board. The current issue is within the jurisdiction of the Charter Board. I have no power or influence over that. If I were to try to influence it, the Charter Board would resent the trespass on their turf, and it would do more harm than good,” said Horne at the time. “There is likely to be an appeal to an administrative law judge, and the school needs to marshal its evidence to present to the administrative law judge. If I am asked for any data or other information that the department has, I will of course immediately provide it regardless of which side requests it.”
Without intervention, ASBCS revoked Primavera Online School’s charter last summer.
Primavera Online School leadership publicly fought the revocation, accusing ASBCS of incorrectly redesignating their school as traditional rather than its historical designation as alternative.
The school did receive approval for alternative status for the 2025 fiscal year, and its application for the 2026 fiscal year was pending before the Arizona Department of Education at the time of the revocation.
Its founder and CEO, Damian Creamer, failed to convince ASBCS that they had improperly redesignated his school.
The board cited three years of low academic results as the basis for its decision.
However, a retrospective review by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) recently conducted focusing on the online charter school’s academic standing over the three scrutinized school years (2022, 2023, and 2024) determined that the charter school would have warranted a passing grade of “at least C” under an alternative school status.
Primavera Online School was founded in 2001 to assist students with a high risk of not graduating from conventional schools. Since opening, the school has had over 250,000 students. Approximately 8,000 students attend the school annually.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
In a previous op-ed, I argued that Arizona’s district school system is no longer failing quietly or at the margins; it is failing in concrete, measurable ways that any citizen can see. Districts are sitting atop tens of millions of square feet of unused facilities, fleets of underutilized buses, and continued academic declines, even as families vote with their feet for charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. I suggested that this mismatch between assets and enrollment is not primarily a failure of effort by teachers or even of management by principals and superintendents. It is, rather, a structural failure—a failure of the political governance model that was built for a different age and has now grown badly out of step with a landscape defined by choice and specialization.
That first piece only sketched the deeper questions. If Arizona’s district schools are governed by locally elected boards precisely so that they can respond to the public interest, why do they so consistently struggle to respond to the public itself? Why do boards that are supposed to safeguard public funds preside over billions of dollars in underutilized assets? Why does a structure designed to protect the common good now preside over persistent scandal, fiscal mismanagement, declining enrollment, and widespread frustration among teachers, administrators, and parents alike? To answer those questions, we must look beyond current headlines and follow the longer arc of how we came to equate “public” with “politically governed” in the first place.
A Short History
The political governance model that structures Arizona’s districts did not descend from heaven fully formed. It emerged in the early twentieth century as a particular way—one way—of securing community oversight of local schools. The assumption was simple: if citizens chose board members at the ballot box, then “the public interest” would be represented in school decisions. Over time, that prudential, albeit contingent, arrangement hardened into dogma. Political representation came to be treated not only as a means of protection, but as the necessary and exclusive guardian of the public good, public funds, and the formation of the next generation. To question the structure itself began to sound, in some ears, like questioning public education altogether.
Yet a careful look at both history and experience suggests that this is far too narrow a view. Arizonans know as well as anybody we must distinguish between the health of a society and the reach of the state. Our southwestern culture has long insisted that families, churches, associations, and voluntary institutions represent the public and serve the common good, often more effectively than formal political bodies. We know that political power is not the sole guardian of the public interest; it is one instrument among many and must be judged by its fruits. Therefore, we also know that if a particular form of political governance routinely frustrates educational excellence, wastes public resources, and subjects schools to the whiplash of partisan cycles, it is not sacrilege to reconsider it. It is an act of enlightened stewardship.
Arizona did not begin with today’s sprawling unified districts and five-member boards. In the territorial period, the basic unit of public education was the local school district, often consisting of a single schoolhouse serving one community. Territorial law in the late 1860s and 1870s required each district to elect a small board of three trustees, who oversaw the teacher, maintained the building, levied modest local taxes when necessary, and kept a simple census of school-age children. Early political governance of schools in Arizona was rudimentary and intensely local. The trustees were neighbors, the school was usually the only option for miles, and the questions before the board were concrete: hire a teacher, repair the roof, stretch a short budget a little further. And parents were close and connected to every operation of the school.
With statehood in 1912, the picture began to change. The Arizona Constitution established a State Board of Education and charged the new state with maintaining a system of common schools, while statutory law gradually formalized local districts as political subdivisions of the state. Over time, those simple boards of trustees evolved into today’s “governing boards,” recognized in Title 15 of the Arizona Revised Statutes as the governing body of each school district, typically consisting of three or five members serving staggered four-year terms and elected on the regular general-election ballot. What began as lay oversight of a single schoolhouse was thus absorbed into the broader machinery of state and county elections and invested with a much wider portfolio of powers.
Through the middle of the twentieth century, Arizona followed the national trend toward consolidation and unification. Numerous small districts were merged into larger common and unified districts, each with a single governing board responsible for K–8 and high school operations across multiple schools and neighborhoods. State law now gives these boards dozens of specific powers and duties—from hiring and evaluating the superintendent to adopting curricula and policies, issuing bonds, and managing the district’s substantial real estate portfolio. In effect, and by necessity, school boards shifted from being small committees of trustees to quasi-legislative bodies whose decisions shape complex organizations serving tens of thousands of students and stewarding hundreds of millions of public dollars. With this growth, parents became more like mere bystanders.
Political = Public?
From a legal standpoint, Arizona’s embrace of political representation as the default mode for “real” public education is baked into its constitutional and statutory architecture. Article XI of the Arizona Constitution charges the Legislature with creating a “general and uniform public school system” and vests the “general conduct and supervision” of that system in a State Board of Education, a state superintendent, county school superintendents, and locally established governing boards. District governing boards are thus conceived, from the outset, as political bodies—public offices filled by election, exercising delegated authority from the state to manage schools, steward funds, and set policy. Over the twentieth century, this framework was reinforced as boards took on larger consolidated districts, wider fiscal responsibilities, and explicit policy-making roles. In practice, “the public school system” came to mean the system supervised by these constitutionally recognized, electorally chosen officials.
Culturally and politically, this legal design was then wrapped in a powerful democratic narrative. State and national advocacy groups routinely describe elected school boards and district schools as the “cornerstone of democracy” and the essential vehicle for citizen oversight of government. In Arizona, governing-board candidates and education associations explicitly frame district schools—not charters—as the institution that embodies this democratic ideal and warn that parental-choice policies “attack public education” and threaten that cornerstone role. The result is that, in both rhetoric and policy debates, “public education” is habitually equated with electorally governed districts, while other public schooling arrangements (charters, open enrollment, and yes ESAs) are treated as exceptions or threats. Political representation by board election is no longer presented as one prudential way to secure the public interest; it is treated as the litmus test for whether a school is truly public at all.
The Results
Measured against its own stated aims, Arizona’s district governance model is not delivering. Start with the most basic metric of public confidence: whether families actually use the system they are taxed to support. Since 2011, district school enrollment in Arizona has fallen about 8 percent while charter enrollment has grown 87 percent; nearly all net growth in public-school enrollment over the past decade has come from charters, not districts. A recent analysis estimates that roughly 27 percent of Arizona’s 5- to 17-year-olds now do not attend a district school, and that close to 40 percent of incoming kindergarteners bypass their assigned district campus for charter, private, or home- and micro-school options. In other words, under the very governance structure meant to embody the “public interest,” a steadily shrinking share of the public is choosing the product offered—even before one considers the additional 7 percent (and growing) of students now educated via ESAs outside the district and charter systems altogether.
The picture is no more reassuring on fiscal stewardship. Arizona’s Auditor General recently warned that dozens of districts are on the verge of serious financial distress, and state financial investigators fielded 102 fraud-related allegations involving school districts and other public entities in 2024 alone. In the Isaac Elementary School District, mismanagement and budget overruns became so severe that the district could not meet payroll, prompting the State Board of Education to place it into formal receivership and triggering investigations by the Auditor General and Attorney General. The Nadaburg Unified School District has likewise drawn public accusations of “gross financial mismanagement” from the state treasurer, who urged an audit and potential receivership. All of this is happening in a system that, even as enrollment declines, continues to accumulate physical plant and capital costs: between 2019 and 2024, district enrollment fell 5 percent while gross square footage rose 3 percent, capital spending rose 67 percent, and square feet per student rose 9 percent, leaving districts operating at roughly two-thirds of their capacity while charter schools operate at about 95 percent. A governance model that presides over shrinking usage, growing fixed costs, and periodic fiscal crisis is, at a minimum, not obviously safeguarding public funds.
Nor is the system maintaining the confidence of its own professionals. A 2024 study from Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute found “deep dissatisfaction” among K–12 educators statewide, with nearly two-thirds reporting that they have considered leaving the profession. Separate reporting notes that more than half of Arizona’s public-school teachers say they may leave within two years if working conditions do not improve. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s most recent survey shows the teacher shortage remains at a “catastrophic” level: since July 2025, more than 1,000 teachers have quit, over 4,000 positions are being filled by long-term substitutes or other stopgaps, and nearly 1,400 positions are entirely vacant. These are not merely human-resource headaches; they are evidence that the governance structure is failing at the elementary work of sustaining a stable, dignified professional environment for the adults on whom student learning depends.
Finally, academic results under this model are stubbornly mediocre. On Arizona’s 2024 statewide assessments, close to 60 percent of students were not proficient in English Language Arts and 67 percent weren’t proficient in math, essentially unchanged from the prior year despite significant pandemic recovery spending. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s eighth-grade math score in 2022 was lower than in 2019 and not significantly different from its score in 2000; barely 18 percent of students reached “proficient,” and the share below “basic” was alarmingly high. Reading scores for fourth and eighth graders declined again in 2024, with only about a quarter of students proficient. After more than a century of elected-board oversight, the system is educating barely one in three students to grade-level standards in core subjects.
Taken together, these facts are not the story of a governance model quietly doing its job in a difficult environment. They are the record of a structure that has failed to retain families, failed to steward assets, failed to sustain its workforce, and failed to secure strong academic outcomes—even as alternative, non-political public models have expanded alongside it.
Beyond the Political Governance Model
The political cycle all but guarantees that Arizona’s district schools cannot build the kind of stable, long-horizon strategy that genuine educational excellence requires. Board elections, party primaries, and shifting legislative coalitions continually reset priorities, rewarding short term gestures that energize a partisan base rather than quiet, steady investment in students, families, and faculty. The incentives are clear: politicians and would-be board members gain more by fighting over the latest cultural controversy or signaling loyalty to party talking points than by aligning curriculum, staffing, facilities, and budgeting to a coherent, decades-long vision for student formation. In this environment, strategic plans are drafted to placate interest groups, messaging is crafted to survive the next news cycle, and superintendents are hired and fired according to political winds rather than educational competence. The result is a political strategic governance model, in which schools are treated as stages for ideological contest, rather than an educational governance model, in which decisions are anchored to evidence about what helps children learn, what sustains excellent teachers, and what builds strong, enduring school communities.
It is therefore time, not out of hostility to public education but out of love for it, that we rethink the political governance model that currently defines Arizona’s district schools. The interests of students, families, faculty, and staff are too precious to be chained to a structure that persistently frustrates their flourishing. If public education is truly a public good, then it must be governed in a way that safeguards that good by honoring scarce resources, attracting and retaining excellent educators, and treating children as persons to be formed rather than as data points in a political contest. Structures exist for the sake of these ends, not the other way around. To ask whether elected boards and partisan incentives remain the best guardians of our schools is not an act of heresy; it is an act of stewardship and, in a self-governing republic, a moral duty. A people that refuses to examine its institutions when they fail to serve their purpose is not defending the common good. It is neglecting it.
Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. He served as President of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022.
The Common Sense Institute’s recent report, Echoes in the Halls: Arizona School Districts’ Growing Problem with Empty Buildings and Empty Buses (August 2025), quantifies a reality that many parents and educators in Arizona already sense: the traditional district school system is struggling to adapt to the new education marketplace. The report highlights a staggering mismatch between student enrollment and district assets. District schools across the state now operate with seventy-eight million square feet of unused space—capacity for more than six hundred thousand students who are not there—representing assets valued at more than twelve billion dollars. Since 2019, district enrollment has fallen by nearly fifty thousand students, while close to forty percent of incoming kindergarteners are now enrolling outside their local district.
The story of transportation is equally telling. Even as eligible bus ridership has dropped by forty-five percent, districts have added more than three thousand new vehicles, bringing annual transportation spending to more than half a billion dollars. At the same time, capital expenditures have surged by sixty-seven percent in just five years, reaching nearly nine billion dollars, with hundreds of new buildings added even as families continue to leave for other options. The evidence points to a system built on assumptions of perpetual growth, unable to pivot as students migrate toward charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling.
The question is not whether Arizona has too many empty classrooms and idle buses—the report makes that clear—but why the system finds it so difficult to adapt. The answer lies not in the commitment of teachers and administrators, but in the political structure that governs districts themselves. For more than a century, Arizona’s districts have operated under locally elected boards with broad political and taxing authority. This design once served an important democratic purpose, anchoring schools to their communities. But in an environment defined by choice and specialization, it has become a straitjacket.
What is clear for anyone with any visibility on the governance model districts operate within is that the political cycle ensures instability. Board turnover, electioneering, and the shifting priorities of competing constituencies disrupt long-term strategy. Every few years, districts are thrown off course by new agendas, new mandates, new programs, new superintendents, and a seemingly unending supply of divisive debates. In a consumer-driven education market, where parents prize clarity, stability, and quality, such volatility is profoundly counterproductive.
By contrast, Arizona’s most successful education providers—charter networks like Great Hearts and BASIS—operate under governance models insulated from political churn. Their boards are mission-driven and stable, enabling them to stay focused on long-term priorities and to deliver a coherent and trustworthy experience. Families know what to expect from a BASIS or a Great Hearts school. Each has built a distinctive value proposition and a consistent culture, refined over years without disruption from local political battles. Governance stability has been essential to their growth and attraction, and it is no accident that they are now among the most sought-after public schools in the state.
The one-size-fits-all assumption that once defined public education—that a child would simply attend the local district school—has evaporated. Today, nearly half of Arizona’s students are educated outside of their neighborhood district school. Parents are no longer defaulting to their assigned option; they are actively choosing models that align with their values and aspirations for their children. They want education providers that are both distinctive and stable—schools that can deliver excellence without being buffeted by every election cycle or politicized by the latest ideological controversy.
The traditional political governance of districts is increasingly out of sync with these expectations. It undermines the very qualities—consistency, coherence, and focus—that families prize. Meanwhile, two generations of charter operators in Arizona have demonstrated that nonprofit governance structures free from political cycles can create durable, attractive, and scalable school systems. These operators are not without challenges, but they have proven that clarity of mission and insulation from politics allow for the steady building of educational brands that families trust.
The lesson is plain: if Arizona’s districts are to thrive rather than decline, they must be unshackled from their archaic political governance model. Continuing to operate under structures designed for the early twentieth century ensures further erosion of parent confidence and continued inefficiencies in managing billions of dollars of underutilized assets. A new path is needed, one that allows districts to reimagine themselves as nonprofit education management organizations, brings simplicity and flexibility to sources and uses of capital, allows for the restructuring of real estate portfolios, and the establishment of governance models capable of long-term stewardship. It would mean shifting from political governance to mission-driven governance, from reactive cycles to strategic stability. Nothing about this would be easy. It will take a thoughtful integration of the tax and governance issues that are best considered by a new commission of governance transformation.
Such a transformation is not about abandoning public education but about liberating it. It would align districts with the same best practices that have made Arizona’s most successful charters so attractive to families. It would give teachers a more stable environment in which to do their work, free from the whiplash of shifting political priorities. It would give parents confidence that their schools are governed for the long-term benefit of students, not for short-term political gain. And it would give students schools that are full, focused, and flourishing, rather than echoing with the costs of inefficiency.
The Echoes in the Halls report demonstrates that Arizona has reached a tipping point. Families have embraced choice, and the state’s education landscape has been reshaped accordingly. What remains is for governance to catch up with this reality. The way forward is not to cling to political structures of the past, but to free districts from them so they can compete on the same terms as the schools parents are already choosing. Only then can the empty classrooms and idle buses be replaced with what every community wants most: the sound of students learning in schools built on mission, stability, and trust.
Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. He served as President of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022.
Have you heard the charge that Arizona families are using Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) for babysitting? Or that ESA families are sitting on millions of dollars that they’re using for expensive, overseas vacations? Or that the ESAs only benefit wealthy families who live in high-performing school districts?
These claims range from “lacking key context” to “lacking any evidence whatsoever.” The main source of these and other horror stories that school-choice opponents tell is reliably left-leaning Arizona media outlets such as Channel 12 and the Arizona Republic.
It’s no surprise. Reporters at these outlets, such as Craig Harris, have a history of inaccurate agenda-driven “reporting” on Arizona’s school choice policies. Recent articles and “news” segments from these and other outlets are in keeping with this history.
Award-Winning Errors
In 2018, the Republic released a series criticizing Arizona’s charter schools. The series won the paper a Polk Award. The only problem is that it was riddled with errors.
For example, the Republic claimed that Arizona’s traditional district schools outperformed the state’s charter schools as measured by the state’s A-F school grading system and graduation rates. Both these claims were demonstrably false, but the Republic never ran a correction.
Matthew Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute detailed at length the numerous errors the Republic made to reach those incorrect conclusions, describing the story as “astonishingly deceptive.” For example, they counted one charter school as having a graduation rate of 0% when the school only offered instruction through 9th grade. Two more schools that supposedly had 0% graduation rates had closed years earlier. Another charter school with a low graduation rate was an alternative school that operated under the Yuma County Juvenile Justice Center—hardly an apples-to-apples comparison for typical district schools.
In 2019, the Republic released an above-the-fold, front-page story claiming that 100 of Arizona’s then 544 charter schools were in imminent danger of closure. The report said it was a “near certainty” that at least 50 would close “in the near future.” You’d think such a sensational claim would warrant a healthy dose of skepticism, but the Republic was more than happy to breathlessly repeat the claims nearly unchallenged.
Six years later, 580 charters operate in the state, defying predictions of a mass extinction. In fact, on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s charter school students scored over two grade levels higher than district students on 8th grade mathematics and by almost two grade levels on 8th grade reading. The state’s charter school students also scored higher than any other statewide average on both subjects.
You won’t see those facts reported by Arizona’s legacy media.
Journalism’s Credibility Crisis
For careful journalists concerned with their personal credibility and the declining credibility of their profession with the American public, these embarrassing errors might have sparked some self-reflection upon their sources and practices. For the Republic, it was merely a warmup for more of the same.
Author Amanda Ripley, interviewed for a book she wrote on deep problems of journalism, noted the “strange and insular world of journalism prizes,” which encourage simplistic “us versus them” stories. “This adversarial model that we’ve got going in education, journalism, and politics no longer serves us. There’s a good guy and a bad guy and everything’s super clear, it just breaks down. And we keep awarding prizes in that model. But 99 percent of stories are not that clear-cut,” Ripley noted.
In other words, as if journalism did not have enough problems amid a pronounced decline in public confidence, journalism awards—like the Polk Award given to the Republic team for their inaccurate and ideological anti-charter school series—encourage advocacy-style journalism.
There Is No Evidence Families Used ESAs for Babysitting
Channel 12’s recent anti-choice crusade involves a series of clumsy attacks on Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program.
One myth Channel 12 has been attempting to spread is the notion that participants in the ESA program are using their accounts to pay for “babysitting.” In fairness, this claim is based upon a since-corrected misstatement by a representative of the Arizona Treasurer’s Office. The ESA program, however, has a list of allowable uses for accounts, and babysitting is not now—nor has it ever been—an allowable use.
Despite the correction by the Treasurer’s Office, some in the media are still spreading the claim. Asked about this on KTAR days after the correction, reporter Craig Harris of Channel 12 (who authored or co-authored the erroneous Republic articles described above) artfully claimed that the Arizona Department of Education’s use of risk-based auditing on low-dollar purchases means that we really don’t know whether parents are using ESA accounts for babysitting or not.
We can likewise state that we really don’t know whether any random person has cheated on his or her federal income taxes. After all, the IRS does not audit every single income tax return—instead they use a technique known as “risk-based auditing” to detect and deter fraud. This is the same technique that Arizona law established to ensure accountability in the ESA program, as recommended by the Arizona Auditor General, and it is used by numerous government agencies.
Journalists have no evidence that anyone has ever used the ESA program for babysitting. But if it happened and they were caught, just like the hypothetical tax cheat, the hypothetical ESA offender would face fines or even jail time. The combination of risk-based auditing and consequences for fraud is why the United States has one of the highest tax compliance rates in the world.
ESA Parents Are Not Really “Subsidizing Vacations”
Channel 12 is likewise playing fast-and-loose with the facts when they claim that Arizona parents are “using education tax dollars to subsidize their vacations.” That phrasing gives the impression that ESA funds are being used for flights, food, or hotel stays—none of which are allowable expenses under the ESA statute.
The reality is that families are using ESA funds to buy tickets to museums, zoos, aquariums, and other educational venues that are—appropriately—allowable expenses under the ESA statute, and which public schools regularly purchase as well.
ESAs Expand Educational Opportunity
Stories from the same outlets also claim the ESA is “hurting high-performing public districts.” Even setting aside that such statements treat children as mere funding units for district schools, reporters’ use of the term “high-performing” is out of step with what most parents think it should mean.
The article notes that the “top five school districts losing students who left for [ESAs] are: Mesa, Deer Valley, Chandler, Peoria and Scottsdale,” and that all these districts received an “A” letter grade from the state except for Mesa, which received a “B.”
But are Arizona’s school letter grades a reliable indicator of quality? Absolutely not.
In the 2023-24 academic year, Arizona awarded 677 schools “A” grades, while only four schools “F” grades—yet only a third of Arizona students passed the state math exam.
By contrast, GreatSchools is a much harsher grader than state bureaucrats. In Maricopa County, the state awarded 325 “A” grades and only two “F” grades, while GreatSchools gave 49 “A” ratings and 111 “F” ratings. For obvious reasons, parents trust GreatSchools more than they trust state bureaucrats.
In the five districts that parents are fleeing most for ESAs, the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or higher on the state math test ranges from 30% in Mesa to 58% in Chandler. Fewer than half of students scored proficient in Deer Valley and Peoria as well.
Reporters who are hostile to parental choice in education might call that “high performing,” but most parents don’t.
Arizona families deserve accurate reporting on education policy, not sensationalized narratives built on flimsy foundations. Arizona media’s pattern of misrepresenting school choice programs—from the error-ridden charter school series to unfounded attacks on ESAs—undermines the public’s understanding of legitimate educational options.
While parents increasingly turn to alternatives like ESAs and charter schools that demonstrably outperform traditional districts, journalists have a responsibility to report these developments fairly, not perpetuate myths that serve no one except those invested in maintaining the status quo. Arizona’s children benefit when families have genuine choice in education, and they deserve journalism that illuminates rather than obscures the facts about their options.
Matthew Ladner is a Senior Advisor for education policy implementation and Jason Bedrick is a Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools (ASBCS) revoked the charter for Primavera Online School, potentially affecting over 20,000 students enrolled.
ASBCS cited low academic results these past three years as the basis for their decision, unanimously made during Tuesday’s meeting.
Primavera’s founder and CEO, Damian Creamer, maintains ASBCS incorrectly redesignated Primavera in recent years as a traditional school rather than its historical designation as an alternative school. Grading as a traditional school resulted in Primavera receiving failing grades — rather than the adjusted passing grades Primavera would have gotten had it continued its designation as an alternative school.
Alternative schools serve at-risk students, a status requiring annual application.
ASBCS did acknowledge that Primavera could be classified as an alternative school. However, it was also discussed how Primavera officials hadn’t contacted state officials about its redesignation as a traditional school, let alone about the poor grades.
Creamer had this to say in response to ASBCS’s decision:
The Arizona State Charter School Board’s decision to uphold its plan to revoke Primavera’s charter is a grave injustice and a tremendous disservice to all of Arizona’s students, parents, and teachers. This reckless action threatens to dismantle a vital educational institution that has faithfully served our community, providing innovative, accessible, and high-quality education to hundreds of thousands of students since our inception. We are appalled that the Board denied our legal counsel an opportunity to address the allegations made or to address the multitude of factual inaccuracies on which the board members specifically said they were acting. They did not want to hear anything that was contrary to the factually incorrect narrative they created. This blatant disregard for due process is not only unfair but undermines the principles of transparency and accountability that the Board claims to uphold. The assumptions and conclusions reached by the Board are based on factually untrue and materially false information. These were obvious misrepresentations rather than data driven evidence. Primavera will not stand idly by while the educational futures of our students are jeopardized. We are prepared to take all necessary action to challenge this decision and protect the rights of our students, parents, and educators. The Board’s actions will not go unanswered, and we will fight tirelessly to ensure that Arizona families continue to have access to the exceptional education Primavera provides.
The state’s chief educational authority says he was powerless to stop the revocation process. Back in March, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said he lacked authority to meddle with the ASBCS decision in response to appeals to intervene from the charter giant and its allies. Horne said Primavera would have to appeal and present evidence to an administrative law judge as their next steps. Primavera has hearings on the matter scheduled for September.
“The legislature chose to divide jurisdiction regarding charter schools between the Arizona Department of Education and the Charter Board,” said Horne. “The current issue is within the jurisdiction of the Charter Board. I have no power or influence over that. If I were to try to influence it, the Charter Board would resent the trespass on their turf, and it would do more harm than good.”
Horne also issued a statement supporting the ASBCS decision to seek charter revocation.
Primavera did receive approval for alternative status for the 2025 fiscal year, and has its application for alternative status for the 2026 fiscal year pending before the Arizona Department of Education.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
