PHOENIX — Great Hearts Academies hope to earn high marks for charter school transparency by posting top administrators’ salaries and other financial information on its website.
Great Hearts CEO Jay Heiler manages one of the largest charter school organizations in the state, serving 16,000 students across 24 schools. Charter schools are public schools funded by tax dollars.
“We see nothing unreasonable about anybody’s expectation that we should be clear about how the public dollars are being used,” Heiler said.
The Great Hearts financial transparency webpage shows salaries, IRS filings, audits, and other spending information.
Its state superintendent, Brandon Crowe, has a base salary of $231,132 for this school year. He’s the organization’s top-paid administrator for Arizona.
Heiler admits Crowe has one of the highest salaries for a charter school administrator in Arizona, but Heiler also said it’s “much lower paid than many others, including many others of our size.”
Heiler is talking about both charter schools and district schools.
“You can’t just put compensation wherever you want it,” Heiler said. “You have to maintain an eye to the market for the talent that you’re trying to retain and develop and hang on to.”
See how Great Hearts’ superintendent’s salary compares to top leaders at other schools in the table below.
School District or Charter Organization Enrollment (2025-26 school year) Top Administrator Salary (school year)Great Hearts Academies 15,572$231,132 (26-27)Washington Elementary District 18,765$230,000 (23-24)Paradise Valley Unified District26,164$230,000 (25-26)Edkey, Inc 4,086$258,096 (24-25)Alhambra Elementary District9,709$230,000 (24-25)Ben Franklin Charter School 3,364$208,000 (23-24)
Note: Salary data is based on an ABC15 analysis of superintendent contracts, charter school public records, and IRS Forms 990. Enrollment numbers are from the Arizona Department of Education.
Arizona School Administrators’ Salaries
Over the past year, the ABC15 investigators gathered salary and compensation data for the top administrators of 236 charter school organizations and 107 school districts. That’s about half of the public-school operators in Arizona.
Through public records requests, ABC15 asked for the contract or annual salary, including bonuses and perks, for their superintendent or top administrator. While we asked for information from the 2023-24 school year, many schools provided more recent years.
RELATED: Arizona charter school CEO earns $520K for school with about 225 students
District schools provided contracts for their superintendents.
Charter schools’ top administrators can go by several titles, and most said they did not have a contract. Charter schools also varied in whether they provided base salary or total compensation.
In dozens of cases where we did not receive data directly from the schools, ABC15 used the top earner listed on the charter school’s IRS Form 990s, which are annual reports for tax-exempt organizations,
Testing Transparency
ABC15’s project has been a test of transparency.
It took us months of emails and calls to get us a response from a few charter organizations when we asked for more detailed information about total pay or financial arrangements that benefited top leaders.
A couple of schools also turned us away when we visited in person seeking answers.
“We should know where that money is going and how it’s being spent, and I don’t think that’s an outrageous ask,” said State Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, D-District 18, who introduced a bill earlier this year to require all charter schools to publicly report salaries for top administrators.
That bill, and a Republican-backed bill that would have required similar reporting for district schools, both failed.
Gutierrez said she’d like to see more overall accountability for charter schools.
“Charter schools are public schools, so they are funded by public tax dollars,” Gutierrez said. “It’s important to know where that money is going.”
Heiler said he might be open to more financial transparency requirements if they apply to all public schools – both district and charter schools.
“I would certainly be willing to participate in a public policy conversation,” Heiler said. “It should be directed toward an end of better school performance and better outcomes for kids and families. That’s in reality, the work we’re all trying to do here — or should be trying to do.”
Heiler’s salary is not on the Arizona transparency website’s list of executive salaries. He said it’s because he is CEO of GreatHearts America, which is based in Phoenix, but operates 50 schools with 30,000 students in several states. His total compensation is listed as $456,000 on a publicly available IRS Form 990 for the 2024-25 school year.
