Michael Petrilli recently made a sensible case for charter school regulation—not for its own sake, but because charter authorizers should concern themselves with how our public schools are being run. “Let’s embrace the potential for innovation,” he contends, “but not be Pollyanna about the potential for waste, fraud, abuse, bad ideas, poor execution, and all the rest that comes along with human imperfection.”
He was responding to a piece in Education Next by EdChoice’s Robert Enlow and Michael Q. McShane, who decried any and all charter school regulation as no better than the “very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid.” Because of “needless restrictions,” the authors argue, the charter movement’s progress has been stymied.
I work for the Florida Charter Institute, which supports charter schools in the state and its Charter Review Commission, Florida’s statewide authorizer for charter schools. I applaud Petrilli’s defense of the work of charter authorizers, but there is something missing from this exchange: What exactly do we mean when we talk about “regulation?”
First, I find fault with Enlow and McShane’s vague representation of “overregulation.” Charter schools, for example, are generally required to align their curricula with state standards and take part in states’ assessment systems, which is primarily how states hold them accountable to the public. That, surely, is regulation—but is any and all regulation a bad thing?
I’ll borrow an analogy I heard last month at the National Charter Schools Conference, where I attended a panel led by the former Minnesota state senator that spearheaded the nation’s first charter school law, Ember Reichgott Junge. She likened the traditional public education system to a large ship, and charter schools to small boats headed to the same destination. The vision of the charter movement, she reminded her audience, was not to divide our education system into disparate paths, but to allow families to get to the same destination on a different boat.
That destination is analogous to the core function of a public school—to educate kids. And while I agree that educational diversity is good, it only works if kids arrive at the same destination. We can only assess and compare the quality of our schools if we, at the very least, share a common understanding of what they should be doing. Lest we forget, the ineffectiveness of American schools compared to other international education systems was the catalyst that motivated policymakers to question what was going on inside our public school classrooms in the first place.
When assessing the regulation of the charter sector, we should ask ourselves whether any specific law or rule ensures that kids reach the same destination. Not least of these considerations is the triad that anchors what students learn in school—academic standards, curricula, and assessments—all of which are regulated in the charter sector by state policymakers, school districts, and charter authorizers. When good, research-backed policy is effectively implemented, it works for all schools.
And at the risk of taking this nautical analogy too far, it’s wise for charter school regulation to encompass who’s driving the boat—in other words, the teachers and administrators whom we charge with educating our children. We must ensure they’re not going to run their boat aground and their students along with them. In regulatory terms, that could mean rooting teacher certification in evidence-based practices like clinical practice.
When Enlow and McShane talk about “regulation,” however, they probably have in mind the kind of pesky bureaucracy that is regularly heaped on public schools’ shoulders. Even charter schools in Florida, rated by EdChoice among the top states for education freedom, must follow a dizzying list of state guidelines around student enrollment eligibility, physical security, transportation, food service, student discipline, teacher hiring, financial management, and more.
It’s worth examining, in any state, the extent to which this type of regulation stunts charter schools’ success and their capacity for growth. For example, Florida charter schools aren’t required to follow the state’s standard requirements for educational facilities, but they are required to follow additional laws related to campus security. In getting to their “destination,” how much flexibility should charter schools be allowed when it comes to their physical space? Are some of these requirements a prerequisite to student learning?
To be clear, the answer won’t always be straightforward, but simply interpreting regulation in negative terms is not helpful to educators and, most importantly, the families making educational choices in the first place. By keeping the destination in sight, policymakers can distinguish between measures that guide charters forward and the anchors that hold them back.
