Plenty has been written about charter schools and how they are (and aren't) doing, but practically nobody has looked carefully at the organizations that give birth to them, raise them, oversee them, hold them accountable, and decide whether or not they will get their charters renewed. Variously known as "authorizers" and "sponsors," America today has more than 500 of them, ranging from local school boards (the most common by far) to state agencies, specialized boards, universities, and even mayor's offices, city councils, and nonprofit organizations.
It's remarkable that something so important to the success of the charter movement has had so little scrutiny, save for the random media alarum about some sponsor that has allowed a scandal or outrage to develop at one of the schools for which it is responsible. Those stories make for lively reading and cocktail chatter, but they're far from a full picture of what sponsors/authorizers do - and those that quietly do a good job rarely make it onto the front page.
Picture a school's charter as a contract between two parties: the "operator" who wants to run the school and the "authorizer" that determines whether or not this will be allowed to happen and, if so, on what terms. States structure authorizers' responsibilities very differently and individual authorizers go about their tasks even more differently, but how they do it is apt to have as much bearing on the success of the charter movement as what the schools themselves do.
How are today's charter authorizers doing? With funding from the Walton Family Foundation, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute set out to determine this. Our most important move was to engage veteran charter-school analyst Louann Bierlein Palmer, now on the faculty of Western Michigan University, and Rebecca Gau of Arizona State University's Morrison Institute, as lead investigators. A small group of savvy charter experts advised Louann and Rebecca on methodology.
The team made two big methodological decisions. First, they opted to undertake this study at the state level in the two dozen jurisdictions where most charter schools are located - and not to try either to make huge national generalizations or to inspect individual authorizers. Second, they decided to rely for information on some 860 knowledgeable participant-observers in those states, whose judgments were obtained via on-line surveys. The researchers developed an awesome 56-criteria questionnaire (customized by state) designed to probe two big issues: how good a job are the state's major authorizers doing in carrying out six key responsibilities (e.g., awarding charters, overseeing schools, making renewal decisions); and how supportive is the state's policy environment for charter schools and authorizers.
The results are now in and grades have been given. There were no A's or F's - perhaps a result of data averaging - but overall state grades range from B+ (Massachusetts and Texas) to D (New Mexico). Authorizer practices in 15 states were rated B- or better but only 4 jurisdictions had "policy environments" that earned similar grades.
The analysts also came to six big conclusions:
* Most major authorizers are doing an adequate job - some notably better than others, of course - but they're prone to "compliance creep." Everyone knows it's hard to strike the perfect balance between giving a charter school enough autonomy to do its thing while holding it accountable both for its results and for adhering to basic rules of the education road (e.g., non-discrimination, legitimate uses of tax dollars, the handling of special-needs students).
* Few state policy environments are favorable to charter schools and their authorizers. (Yet these 24 jurisdictions are the states with relatively STRONG charter laws!)
* Local school boards generally do not make good authorizers. (There are a few swell exceptions.)
* States with fewer authorizers, serving more schools each, appear to do a better job. (But states need enough sponsors that would-be operators can bring their school dreams to more than one place - and no one authorizer has a monopoly.)
* Quality authorizing costs money - but many authorizers have very little of it. (One solution is to allow them to retain 1-3 percent of school revenues.)
* Higher marks generally went to states where authorizers see themselves responsible not only for overseeing specific schools but also for assisting those schools and serving as advocates for the charter movement as a whole.
Each of these findings has far-reaching policy implications. Let me here address only the one with greatest political volatility: whether local school boards should control authorizing.
Since the onset of the charter movement, that's been the position of the public-education establishment: keep all charter schools under the thumb of district boards. Whenever you find a partial endorsement of the charter idea by card-carrying members of the establishment, it carries that condition (and usually a bunch more).
Despite a handful of terrific exceptions (a few local boards in California or Colorado, say, Houston, the Chicago Public Schools), by and large this study suggests that placing school boards in charge of charter schools is akin to placing McDonalds in charge of Burger King. The sponsor doesn't want the competition, has scant experience in letting some schools be different from others, and doesn't know how to replace command-and-control compliance with results-based accountability.
This is a heated issue in many states as they enact or revamp their charter laws. Under heavy establishment pressure, the California legislature, for example, recently tabled a proposal to widen that state's sponsorship options precisely because many local boards have done a slipshod job. (On the new study, California authorizers earn a woeful D+, as does that state's charter policy environment.) Ohio, on the other hand, recently moved to allow many more entities to sponsor charter schools.
The bottom line is simple: in the charter world, authorizing matters quite a lot. It can be done well but often isn't. It cannot succeed (nor can the schools) without a supportive state policy environment. And it makes little sense to entrust the fate of charter schools to entities that would just as soon drive them all into the sea.
Charter School Authorizing: Are States Making the Grade?, Louann Bierlein Palmer and Rebecca Gau, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, June 5, 2003
