The National Association of Charter School Authorizers recently issued its latest annual report on the policies and practices of the nation's charter authorizers (see Kathryn's review here). Despite the fact that the charter school movement turns 20 next year, it's remarkable that states and authorizers still struggle mightily with issues of accountability. And it's all the more unsettling given that there are an estimated 872 authorizers across the nation, and that collectively these entities oversee and hold accountable 4,956 charter schools serving about 1.6 million students.
Charter theorists have long argued that there is a sacred tradeoff between charter school freedoms and accountability for results. (A Fordham report recently examined the freedom side of that equation and found that charters don't always receive the autonomy theoretically promised to them.) Per accountability, charters either work or face closure for their failure to deliver. Newsweek captured this bargain in a recent article:
In theory, charter schools are laboratories where educational ideas are tested. If a charter school is failing after three to five years it is supposed to be closed down, freeing up a slot for another educational entrepreneur. Too often, however, it hasn't worked out that way.
The reasons it hasn't worked out are covered in the NACSA report. First, the organizations responsible for regulating charter performance often lack the resources to do their jobs well. Ask any authorizer who has ever closed a charter school about their experience and you will hear things like: ???It was the hardest thing we've ever done,??? ???I lost ten pounds during the closure fight,??? and ???I can't believe how much we had to spend on legal fees.??? Contrast this with the fact that fully half of the large authorizers surveyed by NACSA ???do not agree that their organization allocates enough resources to fulfill its authorizing responsibilities.???
Second, more than 60 percent of the country's largest authorizers get their funding by effectively taxing their schools a fee. This means that in practice when an authorizer closes a school, it is cutting off its own funding flow at least for that individual school. Not only do authorizers have to go through the pain and cost of closing a school, but in doing so they are literally diminishing their own operating budgets in the process. Is it any surprise that so few schools are actually closed for lack of academic performance by authorizers?
Third, many authorizers ??? especially those that authorize fewer than 10 schools ??? make their budgets whole by selling supplemental services to their schools. In Ohio, we have testified in the last two months against this practice in front of both the state board of education and the state's lawmakers.
What's happening in the states to address charter accountability challenges? Are 20 years of failing to get accountability sufficient cause to end the entire charter experiment?
As the country's charter school movement approaches adulthood, it's time to seriously address the accountability portion of the charter school bargain. Authorizers need the resources and authority to do their jobs well and without worrying about tough accountability decisions depleting their budgets. They need to be free of the conflicts of interests that make it so hard for them to hold charters accountable for their performance. NACSA is leading the way in this effort, but there is more work to be done at the state level.
We'd like to hear from Flypaper readers on this one. Are we overstating the problem? What's happening in the states to address charter accountability challenges? Are 20 years of failing to get accountability sufficient cause to end the entire charter experiment? With states and schools facing budget cuts of historical proportions is this issue likely to get worse?
- Terry Ryan
