Better oversight could have weeded out a charter school scandal

yes Adam Emerson / November 1, 2012

It may be tempting for legislators to point to the scandalous payments made to an Orlando charter school principal as a reason to tighten regulations governing all charters. In the last week, we’ve learned that the principal of the now-closed NorthStar High Charter in Orlando not only received a $519,000 contractual payout from her board, her compensation exceeded the amount the school had spent on classroom instruction. (NorthStar closed before the Orange County School Board could shut it down for poor academic performance.)

Are school boards are doing enough to provide oversight of the charters in their portfolios?

But now might be a better time to set aside legislative energy and ask whether school boards are doing enough to provide oversight of the charters in their portfolios (as in many states, only school districts can authorize charter schools in Florida).

It may seem hard to hold the Orange County School Board accountable in this case. According to one official at the Florida Department of Education, the last couple of financial reports that NorthStar High sent to the school district showed that the principal earned about $73,000 a year. But her actual pay was much more. Last week, the Orlando Sentinel unearthed details showing that salary, stipends, and bonuses last year brought Principal Kelly Young’s annual pay to about $305,000.

Why would the district question the charter school’s own reporting? Because there is enough information in independent audits of the school to question

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Better oversight could have weeded out a charter school scandal

What “local control” means in the Peach State

yes Adam Emerson / October 26, 2012

On Election Day, Georgia voters will get to decide whether their state can authorize and oversee charter schools, a power that rests almost exclusively with locally elected school boards. Of course, school districts have urged Georgians to maintain the status quo by voting no on the constitutional amendment before them, contending that a new state bureaucracy would be unanswerable to their needs and concerns. But voters should consider what “local control” of public education has meant in the Peach State.

Voters should consider what “local control” of public education has meant in the Peach State.

Fundamentally, it has empowered most of the state’s larger school districts to keep charter growth (and, therefore, school choice) moderate at best. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s largest school system (and the thirteenth largest in the nation) where charter students make up less than 1 percent of the public school population.

Perhaps Gwinnett was on Republican state Senator Fran Millar’s mind when he wrote recently in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution that “there are areas of this state where local school boards will not approve any charter school.” But Gwinnett is hardly alone, and that is why voters should say yes to a charter commission independent of Georgia-style “local control.” Promising charter providers shouldn’t have to depend only on the whims of a recalcitrant school board.

Consider that:

• In Gwinnett County, the 1,500 students that presently attend charter schools make up 0.9 percent of

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  Category: Charters & Choice

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  What “local control” means in the Peach State

Where is the promised leadership on school choice in Pennsylvania?

yes Adam Emerson / October 22, 2012

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett promised a school-choice juggernaut in the Keystone State when he campaigned for office two years ago. Not only has no crusade has ever come to pass, Corbett and the GOP-led state assembly let a modest charter school reform bill languish in the House recently without a vote. This should have been an opportunity for the state’s executive and legislative leadership to pay more than lip service to education reform. But, again, they failed.

This should have been an opportunity for the state’s executive and legislative leadership to pay more than lip service to education reform.

What’s worse, the bill the House killed had already been weakened through compromise. The effort to create an independent state board to authorize charters was removed to accommodate complaints for local school boards, which—with the exception of virtual schools—remain the sole charter authorizers in Pennsylvania. What was left was a commission to recommend a smarter funding strategy for charters, a provision to award high-performing charter schools with a ten-year  contract (up from five), an application of the state’s Ethics Act to charters, and a move to allow charter networks to oversee multiple schools with one board, among other things.

Many states have already adopted one or more of these strategies. And, it should be noted, that one of the more controversial elements of this legislation was the commission that could only recommend to the state assembly different funding measures for charters. Legislators

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Where is the promised leadership on school choice in Pennsylvania?

A new business model for Catholic schools amid tough times

yes Adam Emerson / October 18, 2012

Anyone who cares about Catholic education ought to watch what’s happening in Philadelphia, not just because the archbishop there has turned twenty-one of his schools over to a private foundation, but because that foundation is applying business principles to schools that sorely need them.

Carter and Faith in the Future have the potential to invigorate a vital sector of education throughout North America.

For starters, the Faith in the Future Foundation two weeks ago chose a longtime education and charter-school guru named Samuel Casey Carter to shepherd its new network of Catholic high schools to viability. Carter has a resume you don’t generally find in a school administrator, and he knows how to measure a school’s effectiveness in ways that would be lost on the typical bishop.

But, if they succeed, Carter and Faith in the Future have the potential to invigorate a vital sector of education throughout North America.

One would be hard-pressed to find a diocese presently undertaking an analysis of the market conditions affecting its schools and its finances, but that’s precisely what Carter spent his first few days on the job developing. In a recent interview, he laid out a plan that would examine 1.) which of the seventeen high schools and four special education schools now in his charge can continue to compete with neighboring public and charter schools as well as high-quality private, college-preparatory schools, and 2.) which schools are running deficits and may need the most

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A new business model for Catholic schools amid tough times