The trouble started two years ago, when the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Wisconsin complained to the Justice Department that private schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program were violating the ADA. They argued that the schools were failing to accommodate disabled students, discouraging some from attending and improperly expelling others. (NB: These groups did not make these claims under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (i.e., special education); private schools are clearly exempt from its requirements.)

The Justice Department didn’t determine whether Milwaukee’s private schools had violated the ADA, but its civil-rights attorneys did tell the Wisconsin schools superintendent, Tony Evers, that he “must do more to enforce the federal statutory and regulatory requirements that govern the treatment of students with disabilities who participate in the school choice program.” Evers, according to the letter, must also count all of the disabled students enrolled at voucher schools and determine how many of them end up suspended or expelled. And he must advise these schools about all of their ADA obligations (such as making their facilities wheelchair accessible) while developing a procedure whereby disabled students attending voucher schools can complain of discrimination.

Here’s the rub: While non-sectarian private schools have fallen under the requirements of the ADA since it was enacted in 1990, churches and religiously affiliated schools have been exempt from most of its provisions. That’s important in this case, because about 86 percent of the 123 private schools in the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs are religious.

When Congress first debated the ADA, the Association of Christian Schools International successfully led the charge to exempt religious groups from provisions that required private entities to remove any barriers that hindered access for the disabled (otherwise known as Title III). The association argued that ADA compliance would be too costly for religious schools, many of which were in older buildings that couldn’t be renovated or retrofitted without great expense. Moreover, its leaders argued, enforcement of the law would improperly entangle government with religion.

The Justice letter, however, effectively nullifies that exemption and concludes that it doesn’t matter whether a school in the Milwaukee or Racine voucher program is religious. Instead, it declares, “The state cannot, by delegating the education function to private voucher schools, place [voucher] students beyond the reach of the federal laws that require Wisconsin to eliminate disability discrimination in its administration of public programs.” Hence, institutions taking part in the state-funded voucher program must comply with Title II of the ADA, which applies to state and local governments.

The problem with this reasoning is that neither the state nor local school districts are contracting with private and sectarian schools to provide a public education. The Wisconsin Supreme Court determined as much in a 1998 decision that upheld the constitutionality of the Milwaukee voucher program. The justices wrote that “the program does not involve the State in any way with the schools’ governance, curriculum, or day-to-day affairs.” Rather, the program “vests power in the hands of parents to choose where to direct the funds allocated for their children’s benefit.”

The same can be said of any direct voucher program. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 (in the well-known Zelman decision) that a Cleveland voucher program gave parents “genuine choice” in where to attend school—a private decision over which the state had no control.

But if the Justice Department can interpret things differently in Wisconsin, then its conclusions may apply in all of the nine states and the District of Columbia that also fund voucher programs. (Tax-credit-scholarship programs would almost certainly still be safe, as they aren’t funded with public dollars.)

One can surely make the case that schools that take public funds should adhere to certain public regulations. (That’s the case, in our view, when it comes to testing and transparency requirements.) Perhaps private schools, including religious schools, should also be required to be wheelchair accessible and such as a condition of receiving taxpayer dollars. But that’s a decision for Congress to make, not three attorneys from the Justice Department.

SOURCE: Priscilla Wohlstetter, Joanna Smith, and Caitlin C. Farrell, Choices and Challenges: Charter School Performance in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, March 2013).

The decision was not on vouchers but on the constitutionality of how those vouchers are funded Photo by Joe Gratz

The legislation in question, Act 2, intended to fund student vouchers with the Louisiana “Minimum Foundation Program” (MFP). But the Louisiana Constitution of 1974 is clear concerning the MFP: It is a funding formula that “shall be used to determine the cost of a minimum foundation program of education in all public elementary and secondary schools as well as to equitably allocate the funds to parish and city school systems.” Further, the constitution says, “the funds appropriated shall be equitably allocated to parish and city school systems.” This is why Justice John Weimer wrote, “state funds approved through the unique MFP process cannot be diverted to nonpublic schools.” Weimer was correct in later describing the constitution’s language on the matter as “clear, specific, and unambiguous.” The constitution only mentions parish and city school systems and public elementary and secondary schools; nowhere does it discuss funding private schools through the MFP.

Nobody doubts the governor wants to get this done, and the smart money is on Jindal succeeding

The original Students Scholarship for Excellence in Education Pilot Program in New Orleans funded vouchers in a completely different way: It received funds via a line item in the Recovery School District Budget. While this manner of funding creates political uncertainty, the constitutionality of this approach was irreprovable because the legislature was simply allocating general funds and not misappropriating a constitutionally protected revenue stream. The goal behind using the MFP for the voucher expansion was to take away the political uncertainty and establish the voucher program as part of the education system in Louisiana. Because of the decision, this effort failed.

But do not write off the voucher program. There are other possible maneuvers for funding the voucher program, including cutting spending in other areas or raising new revenues—the latter being highly unlikely, given the Republican tilt of the state. Appealing the decision is not an option. This is a state constitution issue and is of no federal concern. Since the Louisiana budget battles are notorious for their ferocity and other budgets cuts are under consideration in Baton Rouge, a more realistic approach could be to change the MFP calculations and remove voucher students entirely from the public schools rolls. Since the fund is based on a per-pupil calculation, this would reduce the cost of the MFP and free up other funds in the state’s general fund. As the pilot program showed before, this would be beyond litigious reproach and keep the program intact.

Ensuring that voucher programs can withstand judicial review when it comes to their funding sources is a necessity

With potential tactics still in play to sustain the voucher expansion, it is likely that this ruling will simply be a pothole on the road to voucher expansion in Louisiana. Nobody doubts the governor wants to get this done, and the smart money is on Jindal succeeding.

This episode should, however, remind voucher proponents of the potential hazards of advancing their cause. While each state does not have an MFP, opponents of vouchers are sure to use the legal system repeatedly to prevent legislative action. (It’s the last resort to stop implementation a la ObamaCare.) In the opponent’s view, they have no other recourse. Thus, ensuring that voucher programs can withstand judicial review when it comes to their funding sources is a necessity.

But it’s hard to imagine how the program could grow much more than that if the governor has to find budgetary leftovers to fund it. Every year since 2008, the governor and lawmakers have had to scratch and claw for funds to bankroll the New Orleans voucher program, which was the precursor to the statewide voucher effort. In 2011, the New Orleans program got $9 million from the general budget, which amounted to less than $5,000 per student then.

By contrast, Louisiana’s K–12 public schools received $3.4 billion from the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) in 2011, which came to an average $8,763 per pupil.

And that helps explain why Jindal sought funding for the statewide voucher program through the MFP. The governor can’t fund reform adequately if he has to seek out dollars—and struggle annually with state lawmakers—that don’t go into the entitlement spending for school boards.

Moreover, he shouldn’t have to. Students receiving the Louisiana voucher have to take the same standardized tests as those administered at public schools, and the schools they attend can be ejected from the program if they consistently show poor performance—just like charter schools.

That leaves minor differences between the public and voucher-bearing private sectors of education in the Bayou State. Arguably, the framers of the 1974 Louisiana Constitution would have agreed. It should be noted that while these were the framers that secured the MFP for public schools, they also removed from their Constitution the Blaine Amendment, which prohibited the direct public funding of “sectarian” education and which currently exist in thirty-eight other states.

In 1974, public education was organized traditionally, and the framers couldn’t possibly see that all that would be in flux today. In Louisiana, what is “public” includes a largely charter school system in New Orleans, four publicly funded private school–choice programs, a recovery school district, and online charter schools.

But the Legislature and the citizens of Louisiana can see that clearly. And this court decision should be the catalyst for them to amend the Constitution to make funding available for a statewide and publicly accountable voucher program.

It didn’t matter that the building has sat empty for years and that the district has tried unsuccessfully to sell it to other buyers. It didn’t want to sell to the Ortonville charter because, as Brandon superintendent Lori McMahon casually told a local reporter, “It would be competition for us.”

While extreme, the challenges facing Ortonville focus attention on the struggles for adequate facilities that still bedevil most charter schools. Now twenty years old, many charter schools still commonly rent or own building space that is much smaller than that occupied by their traditional public school peers or that lack kitchens, gymnasiums, libraries, or science and computer labs.

That’s the assessment of a survey of charters in ten states released last week by the Charter Schools Facilities Initiative, a joint project of the Colorado League of Charter Schools and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The Initiative has sought to highlight the persistent capital needs of charter schools and their inequitable treatment and has developed policy recommendations to provide long-range and systemic solutions.

Despite the surge in charter school enrollment nationally and the support the sector receives from both political parties, the Alliance and the League have documented that charters still largely direct money from instruction, classroom support, and administration to their facilities. Local tax revenues remain out of reach for most charters, and while several school districts have included charters in their local bond initiatives in recent years, most districts ask voters to ante up only for neighborhood schools.

This leaves charters with mostly slim pickings among older and smaller buildings that don’t meet all of their needs. Consider some highlights from the Initiative’s survey:

• At least 60 percent of the charter school classrooms in each state surveyed are considerably smaller than those at district schools
• In nine of the ten states surveyed, less than 50 percent of charters have a kitchen that meets the qualifications to prepare meals on-site
• In three states—Indiana, Texas, and Tennessee—half of all charter high schools lacked access to a gymnasium
• Charters in most states surveyed reported that they lacked at least one specialized instructional space, such as a library, a science lab, or a music room
• The average charter the Initiative surveyed spends 10 percent of its operating budget on facilities

In other words, public charter school students are still treated unequally compared to their peers attending traditional public schools. While some states such as Florida are raising the amount of state dollars available to help fund charter facilities, that money is paltry compared to the building and renovation dollars available to school districts. And it’s largely non-recurring money, meaning charters in those states have to go to their legislatures every year to ask for a handout.

While some districts such as those in Cleveland, San Diego, and Metropolitan Denver have cooperated with charters in ways that enhance both sectors of public education, many traditional school systems erect roadblocks to vacant or public buildings, just as the Brandon school district did. Therefore, the charter movement cannot rely on whatever sense of collegiality school districts might display, and charters shouldn’t have to rely on a willing seller and a buyer’s market alone. Charters and their advocates ought to lobby their legislature with the ideas the Initiative has put forth.

Those include a per-pupil facility allowance which annually—and accurately—reflects capital needs, a state grant program for charter school facilities, allowing charters to have their own bonding authority, and providing charters access to the same facility-funding programs available to traditional public schools. Twenty years in, that’s not much to ask for a sector that now serves more than 2.3 million children nationwide.

I love this thing—great data on a critically important part of our field. If you’re interested in chartering, school-level accountability, or The Urban School System of the Future, you definitely want to check it out.

Almost a decade ago, NACSA produced the equivalent of industry standards—the stuff a high-quality authorizer ought to do. These relate to assessing charter applications, monitoring school performance, helping grow high-performers, revoking the charters of low-performers, etc.

This report assesses authorizers against what NACSA deems the 12 “essential practices” of the industry.

Overall, authorizers’ scores improved over last year’s, and large authorizers (those with 10+ schools) scored better than small ones.

Continuing a long-term trend, authorizers are increasingly picky shoppers—they approve far fewer applications than they did back in the day. The average approval rate is now 33 percent.

But many authorizers are still falling short on the back end of accountability: 34 percent of authorizers lack a clear, established policy to close underperforming schools.

Some of the report’s most interesting findings relate to the different types of authorizers (there are six kinds nowadays). The vast majority (more than 90 percent) are local school districts, but they generally authorize few schools apiece; their portfolios combine for only 53 percent of all charters.

Districts score lower than non-district authorizers overall, and their policies are far less friendly to replication than non-district authorizers, meaning they are less likely to help great charters create more high-quality seats.

I strongly oppose permitting districts—especially failing urban districts—to authorize charters. In fact, I believe giving districts the power to authorize was the biggest charter-policy mistake made during this sector’s two decades of existence.

Why?

Charter laws broke the district’s monopoly over public school operation. But some state laws only allowed districts to authorize. This regrettably continued the district-centered era of public schooling; that is, in a geographic area, every public school must either be run or authorized by the district.

Fortunately, most states have since created non-district authorizers, but this legacy mistake continues to this day in a number of places, for example, Baltimore.

The major other problem is that giving districts authorizing power blurs the essential line between these two very different functions: running schools and overseeing others running schools.

We should see districts as school operators only. Authorizing—that is, umpiring, not playing, not coaching—is much, much different work. Districts are built to run schools; they are not designed to oversee from arms-length others doing so. In fact, many of their policies, habits, beliefs, and practices run counter to the essential charter bargain of freedom for tough accountability. And many district authorizers remain hostile to charters to this very day.

(Think I’m being too pessimistic about charter-district relations? How about Chicago’s district—the only charter authorizer for the nation’s third-largest city—which recently declared that buildings no longer needed by the district are off-limits to charters for 40 years.)

The report’s findings on other types of authorizers are really quite interesting. They have much to teach policymakers and practitioners. How are independent charter boards, like the one in Washington, D.C., doing? What about Indy’s mayor’s office or nonprofits?

Read the report and find out!

Two other thoughts: New research demonstrates that charters that struggle early on seldom improve significantly. It might be the case that NACSA’s (and the charter community’s) support for five-year contracts needs reassessing.

Second, as we move to a sector-agnostic approach in urban schooling and rely on a continuous improvement process based on new starts, expansions, and closures, we must develop rigorous, transparent systems for these activities. Successfully managing a portfolio of schools demands it.

It is troubling that many authorizers still don’t have high-quality practices in place for this work. We should prioritize improvement in these areas.

But as my colleague Kathryn Mullen Upton pointed out yesterday, there’s plenty of blame to go around when problems like this surface. Charter boards that agree to arrangements that effectively make them subordinate to managers and vendors are as much at fault, said Upton, who oversees the Fordham Foundation’s charter authorizing operations in Ohio. Moreover, authorizers that grant a charter without even looking at the management agreement bear responsibility, too.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has recommended policies that explicitly assert the independence of the boards that ordinarily hold the charter and ultimately answer to the public. These include performance contracts that not only show how a board will assess a vendor’s performance but will terminate the contract if necessary. And there ought to be laws, just as in Florida, that explain how a governing board will maintain an arm’s-length relationship with a management company.

But these laws don’t guarantee a high-functioning board—one that understands its fiduciary responsibility, knows the difference between oversight and management, and is able to detect and avoid conflicts of interest.

“Strong boards recognize and acknowledge their weaknesses and take action to address the issues,” Upton writes. “Weak boards often tinker at the edges, thereby contributing to organizational malaise, which often tacitly exacerbates the problem(s).”

So what can help? Upton offers up some practical, and sensible, solutions:

For authorizers, try to catch the issues up front, before granting a charter. For fledgling boards new to the charter school world (and ideally in the concept phase), read everything and be able to tap the expertise of a financial analyst and a lawyer before signing anything. And, contact schools that a vendor you’re considering works with and find out what their experience has been. For existing boards, analyze your performance at least once a year: are you meeting your goals as a board and as a school? Most importantly, are students and taxpayers getting a return on their investment in you?

Some very weak boards have done some very serious damage to the image and efficacy of charter schools over the last twenty years. Better and stronger charter school laws can do more to ensure that the board is in charge, but it’s up to the board to govern effectively. “We have an internal saying within our charter school authorizing operation,” Upton says. “‘As the board goes, so goes the school.’”

It is, however, hard to see how the Oakland district could have responded differently. The audit, which was issued in June 2012, concluded that Chavis was able to channel $3.8 million from school accounts to his personal business interests—mostly because the charter’s governing board “failed to maintain and exercise its responsibilities, authority, and control.”

Indeed, the audit showed that a charismatic and assertive school leader had control over American Indian’s governing board instead of the other way around.  Auditors found multiple examples of self-dealing and conflicts of interest in transactions that benefitted Chavis’ consulting, real estate, and construction enterprises—transactions that often put Chavis in the position as landlord to the schools he led. But there were no evidence that the board approved these dealings or ever put them out for competitive bidding. “The lack of due diligence and internal controls by the governing board has effectively granted [Chavis] and his spouse unrestricted access to the assets of the organization and implied authority to enter into a variety of business arrangements for personal gain,” the audit stated.

To be sure, the school district’s decision to revoke American Indian’s charter had less to do with Chavis than with an ineffectual board that remains unrepentant and disinterested in pursuing the reforms the audit and the district recommended nine months ago (Chavis left the charter network in 2011; he has not been charged with a crime and has denied any financial impropriety).

The fact there were three Oakland Unified school board members who voted against revoking the charter is a testament to the academic achievement at the charter schools, not to any confidence that the adult leaders at American Indian can suddenly become responsible stewards. Indeed, the charter network’s own attempt in the last couple of weeks to save itself has been marked by chaos, with stubborn board members refusing to step down amid pleas to do so by parents, teachers, and colleagues. Emergency meetings held over the last several days have ended in indecision and acrimony. The board has yet to appeal the district’s decision to the Alameda County Board of Education, which could reverse the ruling; the charter network has until the end of today to file the appeal.

The school’s success and continued promise ought to transcend the failings of its leadership. Therefore, the American Indian board ought to set aside its pettiness and hubris and appeal the revocation so that the Bay Area’s poorest and most underserved children can have a shot at a school that has stood for years at the top of California’s performance rankings. There, of course, should be assurances that the school will pursue the reforms that the school district demanded, which included hiring a third-party management company to oversee the network’s finances and operation.

But then, and most importantly, each member should promise to step down. If they don’t, then the county or the state should demand their resignations as a condition for the school’s survival.

And make no mistake: the school must survive, even if it will take time to recover its mojo from this damaging affair. State auditors diverged from their scathing assessment of the school’s financial controls and accountability to note that the American Indian network has won two Blue Ribbon awards from the U.S. Department of Education and at one point scored a 988 out of a possible 1,000 on California’s Academic Performance Index, the highest in the state (California’s goal is 800, a benchmark that few traditional schools in the Oakland Unified district have hit).

In Sweating the Small Stuff, a book published by the Fordham Institute in 2009, journalist David Whitman wrote that the American Indian Public Charter School is “one of the great educational turnaround stories in recent history,” noting that the charter and its predominately low-income students even bested the traditional school for Oakland’s “rich kids” in 2006. This year, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post ranked the American Indian Public Charter High School at the top of his list of America’s most challenging high schools.

Ironically, those achievements can be tied to the reforms Chavis put in place when he was hired in 2000 to lead the school, which then had scraped the bottom of the Golden State’s public school rankings. And, to his credit, Chavis put in place administrators and teachers who embraced his no-excuses style of education and went on to start their own successful charter schools with the same model.

But past and current achievements cannot excuse the almost total lack of responsible governance. As I noted in my recent policy brief, Governance in the Charter School Sector: Time for a Reboot, in cases where a manager or a management company effectively “owns” the board they’re supposed to answer to, questions of accountability, incentives, and conflicts of interest often follow, just as they did at the American Indian Model schools.

Even the California Charter Schools Association supported the Oakland school district’s move, but in a March 20 letter, its regional director seemed resigned to the fact that the association must work “to secure alternative education arrangements” for American Indian’s students. It doesn’t have to be that way. The state should retain the formula that has made the schools the most successful in California, but it should show the adults who govern the school the exit sign.

The description helps us parse two different outcomes on school choice legislation in two states: Mississippi and Tennessee. In the former, at least one charter school advocate bemoaned the “compromised bill” that went last week to Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, a bill that finally allows start-up charters in the Magnolia State and an independent state authorizer but also allows better-performing districts to effectively neuter that new state body. In the latter, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam decided last week to pull his favored voucher bill before letting any legislative members of his party amend it. Haslam sought a limited voucher program for low-income students in low-performing districts, whereas Republicans lawmakers wanted to enlarge it to serve more families.

No doubt Haslam wants private school choice in the Volunteer State. Last year, he directed education commissioner Kevin Huffman to lead a task force to study how a voucher program would best work and embraced the concept in January when he appeared with Jeb Bush at a forum on education reform. But he never once made room for negotiation; when legislators sought to amend his proposal with provisions that would have given vouchers to middle-income households, the governor killed the entire bill.

This is the second time in as many years that Haslam allowed a voucher proposal to die because it faced a legislative outcome that, to him, seemed less than perfect. In other words, he held firm on fundamental principles but gave no ground on tactics and secondary issues.

Contrast that with the prudence exercised by Mississippi’s governor and legislative leaders who wanted to enhance an abysmal law that prohibited start-up charter schools (only low-performing public schools have been allowed to seek charter status). Attempts to improve the law last year failed when Republican legislators, aligned with district superintendents, broke rank and voted against a proposal to open more independent charters.

Faced with a similar outcome again this year, Bryant and others gave ground on “virtual” charter schools, which will remain outlawed, and they agreed to stipulations that let districts with A, B, or C ratings approve or veto charter applications before they get to the state’s new independent authorizer.   

Those are far from ideal concessions, but the bill that Bryant is expected to sign does move charter schooling forward in Mississippi. Now as many as fifteen new and independent charter schools can serve students in the state’s poorest-performing districts. The alternative was the status quo. In this case, the governor tactically gave up ground to enhance the fundamental principle of charter schools. In the coming years, charter advocates can highlight the persistent weaknesses in the law and work to amend it again.

Bryant compromised, to be sure, whereas Haslam did not. But Mississippi students don’t have to wait for more and better educational options.

1.    Charter enrollment exceeded Catholic school enrollment for the first time this school year (in 2011–12, each sector had about the same number of students). Catholic school enrollment dropped 1.5 percent to 2,001,740 students, while charter school enrollment increased 13 percent to 2,326,542 students. From here on, any graph plotting student numbers in each sector likely will look like a pair of open scissors.

2.    A recent report from U.S. Census Bureau researcher Stephanie Ewert shows that private school enrollment is negatively associated with charter school enrollment. This is similar to what economist Richard Buddin found in his report last year for the Cato Institute when he looked at charter and private school enrollment trends from 2000 to 2008. Ewert looks at more recent years and found that states with substantial increases in charter school enrollment experienced substantial decreases in private school enrollment—particularly at Catholic schools.

Vouchers and tax-credit scholarships have surely offset some of those shifting patterns (Buddin noted that 190,000 students left private schools for charter schools between 2000 and 2008, but about that same number got public aid for private schools by the end of that time period). Most of those private-school-choice programs, however, are so limited in scope, their vouchers so limited in value, that they can’t slow the migration forever.

No one should expect charter schools to stop trying to fill their seats—even if that means drawing students from Catholic schools. And no one should believe that Catholic schools would once again thrive in the absence of charters schools alone; the downward slide of Catholic schools started long before the nation’s first charter school law passed in 1991.

But because charters and Catholic schools share similar traits and comparable missions in serving inner-city, low-income youth, there ought to be equal opportunities for each sector to thrive. Two policy changes would help: Removing the caps that limit the size and value of most school voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs and establishing religious charter schools.

The latter is, admittedly, the more controversial and eye-opening, for it allows Catholic and parochial schools to convert to charter status and keep the crucifix on the wall. But the idea is not so far-fetched. It’s based on the same premise that has secured constitutional protections for school vouchers. The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris ultimately determined that the Cleveland voucher program was “neutral in all respects toward religion,” even though 96 percent of all voucher recipients then attended a religious school. The justices ruled that parents had been able to exercise “genuine choice” in where to use their vouchers. Families chose the school, not the state.    

A similar principal undergirds charter schooling, which—as charter pioneer Ted Kolderie once explained—transferred the attendance decision from system to student. But, of course, there’s more to it than that. Charter schools are public schools. So what would a Catholic charter school look like?

It would be part of the same accountability system required of other public schools, which means it would publicly report test scores and face closure if those results are consistently poor. It also would have an open admissions policy and adhere to civil rights and special education laws. The biggest difference is that it could continue to exercise the spiritual and holistic approach to education that has driven so much of the success in Catholic schooling.

As charters are supposed to have greater autonomy in the way they do business, there is less fear of “government entanglement,” as identified by another Supreme Court decision on the Establishment Clause, Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). In that case, the court found that two school-aid packages that benefitted private schools were unconstitutional because they required constant government monitoring to make sure that public money was going only to secular purposes. There should be no such monitoring of the Catholic charter school, which should enjoy maximum autonomy in mission and operation in exchange for results-based accountability (just as there should be for all charter schools).

Before critics object that taxpayers shouldn’t be compelled to fund a religious education, it should be noted that we already have sixteen voucher programs nationally that direct funds from state treasuries to families to help offset the cost of a private (mostly religious) education (a freedom guaranteed by federal and state courts alike). There are two problems: Many of these private school choice programs have legislatively imposed caps on the number of students who may participate, and the value of the vouchers is often paltry. The average voucher last year was worth just $5,686; the average tax credit scholarship was worth $2,534.

Neither of those artificial limitations do much to help the low-income child squeezed out of a Catholic education. Lifting those caps and raising those voucher amounts could lay the groundwork for a grand bargain: More transparency and accountability in exchange for more (or more generous) scholarships. As the Fordham Institute’s recent report on voucher regulations showed, Catholic schools are little deterred by regulations and are more interested in maintaining their mission in serving the poor.

The alternative to these proposals is the continued downward spiral of what has long been the heart and soul of urban private education. Charters and Catholic schools can coexist, but not without smarter public policies that recognize—and reward—the valuable contributions Catholic education has made to the larger community.

My greatest frustration, though, has been his unwillingness to offer full-throated support for school vouchers.

Maybe he’s finally ready. In a blog post yesterday, he predicted that if current reform efforts stall, the future will bring a “low-accountability environment coupled with much more choice” and pointed to the Indiana voucher program (recently upheld by that state’s Supreme Court and hailed by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post) as a sign of things to come.

What Andy may not fully appreciate is that Indiana’s voucher program has accountability in spades. As David Stuit and Sy Doan explain in their recent report for Fordham, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring? , the Hoosier State has an “annual performance-accountability rating system” for participating private schools that is based on the results of state assessments—the same tests that public school pupils take. Indeed, the fact that private schools will soon be held accountable under Common Core standards and assessments has become a major issue in the Hoosier State—because it gives palpitations to the right, not the left! (Other recently enacted private-school-choice programs, including those in Louisiana and Alabama, also include significant testing and accountability requirements.)

So if the lack of accountability is Andy’s (and other reformers’) beef with voucher programs, that concern has been alleviated, at least in several states. 

To be sure, I can spot at least two other plausible reasons to oppose vouchers. One is that the schools aren’t required (outside of Milwaukee) to be publicly “accessible.” (Andy, many years ago, wrote a piece saying that “accountability and accessibility” should be demanded of any voucher program.) In other words, private schools can still practice selective admissions. That’s a deal-breaker for many on the left. (And impinging on admissions policies is a deal-breaker for many private schools, the Stuit study found.) But we already have selective-admissions magnet schools (of the sort profiled recently by Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett in Exam Schools) and I don’t remember many reformers calling for their abolition. 

The other argument against vouchers is on church/state grounds—a concern that the current Supreme Court doesn’t share, and one that I’ve always found utterly irrational. (Why can public funds help a poor kid attend Notre Dame University but not Notre Dame High School?)

So reformers on the left: Unite! (With those of us on the right who already support the entire range of parental choice.)

1.    Reporters Fernanda Santos and Motoko Rich wrote, “Research tracking students in voucher programs has also not shown clear improvements in performance.” Not true. As nine scholars and analysts noted in an Education Week essay published last year, results from gold-standard voucher research have consistently shown (among other positive effects) modest academic gains and outsize graduation rates among voucher recipients when compared to their public school–district peers.

2.    The story also repeated the fable that vouchers are accompanied by no accountability for academic results. Wrong. Choice advocate Dick Komer of the firm Institute for Justice told the Times that the only real accountability that matters is parental choice. Voucher opponent and union chief Randi Weingarten railed, “There’s absolutely no accountability with vouchers.” Both are wrong.

In fact, the two newest voucher programs, both of which have captured much attention (Indiana and Lousiana), as well as the proposed initiative in Tennessee, make clear that underperforming private schools won’t be welcome in these programs, for these (and many other) choice programs require participating private schools to administer the same assessments as are given in public schools and bar schools from continuing in the program if their assessment results are weak and stay that way.

It turns out that the oldest voucher program United States, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, is perhaps the most tightly regulated of the twenty-three or so such programs now in existence. In their introduction to the Fordham Institute’s recent report on laws governing vouchers and tax credit scholarships, Chester Finn and Amber Winkler wrote that the Milwaukee program has accumulated more rules as it has grown older and larger, “like a ship burdened with barnacles.”

Some analysts believe that programmatic requirements such as these have helped to produce the achievement gains that evidently eluded the Times reporters. Professor Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, for instance, found that the mere public release of test scores in Milwaukee played a role in the achievement gains those voucher students made on their public school peers.

But that’s not all that voucher programs can claim. The best methods used for high-quality research, including random assignment of participants, have been applied to voucher programs in Milwaukee, New York, Dayton, Ohio, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. And these studies have generally reported modest achievement gains that accumulate strongly over time. Graduation rates among voucher students have also been stronger, especially in D.C., where the Opportunity Scholarship Program increased a student’s chance of graduating high school by 21 percentage points.

None of these studies found a negative impact of vouchers. That’s important to know—but barkless dogs rarely make it into sensational news accounts, either.

In the last twenty years, American education and its charter sector have evolved in important ways.

Much has happened in the charter sector since then—in fact, what began as a community-led, mom-and-pop movement has evolved to include a burgeoning assemblage of charter school networks, as well. But the laws ruling charter school governance remain largely the same. It’s time for a reboot in order to address three critical problems.

First, state laws and authorizer policies often require a full-fledged governing board for every charter school, and these policies make no exception for high-performing charter networks (such as KIPP and Rocketship Education). Thus, replicating at scale is difficult. In fact, only ten states explicitly allow for networks to operate multiple schools under the oversight of one governing board* and three states (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Iowa) explicitly prohibit the practice.

Second, management organizations—especially for-profits—often control their schools’ governing boards, leading to serious questions about accountability and conflicts of interest. The Fordham Institute, both as an education think tank and a charter school authorizer in Ohio, firmly believes that governing boards and management organizations should be independent of one another—and the former should be in charge of the latter.

As my colleague Terry Ryan explained recently, too many Ohio charter schools have been controlled by their management organizations, rather than by their governing boards. This explains much of the low performance (and high-profile scandals) that the Buckeye State charter movement has spent years cleaning up.

Lastly, charter governance is most outdated when it comes to technology. Most virtual charter schools are authorized by local school boards, which collect massive fees to oversee what are often statewide schools. This creates a perverse incentive to look the other way when quality is weak—especially if the money is rolling in and the school mostly serves “other people’s children.”

To answer these challenges, we recommend the following:

• Allow existing high-performing networks to organize multiple schools under single boards. KIPP’s geographically based “governing pods” are a good way to develop a locally based governance structure while still drawing on a network’s brand name.
• Require performance-based contracts between governing boards and education management organizations (EMOs) and charter management organizations (CMOs). These contracts should incorporate explicit terms regarding evaluations, oversight, compensation, and conditions for contract renewal and termination. Policies should also outline how the board will maintain an arm’s-length relationship with its management company.
• Require statewide virtual schools to report to a statewide authorizing entity, such as an independent charter commission or state school board, rather than a local board of education. States that are serious about online learning must provide a governance model that can meet the changing requirements that technology brings to education.

Twenty years later, charter schools remain the most promising governance innovation in American public education. Let’s make sure the governance of charter schools themselves is up to the task of even greater charter quality and quantity in the years ahead.

Download Governance in the charter school sector: Time for a reboot to learn more.

Those exceptions partly explain why the Thomas B. Fordham Institute excluded special-education voucher programs from a study of how private schools view the regulations that come with various voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs. Traditional testing tools aren’t always the best measure for students with special needs, but that doesn’t mean no accountability measures should follow special-needs students who leave a public school for a private school with a publicly funded voucher.

Virtually no accountability measures, however, exist in most of the nation’s special-education voucher programs, including the largest such program in the United States, Florida’s McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. And the coalition of schools that oversees the McKay program appears to want to keep it that way—and it’s wrong to do so.

The McKay Coalition surveyed its own Florida schools after Fordham published School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring, which surveyed private schools in communities served by four prominent voucher programs in Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Fordham report found that only 3 percent of non-participating schools cited governmental regulations as the most important reason to opt out. Regulations that restrict student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than are requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results.

Leaders of the McKay Coalition, in a post on the redefinED blog, said its own survey led to “findings in Florida that were polar opposite from the Fordham Institute…” Of the private schools that currently participate in the McKay Scholarship program and that responded to the coalition’s survey, 61 percent said they would no longer participate if they were forced to administer Florida’s state assessment to their pupils.

Voucher programs are of little value if their rules and requirements discourage private schools from signing up. But there are several problems with the McKay Coalition’s thinking and line of questioning on this issue:

• The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), the state’s public school assessment, isn’t the only test available. Indeed, the McKay Coalition reports that 91 percent of the participating schools that responded to its survey administer a norm-referenced test, such as the Stanford Achievement Test. Why not make the results of that test public, especially for schools that receive a substantial amount of revenue from the scholarship program? Such a requirement is a part of Florida’s other voucher-like program, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, and the number of schools participating in that program continues to grow.
• As many as three-fourths of the students receiving the McKay Scholarship this year had milder disabilities and would have required, at most, only moderate interventions and testing accommodations in the public schools they left.
• The coalition reports that 98 percent of the schools that responded to its survey said the FCAT was an inappropriate assessment for McKay students. Yet about 40 percent of respondents said they would remain in the program if the FCAT was a requirement.
• The coalition also seems to be celebrating that 60 percent of their schools would stop serving special-needs kids over a single test. But however objectionable that finding might be, it also seems to be the least credible. The Fordham report surveyed school perspectives on rules and regulations already in place. The McKay survey stoked emotions about a program requirement that doesn’t exist.

All this points to what motivates the McKay Coalition in the first place: maintaining the conditions that allow for as few regulations as is possible. Its previous statements about testing imply it believes that no method of public assessment or public scrutiny is permissible. To be sure, an innovative policy like the McKay Scholarship shouldn’t get in the way of a private school’s autonomy or its freedom to be different. But taxpayers shouldn’t be left in the dark about the educational value of the investment they have made.

Picture by Santa Catalina School

But Senate Bill 243 doesn’t go far enough. Yes, it requires the nonprofit groups that administer the scholarships to disclose the number of students they serve and the amount of tax-credited donations that they receive. Well worth making public—but it reveals nothing about the program’s educational value.

Why not also pull back the curtain on student performance? Most of the school-voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs that exist in other states are designed to show the public at least how they’re performing overall in terms of student achievement. For example, private schools participating in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship administer a standardized test to their scholarship students and report the results to an independent analyst, who then studies the program’s effectiveness and reports to the legislature.

For a quartet of reasons, Georgia should at least do something similar.

1.    Parents, policymakers, educators, and the taxpaying public deserve to compare the gains that students make in different school environments. Ideally, comparisons should be made from school to school, but today Georgians can’t even make comparisons between the public, charter, and voucher-accepting private sectors of K–12 education.

2.    Academic accountability would go a long way toward quieting some of the more vocal critics of the Georgia program who assert that lawmakers and advocates for school choice don’t care about the standards or performance of the schools accepting the scholarship. Researchers who have studied the nation’s oldest voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, have found that the mere public release of test results played a role in the gains voucher students made there.

3.    Few of the private schools that take part in the program would flee from it, even if they faced a testing-and-public-disclosure requirement. Our recent study surveyed private schools in communities served by four of the country’s most prominent voucher programs and found that only three percent of non-participating schools cited governmental regulations as the most important reason to opt out. Regulations that restrict student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than are requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results.

4.    It lays the groundwork for a grand bargain: more transparency in exchange for more (or more generous) scholarships. Georgia students would definitely benefit from a more generous program, but Senate Bill 243 maintains the current cap on the amount of tax credits awarded—about $50 million worth. The legislature could raise that ceiling while insisting on greater transparency in regard to the program’s effectiveness.

Indeed, families have expressed great satisfaction with the program and, undoubtedly, more would opt for the scholarship if given the chance. But are satisfied customers enough? Do these private schools teach their children anything? And does their performance compare favorably with students who remain in public schools? Right now, we don’t know.

And we should. The legislature ought to pass Senate Bill 243 for the transparency it does provide. But it should ask for more while loosening the limits on the program to serve more families.

A version of this article first appeared on the Get Schooled blog and will appear in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 25, 2013.

Bentley put his signature on the Alabama Accountability Act one day after the state’s Supreme Court lifted a restraining order that prevented him from even getting the bill, which passed two weeks ago along party lines. The Alabama Education Association had convinced a state judge last week to block legislative staffers from sending the bill to the governor, arguing that too many Republican lawmakers privately discussed rewriting a separate measure to include the tax credit without calling a public meeting.

The Alabama Supreme Court sensibly determined that the restraining order issued by Judge Charles Price was “premature.” The bill hadn’t even become law, and according to the top justices, there was no “existing case or controversy” that needed adjudicating.

In other words, there was no one harmed. As political scientist Joshua Dunn noted, courts don’t typically intrude in the internal workings of a state legislature, as a matter of separation of powers. The notion that the teacher union might have suffered “irreparable harm” without the restraining order (Judge Price’s words) was ludicrous.

Now that the bill is law, Bentley and others who supported the tax credit can expect a lawsuit. And families whose children are zoned to a failing public school and who are hoping for the private school tuition break this law promises can expect an unstable environment for years to come. The House Democratic leader called the tax credit “a voucher program, a charter school program, and a diversion of the Education Trust Fund all rolled into one.” That indicates that no school choice plan is acceptable to the public education establishment in the Heart of Dixie, nor to its allies in the legislature (Alabama is one of only eight states without a charter school law).

But whatever happens next, and however disappointing that litigation may be, at least the Alabama Supreme Court corrected what was a mockery of the legislative process.

Farce does not seem to capture what happened last week in Alabama.

Two weeks ago, the Alabama House and Senate passed the Alabama Accountability Act, giving parents with children in failing schools a tax credit for tuition at a private school. The bill passed by 2-1 margins in both houses of the Republican-controlled legislature. Naturally, organizations such as the Alabama Education Association (AEA), opposed as they are to letting students escape miserably failing schools, howled that the measure violated state law. But this time, rather than at least having the decency to sue once the legislation was signed, the AEA decided to lawyer up before it even reached the governor’s desk.

Initially, the act was called the School Flexibility Act and did not include tax credits. After the House and Senate passed different versions of the act, the conference committee added the tax-credit provision and changed the name. The restructured and renamed legislation then passed 51-26 in the House and 22-11 in the Senate on party-line votes.

Horrified after realizing that a program increasing options for children trapped in failing schools had passed, the AEA sued. It asked a state judge to enjoin the governor from signing the legislation—claiming that the conference committee violated the state’s Open Meetings Act when it inserted the tax credit with insufficient deliberation. The judicial gods smiled on the AEA when the case went before Circuit Judge Charles Price. Price had previously achieved momentary fame for declaring that a fellow circuit-court judge could not display the Ten Commandments in his courtroom or begin sessions with prayer. After a brief hearing, Price agreed with the AEA ruling that the state legislature could not send the bill to the governor and scheduled a hearing for mid-March over whether the legislature violated the Open Access Act. The state attorney general has appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The litigation raises basic questions about separation of powers.

The litigation raises two basic questions about separation of powers. The first is whether the courts have the authority to oversee the procedures that the legislature establishes for itself. Typically, courts have ruled that as a matter of separation of powers, they are not allowed to exercise this kind of oversight. But even if the Alabama courts were to intrude into the internal workings of the state legislature, it should be a question raised only after a bill has actually become law. After all, until a bill has been signed, no one can claim to have been harmed and, therefore, no one has standing.

The second, more significant question is whether the courts have the authority to actually stop a legislature from sending a bill to the governor to be signed. Passing a bill and sending it to the governor to be signed (or vetoed) are obviously exercises of legislative power. Legislative power is not granted to courts—that’s why they are courts and not legislatures. By definition, under a system of separation of powers, courts cannot have such power.

Of course, Price’s actions do raise some humorous possibilities—ones that hopefully will arise, if only to salvage this absurd spectacle. What if the legislature were to send the legislation to the governor anyway? Would Price dispatch marshals to block thoroughfares between the statehouse and governor’s office? Would he send marshals to confiscate all the governor’s pens?

Regardless of these amusing possibilities, it is unlikely that the Alabama Supreme Court will side with Price’s brazenly unconstitutional power grab if party identification is as good a predictor of voting behavior there as it is in the legislature. All eight members of the court are Republicans. Oh, and the state’s Chief Justice is the infamous Roy Moore, the same judge Price said violated the Constitution by displaying the Ten Commandments. All of which means that the AEA and other Alabama choice opponents had better pray for a miracle—or prepare for the country’s newest tax credit program to become law.

Guest-blogger Joshua Dunn is an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs and co-author of Education Next's Legal Beat column.

When Republicans passed a tuition tax credit late last week, the Alabama Education Association cried foul and took the GOP to court, claiming that legislative leaders violated the state’s Open Meetings Act by privately discussing the measure and tacking it on at the last minute to an entirely different education bill. This afternoon, a state judge gave the union a temporary victory and forbade the governor from signing the bill until next week when a hearing determines what will happen next.

Not to be sidelined, the Alabama Association of Schools Boards and the School Superintendents of Alabama have sent Governor Robert Bentley a joint letter urging him to reject the measure, using faulty assumptions to claim that such a law would reduce education funding by tens of millions of dollars.

The harm done to these parties is real only if one assumes that every education dollar is theirs to begin with. And to the state’s public education establishment, that has been the assumption. Whether lawmakers or school-choice advocates are proposing tax credit scholarships or charter schools, they can expect a fight—not just from the unions and the school boards, but from the Alabama Department of Education, as well. And all of them will be clubbing reformers with the same stick.

In this, the Heart of Dixie is nearly unique as it employs rhetoric and legislative maneuvers that were more common in policy fights some twenty years ago. School boards throughout the state last year threatened they would have to fire teachers and support staff if the legislature passed a charter school bill (Alabama is among just eight states today without a charter law). And the bill itself was so neutered by the time the legislative session ended in May that its Republican champions conceded that it wasn’t worth passing.

So how should one suppose a voucher bill would fare? Legislative leaders knew the answer when they decided last week to take a popular piece of legislation that would have freed school districts from some bureaucratic mandates and appended the tax-credit plan to it. It would have allowed families zoned to a low-performing school the option of attending a better public school or a tax credit to help cover private school tuition. The amount of the credit would be worth up to 80 percent of what the state spends per student in Alabama (an amount that last year would have been worth about $3,500). The benefit would be refundable for low-income households, meaning the state would bankroll the credit if it exceeded a family’s tax liability. And businesses could also contribute to a scholarship group and receive a tax credit for their largesse.

To be sure, such a sweeping measure deserved debate, but its champions allowed no time before a vote and it passed along party lines. Four Republican lawmakers in particular caucused on the bill before they brought it back to other members, an act that ultimately led to the union’s lawsuit and complaints that the bill was borne in secrecy.

Theoretically, debate could have made a good bill better. While the plan would have benefited students in the state’s lowest-performing schools, it did little to help the poorest students first. And the credit could have been applied to students already in private schools but who were “zoned” to a failing school. Such a provision weakens the argument that a tax credit such as this provides a savings to taxpayers.

But let’s not fool ourselves. The policy arena would have been poisoned, as it’s becoming now, and no such constructive debate would have been likely. Even if the governor caneventually sign the bill, families hoping for more school options can expect an unstable environment for years to come.

Yet there remain 45,000 students in Massachusetts waiting for a seat in a charter school, thanks mostly to a state-imposed cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in Boston and other low-performing districts. State education officials have been authorizing schools where they can, approving five new charter schools this week and expanding eleven others, but there still isn’t enough supply; the new openings are expected to serve just 3,100 students, half of them in Boston.

“The more schools we open, the longer the waiting list gets,” Massachusetts Charter Public School Association director Marc Kenen told the Boston Globe this week.

The absurdity of the cap becomes more apparent with the achievement gains Bay State charters are showing. Eighty-three percent of Boston charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their district-school peers in reading and math, and no Boston charters had significantly lower gains, according to CREDO. Those are the largest learning gains of any city or state CREDO has studied so far.

Boston has twenty charter schools, and the Globe has reported that requests have been filed with the Massachusetts Board of Education to open three more schools to serve 1,000 students and expand six existing charters by 800 seats. But because of the cap, the state will have to reject some of those proposals.

What else do Massachusetts charter schools have to show to get past the bureaucratic restraints, the old-school politics, and the sensitivities to school districts that keep their numbers from flourishing? The state education board has a strong history of authorizing high-quality charter schools, and those schools have consistently shown some of the highest standardized-test scores. With these quality markers in place, and with the results from this latest study, it’s clearer now than ever that lawmakers should allow students to soar through the ceiling they built to contain charters a long time ago.

SOURCE: Christina Clark Tuttle, et al., KIPP Middle Schools: Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes (Washington, D.C.: Mathematica Policy Research, February 2013).

Sen. Marco Rubio released an ambitious federal school-choice plan on Tuesday night. Photo from Speaker Boehner's Flickr account.

The nation was perhaps too preoccupied with Marco Rubio’s gulp heard ‘round the world to notice that the senator, immediately after his Republican response to the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday, released a far-reaching federal school-choice plan. And that’s too bad, for what has emerged this week is the most sweeping congressional idea to empower disadvantaged kids with private school alternatives since the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Just as many states now make available tax credit scholarships—cousins to school vouchers—Rubio would empower individuals or corporations to contribute money to nonprofit “scholarship granting organizations” in return for a tax credit—anywhere in the nation.  Those scholarship groups would, in turn, help low-income kids cover the tuition at a private school of their choice.

This is an ambitious plan, but one that would surely face resistance in a Democratically controlled senate that has repeatedly dogged the D.C. voucher program. And while that would not be surprising, it would surely be disappointing, for it would further widen the gulf between the national Democratic Party and a growing number of state Democrats on this issue.

A lot of those state Democrats are in Florida, where Rubio served as House Speaker from 2007 to 2009 and where he helped to lead a greater bipartisan effort to expand and enhance the state’s own tax credit scholarship program. The Florida program was launched in 2001 with the support of just one Democrat, but by the time Rubio left office, the program had the support of nearly half of the legislative Democrats—including all but one member of the Hispanic caucus.

Many Florida Democrats came to this support upon seeing evidence that the program mostly served children of color from impoverished households and among the poorest performers among their school peers. And a lot of those children happened to reside in their own legislative districts. For his effort to succeed, Rubio will have to convince his senate Democratic colleagues that he plans to serve children no less disadvantaged.

Rubio’s plan would serve less fortunate children, and the public can see how the program is performing.

His proposal is less restrictive than Florida’s: Households would qualify for the scholarship so long as their income doesn’t exceed 250 percent of the poverty level; in Florida, the eligibility ceiling is 185 percent of poverty, the line that marks the maximum amount for a free or reduced price lunch. Still, this is not a measure for wealthier families; many parents in this income bracket can’t easily afford a private school on their own, and many more can’t fund a private education at all.

And Rubio’s bill also would add a regulatory burden on participating scholarship-granting organizations that’ has not been seen in most state programs of its kind. The bill allows the scholarship organizations to determine the actual award—a practice different from most states—but these organizations will have to submit independent audits annually and they’ll have to make sure their scholarship recipients are assessed academically.

In other words, Rubio’s plan would serve less fortunate children, and the public can see—at least in the aggregate—how the program is performing. That’s similar to the way the Florida tax credit works (a program the Fordham Institute reported had the highest regulatory burden of any tax credit scholarship nationwide). That should be enough to sway more centrist-minded Democrats, but one shouldn’t be naïve. Congressional Democrats have shown little love for private school choice. Senator Rubio must point to other states and show his colleagues how out of step they are.

When the latest figures from D.C. showed that the number of charter school students increased by 10 percent to 34,673 students, it brought the charter school market share of public education in the city to 43 percent. This led David A. Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s new education committee, to tell the Washington Post on Sunday that there ought to be a way to help charter schools and district schools learn to co-exist, even if that means “a momentary pause” on charter growth. Similarly, Mayor Vincent C. Gray wants his education cabinet to develop a coordinated “road map for public education” in the city.

Pearson was right to challenge statements like these, telling Post reporter Emma Brown, “I’m not interested in joint planning as a cover to put some sort of moratorium on charters.”

Indeed, any hint that charter growth should slow or “pause” in the spirit of collaboration ignores a fundamental reality: D.C. charters are building enough leverage to lead any conversation on collaboration and to quash efforts that would limit options available to families outside the school district.

Pearson and his team have done their part to control for quality in the charter sector by getting tougher on poorly performing schools and authorizing only those charters with the potential to serve children well (an effort borne in a commitment from Rocketship Education to open eight charters in D.C. by 2019). And that focus on quality is coinciding with a clear trend toward the reality that D.C. charters will soon be educating a majority of the city’s students.

If city officials are anxious that they don’t yet know what it would mean for families and for neighborhoods when charters become the choice for most students, the answer isn’t to contain the charter sector—rather, they ought to enhance the strengths and options within the district. To be sure, not all the news for D.C. Public Schools is bad; after years of hemorrhaging students, the school district gained in enrollment by 1 percent this year. So, arguably, district-led reforms have made some progress and enticed some families to the school system.  

Collaboration between D.C. charters and the school district may be good for the city when it has as its goal the maximum number of high-performing seats for low-achieving students. Containment is a bad way to achieve that goal.

Nurturing quality charters takes wherewithal, political capital, and—above all—interest. Photo by woodleywonderworks.

The One Million Lives Campaign launched in the fall by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers has captured popular (and media) attention, mostly for its call to shutter the worst-performing charter schools. But that’s only half of its purpose. The point of “One Million Lives,” as its name suggests, is to create the conditions that allow a million kids a seat in at least 3,000 high-performing schools.

So let’s take a moment to consider the other half of this worthy effort. Parker Baxter, NACSA’s Director of Knowledge and one of the charter movement’s smarter thinkers on growth and accountability, has taken to the Dell Foundation’s blog to encourage authorizers and policy makers to find ways to replace bad charter schools with good charter schools.

As hard as it’s been to close bad schools, nurturing high-flying charters is at least as tricky: It takes wherewithal, political capital, and—above all—interest, or at least the adoption of laws and practices that provide an easier path for high-flying charters to prosper. Baxter recognizes this and points out some more obvious steps to quality (approving new schools carefully and establishing high standards for performance), while urging states to consider more relatively difficult ideas to implement (holding authorizers more accountable for their portfolios and allowing better charter access to underutilized or unused buildings).

The harder ideas remind us of a persistent problem in the charter sector today: It is still mostly locally elected school boards that do the authorizing, and there are far too many school boards that would rather control the growth of charters than nurture the spread of the best of them. This is apparent especially when it comes to proposals that allow charters access to district facilities.

Consider a current legislative measure in Florida, which would not only give charters access to vacant or half-filled buildings in school districts but would empower districts (presently the only charter authorizers in Florida) to give first priority to charter operators “with a proven record of academic success.”

Is this a reasonable step to quality chartering? Not to the districts and their lobbyists. The Florida Association of District School Superintendents said it had “major concerns” with the bill, and various district chiefs tried to remind lawmakers that their schools had capacity because their students had fled to charters. The message: Don’t make it easier for charters to succeed.

And that’s a challenge for the One Million Lives campaign moving forward. Yes, as NACSA has urged, the charter movement can no longer tolerate the failure of many charter schools, and the association has already been successful in getting some authorizers to take the problems in their portfolios seriously. But, as Baxter points out, it’s just as important to lower the barriers for better schools. He’s right. As hard as NACSA has been on those who tolerate bad schools, they’ll have to be equally hard on those who fight the means to create good charters.

SOURCE: Emily Peltason and Margaret E. Raymond, Charter School Growth and Replication (Stanford, CA: Center for Research and Education Outcomes, January 2013).

While Walton is frequently lauded (and attacked) for its contributions to efforts that shape education policy (contributions that totaled $61 million last year, a bit of that to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), far more went to foster quality schooling.

For instance, nearly $15 million went to the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit venture-capital group that works to expand the number of seats in high-performing charter networks (a mission the fund has executed with notable success, as attested in the new CREDO report on charter school growth and quality).  About $8.4 million went to the acclaimed KIPP Foundation and $3.2 million to the highly regarded school-leadership group called Building Excellent Schools. A whopping $24 million went to groups like the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and various state-level charter associations to improve existing schools. So while it’s true that the foundation has, through its largesse, advanced our public policies in ways that enhance parental choice, it has also focused its ambitions and its very substantial checkbook on quality choice, particularly for underserved children.

Much of this, other large philanthropies would shun as too risky politically. Hurrah for this Foundation’s guts as well as its heart, brains, and generosity.

There’s no shortage of efforts or ideas to correct this. But now, StudentsFirst, headed up by Michelle Rhee, has proposed some solutions for policy makers who ought to design programs with underserved children in mind while reasonably regulating these programs in the public interest.

In its newest policy brief, StudentsFirst details its support of enhancing quality options for disadvantaged families through charter schools and school vouchers—with an emphasis on quality. While its support for school choice has been established since its founding, StudentsFirst brings to the debate some common sense reforms that would make these efforts more politically sustainable.

Yes, as the brief documents, there remains a persistent funding gap between charter schools and traditional school districts that needs to be addressed, and lawmakers must find ways to enable charters to better access facilities; doing otherwise treats some public school students differently from others. But enhancing these options comes with responsibilities: requiring performance-based contracts for charters as well as greater accountability of charter authorizers and clear triggers for closing low-performing schools (all measures long advanced by the Fordham Institute).

Additionally, school vouchers and tax credit scholarships successfully educate the poorest and most underserved children at pennies on the public school dollar, and they should receive more funding if they’re to fulfill their potential. But if we’re to better fund our private school choice initiatives, lawmakers must hold voucher and tax credit scholarship programs accountable for results. Parents and taxpayers should be able to compare the performance of voucher kids with their peers in public schools, and the best way to do that is by using the available state assessments and with transparent reporting mechanisms. “If the private school can’t show it is using the money in a way that supports student achievement,” StudentsFirst states in its brief, “policymakers shouldn’t allow the school to participate in the program.”

A statement like that is apt to give many friends of school choice some pause, but it’s the right policy if we want to responsibly empower parents who have no alternatives to a zip-code education. And it’s not a policy likely to prompt many private schools to flee these efforts, as the Fordham Institute has documented in its newest study of private school choice and government regulations.

National School Choice Week will end in a few days, but the efforts to enact and maintain these programs will continue in earnest – some more successfully than others. StudentsFirst has joined the stable of policy groups with smart ideas to keep them going—and Michelle Rhee has the national reach to shape the debate. Let’s hope she succeeds.

This post originally appeared on StudentsFirst's ThinkED blog.

Will private schools avoid voucher and tax credit scholarship programs if they’re overregulated? Many friends of private school choice insist that they will, particularly if these schools are required to participate in testing and accountability mandates. But the findings from a new study released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute indicate these friends might need an intervention.

In their report, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?, researchers David Stuit and Sy Doan find little evidence that policymakers should avoid testing requirements for fear that private schools will avoid voucher and tax credit scholarship programs altogether. In fact, in a survey of school leaders who qualify for four existing private school choice programs, just 25 percent said that state assessment rules figured “very importantly” into their decision on whether to participate.

Of greater concern to these school leaders were laws that forced them to revise their admissions criteria or restricted their religious practices, indicating that private schools were allergic to policies that made them less “private.” But, chiefly, just 3 percent of private schools that opted not to participate in these programs cited government regulations as the most important reason. Indeed, more schools opted out because there weren’t enough eligible students in their vicinity to begin with.

This doesn’t imply that policy makers should burden voucher programs with unnecessary regulations. Of the non-participating schools that Stuit and Doan surveyed, 27 percent still identified government regulations as one of the top three reasons they opted out. And in a separate analysis of thirteen voucher and tax credit scholarship programs nationwide, the researchers found that the greater the regulatory burden on private schools, the less likely that schools would participate.

But testing is not, for most, a burden. While one in four school leaders said that a requirement for state testing figured highly in decisions to participate, even fewer (17 percent) had aversions to publicly reporting their test results.

It’s also notable that Catholic schools, which account for 40 percent of private school enrollments nationally, were least likely to make their decisions based on the regulations they’d face. Of course, vouchers have helped to replenish the declining enrollments Catholic schools experience annually, but voucher and tax credit scholarship programs also align well with the mission of Catholic schools to serve the poorest students in their communities.

That mission is shared by most schools surveyed in this report.  Most (87 percent) of the surveyed school principals said they participated in their states’ voucher programs because it helped them expand their mission in their respective communities, and 72 percent said these programs helped them aid the neediest children in their midst.

So what can policy makers do to assure that disadvantaged and underserved children can have access to private options they otherwise wouldn’t have while reasonably (and necessarily) regulating these programs in the public interest?

For starters, and perhaps most fundamentally, states should minimize the amount of paperwork required of participating schools. Programs like the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship have centralized the task of verifying the eligibility of families seeking aid, but most programs burden the schools with these requirements, a problem for smaller schools that lack that sort of central-office capacity. Not surprisingly, nearly 60 percent of non-participating schools cited the amount of paperwork required as a “very important” or “extremely important” factor in their decisions. 

But the study also suggests that the more states try to infringe upon a private school’s admissions standards or its religious freedom (or their freedom to be religious), the more likely a school will shun these programs outright, which hardly helps the students whom the vouchers were intended to serve. Stuit and Doan recommend financial incentives, not regulatory “penalties,” for schools that follow state academic standards or open-enrollment policies—a good idea that has yet to be implemented in any state.

Another good policy is to make sure that in any case where there is public support for private education, parents and taxpayers can compare the performance of voucher kids with their peers in public schools. And the best way to do that is by using the available state assessments. Arguably, the public-policy groups and private school associations that have long resisted such a policy may have kept the value of vouchers and tax credit scholarship artificially low via political means. They have done no favor to private school leaders, most of whom have few concerns about state testing but do worry that voucher amounts haven’t kept pace with their tuitions.

Greater accountability for more money seems a good tradeoff and, with this latest addition to the literature of school choice, hardly seems counterintuitive.

Click here to download School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?

For it was Ball State’s charters that erased many of the learning gains Indiana charters made in the past five years, according to Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. Statewide, charter students gained what amounted to an additional month and a half of learning on their district school peers, and CREDO’s Macke Raymond concluded that such strong gains would have been even better were it not for Ball State–authorized schools. “They’re not helping,” Raymond told the Indianapolis Star. “The responsibility is pretty clearly on the authorizer.”

Credit ought to go to Ball State’s Office of Charter Schools for recognizing the problem. Bob Marra, the office’s executive director, has visibly grown frustrated with the performance of the schools the university has authorized. And this week, he and his team opted to end contracts with seven of their schools and offer contract extensions of just three years to seven others, provided they meet certain performance conditions. Two other charters withdrew their own requests for renewals.

All of these schools should have seen this coming. Not only has Ball State worked with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers during the past eighteen months to create a new accountability system for all of its charters, the university has repeatedly told its most troubled schools that they had been falling well below standards.

With the spotlight shining on an otherwise good showing for charters in the Hoosier State, Ball State made the right decision, and the university showed in a high-profile way how strong authorizers remain critical to charter school quality. Here’s hoping other states heed that lesson.

Two years ago, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union by card check. Photo from ACTS Michigan.

(Updated January 17, 2013 for the Education Gadfly Weekly)

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools should be careful what it wishes for. Although a recent case before the National Labor Relations Board was decided in the direction favored by the Alliance, by vacillating opportunistically on the issue of whether charters are public or private the organization has weakened the charter movement’s long game.

Here’s what happened: Two years back, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union via card check—a power granted to public employees under Illinois labor law. In response, the charter school asked the NLRB to intervene, arguing that it was a privately run institution, not a “political subdivision” of the state—and, therefore, that attempts to organize its employees should fall under federal law and be done by secret ballot.

In March 2011, the Alliance, led at the time by Peter Groff, filed a brief supporting the Academy’s position. Charter schools are indeed public schools, the Alliance reasoned, but they’re run by private entities. Hence their employees should be treated like other private-sector employees. “To impose state labor law obligations on private charter school employers, even in a public school setting, is inconsistent with the goal of differentiating these schools from ‘traditional’ public schools,” the Alliance argued.

And the NLRB agreed with that position, though it did so by invalidating an earlier ruling from the director of its Chicago region (akin to a “lower court”). In the overturned ruling, the NLRB regional director had determined that even though the government hired and fired no one at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy, the charter school was still a political subdivision with responsibilities to the public. “CMSA and its Board of Directors are subject to statutory restrictions, regulations, and privileges that a private employer would not be subject to,” the regional director said. Not the least of those privileges is public funding.

Interestingly—and confusingly—his position resembled that taken by the National Alliance on a separate matter involving pensions in February 2012. At that time, the Alliance objected to proposed IRS regulations forcing states to prohibit charter school teachers from participating in government retirement plans. In its statement on the draft pension regulations—which would have reversed previous IRS rulings that charters are state “instrumentalities”—the Alliance argued,

The evidence is clear: charter schools are public schools; the degree of state control over charter schools and public funding of such schools justify amending the Proposed Regulation such that public charter schools are considered agencies or instrumentalities of the state for purposes of the Internal Revenue Service’s ‘governmental plan’ definition; and to hold otherwise would harm more than 93% of our national public charter school workforce.

So are they public or are they private? You cannot argue that charter schools are not governmental subdivisions for purposes of escaping hostile state labor laws and sundry public regulations in one breath, and then urge the IRS to deem charters “agencies or instrumentalities of the state” so that their employees can continue to benefit from government retirement plans in the next.

Such inconsistency does no favor to charter schools—particularly when it comes to funding. The Alliance had endeavored for years—and with mounting success—to codify the proposition that charter schools are public schools and therefore deserve all the funding and access to facilities that one would expect public schools to have. Their public-ness is also vital to their constitutionality in a number of states. But how can they be public schools if it is also contended that they’re private entities?

To be sure, the NLRB decision was limited to the Chicago charter school. But by helping to convince the board that even one such school is not an “instrumentality of the state” and therefore should come under federal labor jurisdiction, the Alliance may have subjected other charters to federal labor laws and unionization they never before had to worry about, thereby playing right into the hands of teacher unions keen to organize the instructors in these new schools. Bad.

Simply the threat of pulling the parent trigger could spur complacent administrators to act. Photo from Strollerderby.

There is a reason why, after months of resistance, the Adelanto School Board this week voted unanimously to adopt the parent-triggered charter conversion of Desert Trails Elementary: It’s not the same board. Throughout 2012, all five board members had thwarted the efforts of the Desert Trails Parent Union to enact the nation’s first parent trigger, but only two of those board members are serving the district today.

Gone is Carlos Mendoza, the former school board president who went so far as to flout a California judge’s order to accept the parents’ plan to seek a charter operator for the troubled elementary school; in fact, he lost his re-election bid to a member of the Desert Trails Parents Union.  Gone, too, is Jermaine Wright, who vowed to block the schoolhouse door in handcuffs if that’s what it took to prevent a charter conversion. Wright fled the school district as soon as he spotted an opening on the Adelanto City Council.

A third incumbent was voted out in November as well. And the district superintendent left in the fall just as public opinion was mounting against the board and its thuggery. That cleared the way—finally—for the parents of Desert Trails to work with LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy nearby in the Mojave Desert to transform the school.

Arguably, the incumbents on the school board may have been thrown out or scared away only because of the impudence they showed to Desert Trails parents.

Ultimately, the trigger threat may motivate school boards to provide more choice.

Ben Austin, the executive director of the Parent Revolution (the group that helped to organize Desert Trails parents), has long said that the trigger can be most effective when used as a bargaining chip. The threat of pulling the trigger could spur complacent district administrators and school board members to respond to parental concerns when they otherwise might not. 

To be sure, whether the parent trigger can be a sustainable reform strategy remains far from clear. As Rick Hess pointed out in the summer, the trigger could be counterproductive if families bicker and ineffectually micromanage their schools (and Desert Trails parents did, indeed, fight with one another early in the process). And New Schools for New Orleans chief Neerav Kingsland may be right when he argues that “choice, not a say in management, is the only real power parents need.”

But ultimately, the trigger threat may motivate school boards to provide more choice—not just in Adelanto but also in the seven states that have their own trigger laws or in the twenty states currently considering the measure.

A quarter of Ball State-authorized charters rank in the bottom 15 percent of Indiana's schools. Photo from INDelight Photography cc.

Before the holiday break, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes gave the charter school movement more good news, this time from Indiana: Students in the Hoosier State’s charter schools, on average, had greater learning gains than their peers in traditional schools. Statewide, charter students gained what amounted to an additional month and a half of learning in reading and math. And in Indianapolis, charter students had about two months on their district-school counterparts in reading and nearly three months in math.

The findings were released just a couple of weeks after the Stanford-based group found similar results for New Jersey students. But the Indiana story was tempered by a more sobering fact: The findings would have been better if not for the performance of schools overseen by one authorizer—Ball State University.

Bad performance at Ball State–authorized charter schools erased many of the overall learning gains Indiana charters made between 2007 and 2011, CREDO concluded. And that poor performance accelerated after 2009, when Ball State authorized many new charter entrants that turned out to be low-performing.

How low-performing? Just a few days ago, the Indianapolis Star reported that a quarter of all Ball State-sponsored schools presently rank in the bottom 15 percent of all schools in Indiana when it comes to test scores. That ranking is notable because it’s the cutoff that drives the National Association of Charter School Authorizer’s One Million Lives campaign, which calls upon states and authorizers to more consistently shut down charters that dwell in that bottom 15 percent.

NACSA’s effort has been well received (and well funded). But now, at least in Indiana, we’ll get to see how seriously authorizers will respond to the campaign. Twenty of Ball State’s thirty-eight charters are up for renewal by March 1. During an interview with the Star, Bob Marra, the chief of Ball State’s charter office, said of the lowest performers, “We need to not renew them.”

Let’s hope he makes good on that promise. Indeed, there is much to indicate that Ball State is now taking its responsibilities as an authorizer more seriously. It has spent the past eighteen months working with NACSA to develop better practices. And it’s working in a political environment that has less patience for lackadaisical oversight of charters—last year, for example, the legislature passed a bill that permits the state to suspend the authority of a sponsor if at least 25 percent of its charter schools remain persistently bad.

But Ball State must still make some hard decisions. Indeed, some of the leaders at those low-ranked Ball State–authorized schools have already told the Star that “things are different now” and “the bad times are behind them.” As NACSA’s Greg Richmond said, “You can go on that way forever if you accept those explanations, and the kids will never get a good education.” With a spotlight shining brightly on an otherwise strong performance in Indiana, Ball State should heed that advice.

D.C. charter schools, the task force decided, should remain open to all comers in the city, but charters that move into closed district schools should voluntarily give admissions preference to children who live nearby.

For the District of Columbia, this is a reasonable conclusion that helps to ensure that disadvantaged kids in a given locale have access to a good education while upholding a central tenet of the charter-school idea: that these institutions should be open to all students, regardless of their home address.

But the critical word here is “voluntarily.” Other school districts, such as those in Denver and Chicago, have insisted on neighborhood preference as a condition for handing over public school buildings to charters. That’s a cudgel the D.C. task force has wisely avoided using.

Instead, the task force (which included representatives from D.C. Public Schools, city government, the teacher union, and charter schools) recommended giving D.C. charters that move into district schools the ability to offer a “time-limited” admission preference to families most affected by the closure. “The objective of such a preference would be to ease the transition for students, families and communities impacted by these closures,” task-force members wrote in their report.

Such a preference in other cases, however, might defeat the purpose of school choice. For example, students in Wards 7 and 8—some of the poorest parts of the city—have the greatest need of high-quality public schools and presently attend charters in other wards. A policy of neighborhood preference might limit their access to those seats.

To be sure, the District of Columbia is unlike most cities in that charter schools are educating nearly half of the public school population. But that doesn’t mean that charters should fall into the exclusionary traps that characterize zip-code education. The task force deliberated publicly on several occasions before concluding that charters should maintain not just their autonomy but their openness, too.

Rick Scott is right about Common Core standards. Photo from Education News.

Just as Tony Bennett was talking to reporters last week about his new job as Florida education commissioner, Governor Rick Scott was getting some attention of his own for suggesting that all schools receiving public funding—including private schools accepting voucher-bearing students—should be held to the same standard.

Or, more specifically, the Common Core State Standards. And on this, reporters pounced, noting (with some jest) that Scott was parting ways with fellow Republicans who want to leave private schools alone and stirring backlash among private school leaders who feared they soon would have to “teach to the test.”

This kind of anxiety calls for a voice of reason, and Bennett is just the guy to provide it. After all, he’s leaving Indiana, where he pushed a voucher program that required students to take the same standardized test as do public schools (and where they also will be taking the Common Core assessments when those standards are implemented in 2014).

And the Hoosier State isn’t alone. Voucher and tax credit scholarship programs in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Louisiana require the same standardized assessments as those used in public schools. This does more than just make these programs more politically sustainable (though it does do that). It also develops a compact between states and private schools: autonomy for accountability. In other words, private schools are free to do what they like, but if they’re collecting public revenue, they need to be transparent enough to show that their voucher-bearing students are learning enough to meet standards that states say are important.

To be sure, Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program—the nation’s largest voucher-like initiative at 50,000 students—relies on more than just the marketplace to hold schools accountable. The state requires scholarship students to take a nationally normed achievement test (most take the Stanford Achievement Test), and the results are sent to a researcher who determines the overall impact of the program and of the individual private schools that have at least thirty testable pupils.

While research has compared the achievement of scholarship recipients with that of public-school pupils who take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (and they have roughly the same gains), the taxpaying public would find it much easier to scrutinize the program’s effectiveness if all students were measured by the same yardstick. (Full disclosure: From 2009 to 2011, I worked for the nonprofit group that administered the tax-credit scholarship program.)

While reporters can find private school operators who will hyperbolically object to losing “art, music, chess all to worship at the altar of the state tests,” as one Tampa school leader said this week, they should also look to private schools that find a lot to like in the Common Core.

At least three Catholic dioceses in Florida, including the Archdiocese of Miami, are working to implement the Common Core standards (they’ve joined about a hundred dioceses nationwide that are doing the same). Many others are blending elements of Common Core into their curricula. And, regardless of what Governor Scott does, the seven Catholic school superintendents in Florida have directed the Florida Catholic Conference to talk with the state about allowing their schools to voluntarily partake in the Common Core-aligned assessments.

And if private schools are worried about losing their unique identities to state standardization, they have only to learn from efforts such as the national Common Core Catholic Identity Initiative, which involves the National Catholic Educational Association and helps K–12 schools integrate elements of Catholic identity—values, scripture, and Catholic social teaching—into curricula based on Common Core.

But if Florida follows the example of states like Indiana, will private schools flee the state’s popular voucher and tax-credit programs? If Indiana is any indication, the answer is no. Enrollment in the state’s voucher program doubled in its second year to 9,324 families, and the number of participating schools grew from 241 last year to 289.

Doubtless, Bennett will have other things to worry about when he comes to Florida, but we hope that enacting and implementing the governor’s worthy idea is one item on his to-do list.

Gov. Bobby Jindal giving a speech yesterday at Brookings, which coincided with the report's release. Photo from TPMDC.

But what makes this year’s index worthwhile is the way that Brookings highlighted the differences between even the best. It’s easy to see what separates the Recovery School District from, for instance, Brownsville, Texas, the worst-scoring district on the list and one that provides few alternatives to a zip-code education. The contrast between the Crescent City and Washington, D.C., is more subtle, but Whitehurst argues that it’s still significant.

He’s right. D.C. garnered the third-highest ranking and scored well on its abundance, and funding, of school alternatives (charters and vouchers included). But it fell short in matching families to the schools of their choice. Individual lotteries determine admission to oversubscribed schools, providing more chance than choice; in order to preserve a modicum of choice in this system, parents apply to as many schools as possible, then accept the offer that arrives from their most-preferred school.

Not so in New Orleans, the only city to score an A on the index. A common application is good for all traditional and charter public schools in the Recovery School District, and parents are more likely to gain entry into the school that they ranked highest (it helps that this system was designed by two Nobel Price-winning economists who specialize in match-making). Furthermore, the RSD gets high marks for the information it makes available to parents and for its measurements of student achievement (voucher students take the same tests as public school students; this is not so in D.C.).

None of this is meant to slight the progress made in D.C. when it comes to supporting school choice. Instead, the index shows how schools there, and those in New York, Milwaukee, and Denver (to name just a few districts), can make improvements to help parents find the right school, often without resorting to lawmaking.

To be sure, the architecture of the RSD wasn’t refined overnight, and adult interests remain committed to blocking any further enhancement of parental choice in Louisiana (as Governor Bobby Jindal pointedly said in a speech yesterday at Brookings, which coincided with the report’s release). But Brookings has shown how policies affecting student assignment, funding, and transparency can be changed in small ways to the benefit of kids—if only for states and districts that already are committed to choice. The near-monopolies may have a long way to go, but now we have more insight to aid in the effort towards forward movement.

And that may not be a bad thing, especially if those ideas lead to more educational opportunities for households that cannot afford them otherwise. Consider one of the senator’s more controversial suggestions: a corporate federal tax credit scholarship, one that would help low-income students cover the cost of a K–12 private education. There were few details in Rubio’s brief remarks on this subject, but we have examples in more than a dozen states to show how this might work.

The largest of these is in the senator’s home state of Florida: Corporations with a tax liability in the Sunshine State can receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit by donating to a nonprofit scholarship organization. And that organization, in turn, awards scholarships worth up to $4,335 to children who qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch. There are nearly 50,000 K–12 students in Florida who now participate in the program, up from 29,000 just three years ago.

Despite its popularity, however, there is a reason that a program like this is controversial: A tax credit scholarship is tantamount to a voucher. This would seem to darken the prospects for a federal initiative, considering the hostility the White House and Senate Democrats have shown towards one of the smallest private-school choice program in the United States—the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship. But can a smartly designed corporate tax credit overcome not only the objections from more recalcitrant Democrats but a presidential veto as well?

Perhaps. Consider that nearly half the Democrats in the Florida House and a majority of the Legislative Black Caucus now support the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (full disclosure: Between 2009 and 2011, I worked for the nonprofit that administers the Florida program). That wasn’t always the case, but more Democrats warmed to the program once they learned that it ended up serving the poorest and poorest-performing children in the state and once the program grew more accountable to taxpayers.

Moreover, the Florida effort has stayed focused on impoverished households whereas sizable tax-credit programs in Georgia and Arizona have stirred hostility among Democrats for providing aid to middle-class students who were already in private schools.

Not all Democrats, of course, would sign on to a well-designed tax-credit program focused on the poorest of the poor. And more than a few Republicans might object to using the federal tax code to accomplish what already is taking place in more than a dozen states. But, done right, this could be a federal school-choice initiative that can supplement—and maybe surpass—efforts in states that keep the value of similar scholarships artificially low by politics.   

All of this, of course, may be getting ahead of Rubio’s ambitions. But if the senator is serious about rewarding “investment in education” the way we reward businesses for investing in equipment, then there are models to which he can turn to help bridge the typical Republican-Democratic chasm and, in doing so, benefit kids.

RELATED ARTICLE

“Fight over Detroit Education Achievement Authority control comes to head,“by Jennifer Chambers, The Detroit News, November 26, 2012.

It might seem odd that an organization that supports charter schools would call for the closure of hundreds of them. But it’s not. It makes perfect sense.

At the heart of the charter school concept is a bargain between schools and the entities that authorize them. Charter schools agree to accept greater accountability, including the possibility of closure, in exchange for greater freedom from bureaucratic rules that can inhibit effective teaching and learning. Charters receive autonomy over inputs in exchange for accountability for outcomes.

The surest way to cripple the charter movement is to let failing charter schools continue to operate.

The possibility of closure is essential to making the charter school bargain work. It is not a coincidence that where charters are working well, the threat of closure is real—and that where they are not, closure is rare. If closure isn’t a real possibility, the charter bargain is out of balance. When the link between autonomy and accountability is broken, quality suffers.

Charter schools are growing rapidly. This rapid growth is powerful evidence that when empowered with school choice, parents will seek out better options for their children. And despite a small but vocal chorus of detractors, charter schools also enjoy broad public support and are one of the very few issues in our otherwise divided political discourse where there is true bipartisan agreement.

The surest way to slow this growth and undermine this support—the surest way to cripple the movement—is to let failing charter schools continue to operate.

Tolerance for failure begets more failure, and allowing failing charter schools to remain open has far-reaching consequences, both for the students who attend them and beyond. It harms all those charters that are successful and strengthens the resolve of those who seek to impede their progress. It makes it harder for more promising new schools to open their doors and perpetuates the myth that great charters are exceptions to the rule instead of models to be replicated. It lets failing district schools off the hook and emboldens those who claim that school choice is about choice for its own sake and not a means to quality and equity for all. 

Of course, there are already hundreds of charter schools that are successful, and we should do everything we can to replicate and expand them and accelerate our efforts to create thousands more. In many of our country’s most disadvantaged and troubled communities, charters are demonstrating that while poverty and instability create very real and often enormous obstacles to learning, when given autonomy over inputs and when held accountable for outcomes, schools can overcome them and help even the most disadvantaged children succeed.

As much as the opponents of charter schools would have you believe otherwise, there is abundant evidence that low-income students, who for generations have been failed by centralized, one-size-fits-all industrial-era schools, can thrive in autonomous, accountable schools of choice. You wouldn't know it from the way the research is portrayed in the media or by their critics, but charter schools are outperforming their district peers when it comes to educating America's most disadvantaged students. Every day, all across the country, hundreds of these schools are changing the life trajectories of tens of thousands of students by giving them the quality educational opportunities they need and deserve.

While this success is encouraging, and while we need to do much more to replicate and expand successful schools, there is also abundant evidence that far too many charter schools are failing.

Far too many charters are doing no better than the schools their students chose to leave, and are failing to educate their students well. Out of the more than 5,600 charter schools nationwide, NACSA estimates that between 900 and 1,300 of them are performing in the bottom 15 percent of schools in their states, as measured by those states’ accountability systems. Of the more than two million charter school students, as many as 300,000 students attend charters that are failing to meet their needs and failing to prepare them for success in college and careers.

This sad reality is why NACSA launched “One Million Lives.” For too long, many charter school advocates have focused on growth over quality, and for too long, many charter authorizers and state policy makers have failed to take action to close failing schools.

The time for change is now. As the nation’s preeminent voice for charter school quality, NACSA knows that the continued success of the charter school movement depends on its ability to increase quality dramatically across the sector by closing hundreds of failing charters and replacing them with twice as many excellent ones.

If charter schools are truly about changing lives for the better, if they are truly about transforming public education so that it serves the individual needs of all students, including those children our traditional schools have perpetually failed, and if we are serious about giving schools the autonomy they need to succeed and holding them accountable for results, we cannot allow failing charter schools to continue failing kids.

Parker Baxter is NACSA’s Director of Knowledge. Prior to joining NACSA, Parker served as Assistant Superintendent and Executive Director of the Office of Parental Options at the Louisiana Department of Education and as Director of Charter Schools for Denver Public Schools. Follow him on Twitter @Parker_Baxter. Learn more about NACSA and the “One Million Lives” campaign at www.qualitycharters.org and @QualityCharters.

The consolation for the families who opted for school choice is that this was always going to be decided by the Louisiana Supreme Court

That’s why it was frustrating to see a state judge declare late Friday that Louisiana’s newest and largest voucher program is illegal because it diverts “vital public dollars” to private schools. According to Judge Timothy Kelley, the state was wrong to fund its new voucher program by the same revenue stream that provides a “minimum foundation” to its public elementary and secondary schools.

That was the same argument put forward by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana School Boards Association when they sued to abolish the voucher program, which presently serves nearly 5,000 children in 113 private schools.

But what is the difference between privately operated charter schools and private schools accepting voucher-bearing students if each are held to account to parents and taxpayers?

Students receiving the Louisiana voucher have to take the same standardized tests as those administered at public schools, and the schools they attend can be ejected from the program if they consistently show poor performance—just like charter schools. But Judge Kelley clumsily asserts that Louisiana’s charter schools and the recovery school district are attempts to manage public schools “by a private entity,” whereas the voucher program illegally diverts public funds “into the hands of nonpublic entities.”

What’s the distinction, one may ask? Very little. And that’s why Governor Bobby Jindal led the effort to maximize the state’s constitutional power to create a public education system to enhance every child’s well-being with every available tool. Furthermore, Jindal sought more than just budgetary leftovers and worked to fund the voucher program from the same pot of money that bankrolls nearly all public education in Louisiana.

In rejecting this argument, Judge Kelley even parroted the language of school-choice opponents when he wrote that the voucher program ignored “the good of the individual students who are left behind in those schools deemed underperforming.” Fortunately, the students now in the voucher program can stay there while Jindal appeals the decision. That may be the only good news here. The consolation for the families who opted for school choice is that this was always going to be decided by the Louisiana Supreme Court. It just shouldn’t have been they who had to appeal.

Gov. Rick Snyder unveiled a draft bill that would institutionalize choice and blended learning. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

To be sure, up until just this month, Michigan governor Rick Snyder has mostly sloganeered about school models that could impact students “any time, any place, any way, any pace.” But two weeks ago, Snyder unveiled a 302-page draft bill that would institutionalize choice and blended learning in ways that chip away at the artificial boundaries that have historically defined public education in Michigan and beyond.

But for some reason, Snyder can’t generate the national buzz that has inspired education reformers the way Mitch Daniels has done in neighboring Indiana or the way Bobby Jindal has done in Louisiana. That’s perplexing, because what Snyder is proposing is perhaps more transformative than what any of his peers have so far established in statute.

Consider what’s in his bill:

• A high school education in Michigan would be disaggregated to a level where an individual student could shop for courses in her own district, in neighboring districts, at online academies, at community colleges or at state universities.
• No district would ever own a student, but full funding would follow the student to her destination of choice
• Any student could access all public school online-learning opportunities, even those offered in districts that are outside the student’s home district, and the state would cover the cost.
• Funding would be based on performance, partially at first, but proportionately more over time.
• The school year would remain at 180 days, but would be spread over twelve months, not nine.
• Post-secondary scholarships would go to students who graduate from high school early.

There are still many issues for the governor and the state’s lawmakers to work out: Who should be held accountable for students’ performance, and how will courses and student achievement be evaluated? How much will each school be paid for courses or services provided? And, perhaps most importantly, how much can the governor achieve in the state’s singular educational wasteland (Detroit) if he’s going to allow districts to opt out of any open-enrollment plan he proposes (most every Michigan school district participates in the state’s current cross-district enrollment plan except those in suburban Detroit).

Nonetheless, Snyder has developed a proposal that he approached methodically (the governor charged the nonprofit Oxford Foundation–Michigan with the task of designing the plan, and the foundation did so over several months in several public meetings). And he looks to be ready for a bruising fight in the public square, even without the enthusiasm of the broader reform movement.

Snyder has accomplished much in education reform since he was elected in 2010, but most of that impact was felt gradually (like removing the cap on the number of university-authorized charter schools in the state). If he wants to accomplish more in a strongly unionized state, he’ll need to tap the support of the national change-agents and organizations that are ostensibly committed to reform.

Why? Consider what CRPE found when it compared special-education enrollment patterns at charter schools and traditional schools throughout New York:

• Enrollment patterns of high-need students at charter middle and high schools are indistinguishable from those at school districts;
• Whatever discrepancy exists, it’s found mostly between charter schools and district schools at the elementary level;
• And there is variation among charter authorizers; some authorizers oversee charters whose special education enrollments mirror those at district schools.

In other words, CRPE argues, a statewide difference in charter and district enrollments is too simplistic of a comparison. But even analyzing the variation at each grade level is no easy task. For instance, why would charter elementary schools concerned about their performance marks discriminate against special-education students if state testing doesn’t begin until the third grade? Could it be that charter schools are less likely to identify a student as having special needs (as the New York City Charter School Center has suggested) or that specialized district preschool programs “feed” a greater share of students into district elementary schools?

A statewide difference in charter and district special-education enrollments is too simplistic of a comparison.

The fact that these questions persist implies that the 2010 state legislature rushed these enrollment targets into law without waiting to find out why some charters enroll fewer students with disabilities.

This is all starting to sound familiar. Five months ago, in a publicized exchange, Success Academy Charter Schools chief Eva Moskowitz urged the SUNY Charter Schools Institute to convince legislators to change the law. The quotas that would beset charter schools, Moskowitz argued, would institutionalize what she called “the perverse incentives” that drive district schools to over-identify students as needing special education (and the extra funding that comes with it).

SUNY and the legislature should heed that warning and the recommendations from CRPE. “Rather than using blunt policy instruments such as enrollment targets,” CRPE concludes, “state policy leaders and authorizers would be wise to invest in research to identify where under-enrollment of students with disabilities exists in charter schools and what might explain it, and work with the charter school community to develop innovative strategies that address specific problems.”

Good advice. Let’s hope New York and other states considering similar quotas agree.

Of course, governments have little to no say over the curricula at any private school that participates in any of the voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs that exist presently in fifteen states—as well they shouldn’t. But some state governments have, in recent years, held their voucher programs to account for producing decent results, and that’s where the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program has fallen short.

Private schools that participate in the D.C. program must provide parents with the academic progress of their own children along with the aggregate performance of their children’s grade-level peers, but that’s as far as school-level disclosure goes. Students receiving vouchers must take standardized tests every year, but their results are not made public; they go instead to independent evaluators who determine the program’s overall academic impact.

By contrast, Republican-controlled statehouses in Indiana and Louisiana recently enacted voucher legislation that not only requires private schools to administer the same standardized test given at public schools but stops the flow of voucher money to schools that consistently show poor test performance. Wisconsin, too, requires the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs to administer the state’s standardized test and to publicly post the results from each participating private school, a matter of transparency that some researchers say may have led to larger achievement gains for voucher students.

Advocates for the D.C. program—congressional and otherwise—ought to consider at least two significant quality control measures:

1.) A sliding-scale of public accountability, one in which demands are raised for schools that rely more heavily on voucher revenue to stay in business. This is an approach my Fordham colleagues outlined three years ago and one that Louisiana recently adopted to a large degree. Specifically, private schools in Louisiana that enroll an average of ten voucher students per grade or more than forty in the grades that are tested will be subject to a scoring system similar to one administered to public schools. A lower score could keep a school from enrolling students in the program, and it could, over time, trigger a quality review by the state Department of Education.

2.) A better, and more independent, flow of school information to prospective parents. This is a problem that afflicts all voucher and tax credit scholarship programs: Families must either rely on the marketing of the schools themselves or on the scant academic indicators that states provide. However meaningful test scores in Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin are, they say little about the climate of schools, or about graduation rates, or absenteeism. And changing this doesn’t take an act of Congress. If the nonprofit group that manages the D.C. voucher program thinks that quality oversight of the program is a “dead zone,” as its CEO told the Post, than it could work to get buy-in from the fifty-two schools in the program to collect data that can help parents be smarter shoppers. The D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation can devise an information site of its own that prospective parents can visit or it can work with an organization like GreatSchools to distribute the information. Either way, an action like this would make the D.C. program a leader in the voucher movement.

Perhaps it’s unfair to burden the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship with such a leadership role. After all, at 1,584 students, it remains one of the smallest private-school-choice programs in the nation. But, like it or not, it is a bellwether for the national voucher movement. And it’s surprising that, with so much attention otherwise paid to the program, it took the Post this long to write such a critique. By embracing some modest measures of standards and accountability, the D.C. program might set in motion effects that could ripple beyond its boundaries.

I love this thing.  It is chronicling a renaissance in urban public education.

The report is a yearly reminder of the amazing growth of charter schools and, more importantly, the expendability of the urban district.

Anyone who doubts the premise of my new book The Urban School System of the Future (reviewed here by Checker, here by Education Next, here by Sarah Tantillo)—that we can move beyond the failed district structure and create a system of schools based on the principles of chartering—need only spend a couple moments with this document.

In 15 cities, a quarter of public-school-attending students or more are now enrolled in charter schools. See the following examples:

• Indianapolis: 25%.
• Cleveland: 28%
• St. Louis: 31%
• Kansas City: 37%
• Washington, D.C.: 41%
• Detroit: 41%
• New Orleans: 76%

When charters began 20 years ago, no one imagined that this was possible—that this new way of delivering public education would provide the desperately needed alternative to the dreadful district system.

But before our eyes, chartering is replacing the district in America’s cities, showing that new schools can be started, failing schools can be closed, great schools can be expanded, and parents can exercise choice within public education.

You’ll find lots of other interesting tidbits in the report, including the areas where charters are growing the fastest (Clark County, Nevada is number one with 64 percent growth in the last year) and the cities with the most students in charters (Los Angeles is number one with 98,576 students).

As fascinating as these data points are, please remember the most important finding: We’re seeing in real life—not hoping, not hypothesizing, but witnessing—that the century-old district structure, that behemoth we once thought of as immortal and irreplaceable, is being eclipsed.

In America’s cities, the district is yesterday’s news.

Thank goodness.

[1] This total figure includes a $350 million figure for San Diego charters (the bond question was worth $2.8 billion).

RELATED ARTICLE
“Cleveland levy sails to apparent victory,” by Patrick O’Donnell, The Plain Dealer, November 7, 2012.

Education reform in Michigan suffered a crucial setback on Tuesday.

Or, more specifically, in Detroit, Highland Park, and Muskegon Heights—all of them school districts that have become educational wastelands and where the state had installed emergency managers to take control and (more importantly) to tear up union contracts to get the job done. In Highland Park and Muskegon Heights, that meant converting the school districts into charter-school districts. In Detroit, it meant keeping power out of the hands of a school board that one newspaper columnist said was “sauced on power and staggering with incompetence.”

This week, 53 percent of the state’s voters repealed the emergency-manager law, a victory for public-employee unions (teachers included, of course) that had spent the summer gathering signatures to put the question on the ballot. And that may unravel the boldest measures undertaken by these managers.

Detroit’s emergency chief, Roy Roberts, technically maintains control over the district’s budget, but he wrote to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder this week indicating that he may soon step down due to the response of voters, despite the fact that he feared progress in Detroit Public Schools would be “virtually impossible” without a role like his.

Emergency management in Highland Park and Muskegon Heights believes that the changes in place for public education in each city, which summarily ejected the teacher unions, would remain intact (Highland Park turned control of its schools this summer over to The Leona Group; Muskegon Heights, to Mosaica Education, Inc.) but that may be wishful thinking. Already, public-employee unions are promising litigation, and it’s hard to see how a judge would disregard the will of the electorate.

This isn’t just a setback for these three districts in Michigan. The Wolverine State had gotten to a point where it could repel the adult interests in public education and side with the interests of its kids in Michigan’s most troubled school systems (several other municipalities benefited from the emergency-manager law as well). At least one political scientist told the New York Times that voters overturned the law because many thought “it seemed undemocratic to put a person in place with all those powers.” But it seems even less democratic to return power to dysfunctional school districts that already allowed powerful unions to gain undue influence once before.

In what may arguably be defined as a landslide, 59 percent of Georgia voters empowered the state to create an independent commission to authorize charter schools. But that margin of victory doesn’t even tell the whole story.

Consider Gwinnett County, the state’s largest school district, which has allowed only three charter schools within its boundaries and which filed the original lawsuit that ultimately killed Georgia’s previous independent authorizer (hence the constitutional amendment). Gwinnett superintendent Alvin Wilbanks once said that the question before voters would only empower the state to “privatize, defund, and dismantle public education.” But 63 percent of the county’s voters disagreed with him and said yes to the amendment.

While Georgia can claim a landslide, charter advocates in the Evergreen State may be getting by with a squeaker.

The state’s largest counties followed suit, including Fulton County (where 66 percent of voters said yes) and DeKalb County (64 percent). This highlights the arrogance of Wilbanks and other district superintendents, who warned that the amendment would only diminish “local control” of public education. An overwhelming number of citizens decided that the most “local” kind of school is one where the decision-making power rests at the school level, not in some faraway district office that holds veto power over all public education.

The same can’t be said for Washington State, however. While Georgia can claim a landslide, charter advocates in the Evergreen State may be getting by with a squeaker.

At last count, Washington’s Initiative 1240 was winning 51-49 percent, indicating that Seattle and other cities may finally see charter schools (Washington was previously the largest state without a charter law). But as elections officials were busy counting votes, the tally in Seattle was looking grim: 51 percent of King County voters had said no to the proposal, according to the latest count.

A victory is a victory, but Washington’s charter initiative may narrowly pass despite the fact that proponents outspent opponents by $10 million (Washington has asked voters to approve charter schools three times before, with voters saying no every time).

With such a polarized electorate, advocates and charter operators—should they win—will have plenty of work ahead to assure voters that the schools they plan to open over the next five years will add quality, innovation, and variety to a public-education landscape that has done little to accommodate pluralism.

And pluralism is what emerged on Tuesday—even in states with far different stories to tell. Whatever transpires in the years to come, voters in Georgia and Washington worked to make public education much more local.

Wisconsin has made a lot of progress in holding its voucher program more accountable.

This is absolutely untrue. For the past few years, students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program have had to take the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination (WKCE), which is the same test administered to all public school students. When the Wisconsin legislature expanded the voucher program to Racine last year, nothing changed this requirement. In fact, test results for private schools in Racine and Milwaukee, as well as for public schools throughout Wisconsin, were recently recalculated to comply with a higher standard of proficiency. Those results are available to the public here—and they’ll continue to be made public.

What has changed is the release of a report card that assessed public schools using measures that included achievement growth on state tests, graduation rates, absenteeism, progress on closing achievement gaps, and several other factors. Ravitch could have argued that the 108 private schools presently accepting voucher students in Milwaukee and Racine should have collected this data so that they would be included in the report cards available to the public. But instead, she wrongly asserted that the test performance of voucher students will no longer be public.

This should not be dismissed as a simple error in reporting. The Wisconsin legislature has made a lot of progress in holding the nation’s oldest voucher program more accountable to parents and the taxpaying public, and researchers who have studied the program for years found that the public reporting of test scores may be responsible for some achievement gains not seen in traditional schools.

Arguably, this transparency also has inspired more recent legislation in Indiana and Louisiana, which both require voucher students to take the same tests as do students in public schools. And it would be good to see this trend spread to other states, to both new and existing programs. Test scores may be a muddy measure of a school’s performance (students using vouchers and those attending public schools may differ in important ways), but they are an important measure—and Wisconsin continues to recognize that.

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 whether it was fiscally and organizationally sound and that should have led the district to probe more deeply.

Every year since 2009, audits have revealed that NorthStar High paid $86,000 to $96,000 yearly to the principal’s husband “for certain management services.” Additionally, those same audits noted that some employees required “85% of the unpaid contracted salary” should the Orange County School Board terminate the charter. One of those employees turned out to be the principal.

To borrow from the principles and standards of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Orange County would not have imposed administrative or compliance burdens on NorthStar High by simply inquiring more deeply into these practices. It’s true that the charter school’s own board seemed absent in its required oversight of NorthStar, and it behaved (at best) irresponsibly in signing off on the outsize compensation for its principal (The school only enrolled 180 students in grades 9-12). But the school district is responsible for overseeing the charters it authorizes, and that responsibility became more critical when audits highlighted conflicts of interest and other red flags.

But, of course, some district authorizers are more committed to their job than others. Only ten school boards in Florida have embraced NACSA’s principles and standards, which arguably have advanced the case for greater standards and accountability in the charter sector while respecting the autonomy that charters ought to have. Orange County is not among those boards.

That hasn’t stopped the county school board chairman from telling reporters that NorthStar’s practices are “a shameful abuse of public tax dollars.” He’s right, but it doesn’t absolve him or his board of their responsibilities, either. And the poor oversight of one charter is no reason to punish them all.

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 the total public school enrollment of the county school district’s 163,000 pupils (the statewide average is 4.6 percent). The county school board presently oversees just three charter schools.

• The state’s third largest county, DeKalb, added just two charter schools in the past five years.

• Two of Georgia’s relatively larger counties, Cobb and Richmond, have the same number of charter schools they had five years ago (six and two respectively).

Ten other states have established their own state commissions to authorize charter schools because they recognized that leaving authorization exclusively in the hands of school boards would stymie growth in the charter sector. Georgia lawmakers formed such a panel themselves four years ago, but the Gwinnett school board, among others, successfully sued the commission out of existence (hence the constitutional amendment before voters now).

Gwinnett schools Superintendent Alvin Wilbanks says he has nothing against charter schools, a disingenuous statement, considering he also has complained that the state’s plan is to “privatize, defund, and dismantle public education.” He and other superintendents in Georgia appear interested mostly in preserving their near-monopolies under the guise of democratic local control.

That’s what this really comes down to: control. If a local group of educators or parents wants to start a new school with a particular pedagogical focus, should the local school board have veto power? If a minority of parents want a peach-flavored school, should the publicly elected school board (representing the majority of voters) get to say, “Sorry, everyone gets pecan”? Or do we provide rights, within our democracy, for minority views, too?

The most “local” kind of school is one where the decision-making rests at the school level, not in some faraway district office. In other words, in charter schools, which represent the kind of “local control” to which the Peach State should aspire.