Proposal to expand charter school authorizing elicits mixed reviews
by Sarah Carr
Times-Picayune
February 13, 2012
Gov. Bobby Jindal‘s proposal to expand significantly the number and type of groups that can approve new charter schools in the state has prompted mixed responses among charter researchers and experts across the country. Opening up charter-school creation — or “authorizing,” as it is known — to nonprofits, community groups, and universities would likely cause charters to spring up rapidly across the state, not just in the urban areas where they are now concentrated.
Currently, only local school boards and the state board of education can approve charters in Louisiana. Typically, the state follows the recommendations of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in deciding which new charters to approve.
On the plus side, the shift could address concerns that the approval process is biased against grass-roots, mom-and-pop charter applicants. But several researchers say states with multiple authorizers — including private nonprofits — have some of the weakest charter-school performance in the country.
Ohio, for instance, allowed dozens of nonprofits to act as charter-school authorizers with little oversight for years. One problem was that weak charter-school operators in Ohio sometimes “shopped” for the most generous authorizer, said Bryan Hassel, the co-director of Public Impact, an education policy consulting firm. Authorizers usually get paid a small percentage of their charter schools’ operating budget, giving them a financial incentive to keep even foundering schools open.
As a result, “there has been some incentive for authorizers to make themselves attractive to schools by not being very rigorous,” Hassel said.
Charter schools receive public funding but are run by private, independent boards. They currently enroll about 2 million students across the country.
New Orleans has the highest rate of charter-school attendance of any city in the country, with about 80 percent of public school students now attending them.
One of the largest national studies of charter-school performance found that states with multiple authorizers — defined as states where charter applicants have a choice in who authorizes them — had weaker charter schools on average.
That 2009 study by Stanford University researchers, known as the CREDO report, examined charter-school performance in 15 states and Washington, D.C. It found that, on average, charter schools perform slightly worse than traditional schools across the nation, but in a handful of states, including Louisiana, they perform better.
When the study was released, the authors cited Louisiana’s relatively strict authorizing process, which turns down a majority of applicants, as one of many possible reasons charters here performed comparatively well here.
The authors wrote: “Where state legislation provides for multiple authorizers, there is a significant negative impact on student academic growth. … This finding suggests that applicants are strategic in their choice of authorizer and look for the option that is ‘easiest.'”
Asked why multiple authorizers might lead to poorer quality charter schools, Macke Raymond, the study’s lead author, answered with another question: “Were you ever as a young child given a choice of baby-sitter?”
‘Rigorous process’ promised
Jindal’s team has not yet spelled out the specifics of his proposal. But a summary of his education package calls for changing state law to “allow community organizations, nonprofits, universities and other local entities to apply directly to the state to become charter authorizers.”
A Jindal spokesman referred questions on the governor’s proposal to Louisiana school Superintendent John White, whom Jindal championed for the state’s top education post. White said the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will have a “rigorous process” to ensure that only capable authorizers get approved. In other words, BESE will act as the authorizer of the authorizers, an odd development for a movement created partly to cut down on bureaucracy.
“There will be a quick trigger at the state level, where if you are not producing outcomes for our kids we are not going to let you authorize more schools,” White said. “That way we can ensure we don’t have what happened in Ohio.”
He added that allowing nonprofits, universities and community groups to serve as authorizers will create a chartering process “that is closer to the community.”
Many local school boards have been reluctant to approve charter schools for financial, political or philosophical reasons. But having charter-friendly nonprofits function as authorizers can pose transparency issues; private entities are not obliged to follow the same open-meetings and public-records laws as public ones.
Philosophical divide
The debate over multiple authorizers can be traced to historic tensions in the 20-year-old charter-school movement. From the start, some charter advocates viewed the schools as a limited strategy designed to foster innovative practices that could then be introduced in traditional public school systems. Others, who tend to be more supportive of multiple authorizers, viewed rapid growth of the charter sector as a way to create a “marketplace” of schools and inject more competition into the public sphere.
Very few states have allowed nongovernmental entities such as private nonprofits and universities to authorize new charters. The current trend, according to Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, is to create statewide authorizing boards that focus exclusively on charter-school issues.
Only Ohio and Minnesota allow private nonprofits to act as authorizers, although several states permit public universities to do it. Missouri also has one private university that authorizes charters because of a loophole in state law.
Jeanne Allen, president of the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, said she is not a fan of adding dozens of new nonprofits as authorizers, but she does support expanding the authorization power beyond local school boards and state education boards.
“The issue isn’t that we need dozens more authorizers,” she said. “We need a few strong and competitive organizations who take the job seriously and do the work the state doesn’t have the expertise or bandwidth to do.”
Not an easy job
Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who has studied attrition rates at charter schools, took a somewhat different view, arguing that “the campaign for multiple authorizers is a campaign to grow the charter movement, not to improve oversight.” He said states should grow their charter sectors slowly so they can learn from mistakes.
Miron said there’s sometimes a Catch-22 inherent in creating successful authorizing systems: Authorizers need money and resources to do their job well, but states do not want to give authorizers a financial incentive to keep bad charter schools in business.
Both fans and skeptics of charter schools appear to have reached consensus on one point in recent years: Just like running schools, authorizing charters is not as easy as it might appear. Regardless of whether the government, a university or a community group is doing the work, it requires significant resources, expertise and the willingness to make tough decisions.
Said Terri Ryan, the vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, one of that state’s nonprofit authorizers: “It’s fair to say we’ve come to appreciate how hard it is to do authorizing well.”
