NC: When Charters Become Orphans

The TeamCFA website promises that the foundation exists "to promote the academic growth and success of each student in each TeamCFA school as well as the growth of the entire network. Each school in the TeamCFA network receives long term, meaningful partnership and oversight from the TeamCFA Foundation, with specific regard to academics, business, and governance through the Affiliate Agreement." But apparently "long term" does not mean what you think t means, because organization's leaders have bailed on the North Carolina charters that they helped birth.

So long. Good luck.

TeamCFA is itself the offspring of John Bryan, a retired businessman in his mid-80s who wanted to spread some free market libertarian love. He's not a fan of unions and repeats the old talking point about how spending money on education helps.He has contributed to plenty of conservative groups, but for some reason (people keep asking, but I've never seen a real answer) has particularly fixated on North Carolina, where he threw a lot of money at passage of the Innovative School District law, another version of Tennessee's failed Achievement School District, a system in which the state takes over schools with low test scores and tries to turn them around (or gives them to charter management groups to fix). The North Carolina just skips straight to the "give them to a CMO" part, but as one writer noted, it's a sweet deal.

TeamCFA had its own chain of charters which it helped launch with big six-figure "forgivable loans."

Now, the leadership at TeamCFA has bailed.

Some changes were not unexpected. In 2017, Bryan announced that he was retiring, and TeamCFA would need to find another money tree. TeamCFA fiddled with its business model, but they had reportedly depended on Bryan for almost all of their funding. Takes a lot of fiddling to plug that hole. Some its charters struck out on their own and others have been pondering their fate, but meanwhile, TeamCFA appears to have almost entirely evaporated (and not everyone is sad).

The News&Observer reports that C. Bradley Miller, "a member of TeamCFA's board of directors," says they are totally not closing and they keep on "supporting schools." But according to the
TeamCFA website, Miller can more accurately called "half of TeamCFA's board." There are no coming events. There is no contact information. And the directory is empty.

The group has five "pending" schools. Of the five, only Community Public Charter, with dedication of moral character, Core Values and Core Knowledge, seems up and running as expected. TeamCFA's Bonnie Cone Classical Academy was supposed to open this fall; that doesn't seem to have happened. Ditto Abraham Lincoln Preparatory School. Ditto Alexander Hamilton Community School. Carolina Charter Academy is up and running-- but has a header on its home page saying that enrollment for next year won't start till January, and "staff have no other information to provide." What's happening in the seventeen schools already under the TeamCFA banner is a varied work m in progress.

So here we are again, confronting the whimsical comings and goings of charter schools, which may close for business reasons or may be forced to suffer the whims of an octogenarian millionaire. This s a new wrinkle, where the people doing the work in the charter are themselves abandoned by their erstwhile backers. This is one of the fundamental disagreements between fans of modern corporate charters and advocates for public education-- to corporate charter fans, all this coming and going, opening and closing, is a feature, not a bug. But while business churn may make sense in the business world, stability matters in education. Families benefit from knowing that the school will still be there in the fall; students benefit from having a stable community in a familiar setting.

Do public schools ever close. Sure, though not remotely as often as charters. And there's one more important difference. When a public school closes, the district still has the responsibility of making sure those students are provided with an education. When a charter closes, its operators simply wash their hands of any responsibility for former students. Lock the doors, wave goodbye, nwish them good luck.

"We have to find a new school because our wealthy patron decided to stop funding our old one," shouldn't be a sentence that anyone has to say, ever.