CO: Failed Charter Accountability

“Where’s my kid going to go to school?”

That's a quote from one of the parents whose child was supposed to be going to going to Colorado Skies Academy, an aviation-centered charter school that turned out to be the 1,472.334th (estimated) charter school operated by educational amateurs who couldn't hold things together. They anounced their closing about two weeks before the school year was supposed to start.

It is one of the most undiscussed features of the charter school world-- the vast amounts of money and opportunity and, worst of all, family resources and children's education that are wasted by charter schools that are so amateur hour they can't get the job done and/or manage to stay open. It has been six years-- six years!-- since the Network for Public Education released a study showing the vast amount of federal money going to charter fraud and waste. One out of every four dollars, to the tune of a billion!

Why are we still playing at this? The deal was supposed to be a simple trade-- charter schools would get autonomy in exchange for accountability. But in some states, it's just not happening.

The weak link in Colorado is the weak link in too many other states. A charter system is supposed to depend on authorizers. Authorizers have the job of checking that charter operators can deliver on the promises they make, and shut them down if they don't. A charter is supposed to be like a contract, a deal in which the school says "We will do A, B, and C. Also, we absolutely know how to handle the nuts and bolts of staffing and funding and, you know, educating. And if we can't deliver on all that, you can shut us down."

This sounds great in theory. In practice, not so much. 

One major problem is that authorizers often have a vested interest in saying, "Yes." Take Bay Mills Community College, a two-year school with 400ish students and a location on the Might As Well Be Canada portion of Michigan. Bay Mills made a ton of money by authorizing all manner of charter schools, most of them far, far away from the college. In Michigan, as in many states, authorizers get a cut of the charter school's funding, and that's a mighty appealing argument for saying yes.

In Colorado, there's a diffrerent incentive at play. Colorado has the Colorado Charter School Instittute. CSI was formed in 2004 as an arm of state government; several states have one of these boards, and their main purpose is to answer the question, "What if I want to start a charter school and authorizers keep telling me no?" CSI has a nine-member board, seven of whom are appointed by the governor, so if the governor's policy is "Gimme more of those charter schools," the board can help implement that policy.

In other words, CSI's purpose is not to provide accountability for charter schools, but to get lots of charter schools started. Or as Manuel Solano puts it at Colorado Times Recorder, 

The majority of the CSI Board of Directors are appointed by the governor and operate by advancing their goal of approving more charter schools. CSI’s existence creates fragmented oversight, undermines local governance, and enables schools to escape accountability by switching authorizers. The result is a system where financial collapse can go unnoticed until it’s too late.

Charter schools are too often businesses masquerading as public schools, and that word "public" helps them project an image of stabilty and competence that they don't deserve. According to Solano, 32 charters have collpased under CSI's watch in the last decade. The sudden collapse of 32 schools may not seem like much, but I guarantee that if you are among the families that were counting on those schools, it's a huge deal. And or taxpayers who are footing the bill, it should also be a big deal.

The really annoying thing about charter school accountability is that it doesn't have to be this way. But too much of the charter movement believes in the Visionary CEO model, where some Elon Musk looking whizbang dudebro is free to hire and fire and remake policy as he sees fit without rules or regulations (or unions) telling him how to run his business. Let him move fast and break things, and if one of the things he breaks is the school, oh well--that's genius for you. And if someone suggests that this guy is actually an education amateur who doesn't know what the hell he's doing--well, how dare you. 

The charer accountability sec tor also suffers from a problematic worship of the invisible hand of the market place. Every closure like Colorado Skies Academy comes with at least one market clown declaring, "Well, that's just the market working the way it's supposed to," as if the workings of the market are so sacred and wise that it would be folly to take measures to, you know, protect the young human beings who are trying to get an education (or to watch out for the taxpayers whose contributions fund all these market shenanigans).

There could be accountability for charter schools, actual accountability. Standards to be met, rigorous measures before they even open their doors. It could even be done without strangling the notion of innovation (though innovation is extraordinarily rare in the charter biz). It wouldnt be any harder than what we now do with magnet or CTE schools.

We could protect the interests of young humans and their families. We could provide accountability for the taxpayers. But we don't because in some states, charter fans think the most important thing is not protecting the interests of students or providing accountability to taxpayers, but in protecting the ability of entrepreneurs to operate with little oversight and accountability. And as long as that's the primary driving force in the charter biz, we will keep hearing parents ask,

“Where’s my kid going to go to school?”