What Happens When a Charter School Fails? (Green Dot)

What Happens When a Charter School Fails?

Fri, Dec 17, 2010

By Bertha Rodríguez Santos
New America Media

LOS ANGELES—California leads the nation in charter school growth this year, according to a report released last month by The Center for Education Reform.

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But far less attention has been paid to the closure rate of charter schools. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, over the past two academic years, 281 charter schools, or about 6 percent of the total open in 2008-09, closed nationwide. In California, there have been 150 closures since in 1992, when the state’s charter school law was enacted, and 72 in just the past three years.

What happens to kids when a charter school fails?

Thalía Saavedra, 17, has a sweet and mild demeanor, but she grows angry when discussing the unexpected closure of her school, Animo Justice Charter High School, earlier this year.

“They didn’t even give up the opportunity to share our opinions,” said Thalia.”They never gave us a voice, they never notified us in advance. They just told us, ‘It’s closing,’ and that’s it.”

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Instead, representatives from Green Dot, the L.A-based charter school network that opened Animo Justice in 2006, informed the students that the school was being shut down in June.

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Education as a Business.

“For them, our education is a business,” Thalia said. “They used grades to try to blame us, but in reality, they were the ones who failed.”

One teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, believes Green Dot and other charter school operators mislead students and parents about what they can accomplish. They promise families a high-quality education, but unlike parents in affluent areas like Beverly Hills, low-income parents lack the resources to supplement what the schools can provide, the teacher said. In the end, many charter schools are unable to meet the expectations they set.

“It’s exactly like a factory,” she said. If a school does not perform according to the established parameters, the charter school operator can close it, lay off the teachers, and kick out the students—leaving them in the lurch.

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A Transformed System

Charter advocates should strive to have every urban public school be a charter. That is, each school should have significant control over its curriculum, methods, budget, staff, and calendar. Each school should have a contract that spells out its mission and measurable objectives, including guaranteeing that all students achieve proficiency in basic skills. Each school should be held accountable by an approved public body.

“Charter” will no longer be seen as an adjective, a way to describe a type of school, but as a verb, an orderly and sensible process for developing, replicating, operating, overseeing, and closing schools. The system would be fluid, self-improving, and driven by parents and public authority, ensuring the system uses the best of market and government forces. Schools that couldn’t attract families would close, as would those that ran afoul of authorizers for academic, financial, or management failures. School start-ups, both the number and their characteristics, would reflect the needs of communities and the interests of students, but would also be tightly regulated to generate a high probability of school success.

So, while the government’s role would still be significant, it would no longer operate the city’s entire portfolio of public schools. Instead, it would take on a role similar to the FAA’s role in monitoring the airline industry or a health department’s monitoring of restaurants. Today, we take airline safety for granted and make our choices based on service, connections, and so on. Similarly, we know all restaurants have fire exits and meet food safety standards, so we choose based on our tastes and schedules. A well-regulated chartered school system could guarantee that all public schools were providing a safe, high-quality education and properly managing operations, thereby allowing families to choose a school based on other criteria.

The government’s substantial oversight role in guaranteeing safety and quality would differentiate a charter system from a universal voucher program. To many, a voucher system would undesirably blur the lines between church and state, add the profit motive to schooling, remove the “public” from K–12 education, and leave too much to the vicissitudes of the market. By contrast, in a chartered system, public schools would be nonreligious, managed by nonprofits, overseen by a public authority, and held to clear performance standards.

But a chartered system would capitalize on market forces largely absent from district systems, such as constant innovation, competition, and replication. Replication is arguably the most valuable. Chartering has not only created some of America’s finest schools, it has enabled their leaders to identify the characteristics that made those schools so remarkable and then develop systems for creating additional, equally successful schools. In addition to well-known charter management organizations like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, new ones continue to emerge: Green Dot, High Tech High, Aspire, Noble Street, IDEA, and more. Major funders like the Charter School Growth Fund and NewSchools Venture Fund are helping other high-performing charters expand as well.

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Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering’s way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrict authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.