Key Points
- Charter schools were created with a clear bargain in mind: charter authorizers would give operators autonomy to run schools as they saw fit as long as those schools met defined performance metrics.
- Currently, the balance between accountability and autonomy is heavily tilted toward accountability, with charter authorizers requiring unnecessarily extensive, time-consuming applications.
- Excising unnecessary or inappropriate requirements could shorten the average charter application by one-third, saving applicants more than 700 hours of work and avoiding wasting money that could be better spent educating students.
Executive Summary
In 1988, Albert Shanker, head of the United Federation of Teachers, suggested that small groups of teachers could design charter (performance-based) schools as alternatives to local public schools. In theory, charter school teachers would be held in check by a performance contract but would be otherwise free from rules, norms, and regulations that have stifled innovation in America’s traditional public school system. Charter school leaders would thus make a bargain, trading autonomy for accountability.
In practice, however, the charter bargain has become fairly one-sided. Charter school authorizers often include hundreds of tasks in the application to open a charter school, creating an onerous and lengthy process that risks freezing out potential school operators. To be sure, many application tasks are well within authorizers’ rights to require, but others are unnecessary and unduly burdensome for applicants. This is a real problem for the groups of teachers that Shanker envisioned, who might lack the time or resources to tackle these outsized applications and create new educational options for students.
After coding each of the requirements in applications from 40 charter authorizers, we found that while a plurality (43 percent) of the application requirements were clearly appropriate for authorizers to include, the majority of requirements were either unnecessary (34 percent) or clearly inappropriate (23 percent). This means that authorizers could shorten the average application by at least one-third without sacrificing their ability to ensure quality—a change that could save applicants more than 700 hours of work, based on interviewed school leaders’ estimates of the amount of time it takes to complete a charter application. Interviews and application data point to a handful of lessons about charter school authorizing.
Lesson 1: Many authorizers appear to be able to streamline applications without losing quality control. We discovered that by refocusing applications on the charter bargain, both authorizers and applicants can benefit. Almost one-fourth of the average application contains inappropriate and onerous requirements. Removing those requirements would eliminate busywork for applicants and allow authorizers to focus on the information that is relevant to schools’ chances of future success. It would also help realign authorizing with the original intent of the charter bargain: giving charter operators autonomy in exchange for accountability.
Lesson 2: Authorizers sometimes mistake length for rigor. The applications that we coded ranged from only 4 pages to a whopping 127 pages, with anywhere from 12 to 399 individual tasks for applicants to complete. When asked about 100-plus-page applications, however, authorizers often explained to us that the process has to be difficult in order to weed out those applicants who won’t be successful. The problem is that adding 30 pages to an application doesn’t necessarily make it a better test of applicants’ competence, but it does impair applicants’ ability to complete the application in the first place or, once charter schools have opened, can impair their ability to change their plans in response to outcomes, data, or community input.
Lesson 3: There is a lack of clarity on the role of charter schools and authorizers. Authorizers don’t know which elements of the application are most useful for predicting success. As a result, charter applications often contain a little bit of everything. In turn, applicants don’t understand what authorizers value, and often overshoot the target to ensure their applications cover as much as possible. This cycle is hugely inefficient and tips the balance of the charter bargain heavily toward accountability and away from autonomy.
Lesson 4: Authorizers often prize innovation less than they say they do. Autonomy is a valuable aspect of charter schooling because it promises that operators will have room to innovate. However, an application process that has become increasingly onerous and risk averse severely compromises operators’ ability to innovate. As one operator said, “We love to see innovation, but at the end of the day, it has to make educational and business sense.” It is impossible to know what quality innovation looks like before it exists. Trying to regulate innovation ultimately precludes applicants from developing and testing truly innovative ideas.
Lesson 5: There is more variability within than between authorizer types. We coded applications from and interviewed individuals representing three different types of authorizers: state education agencies, higher education institutions, and independent charter boards. We found that, for example, the range of application lengths between authorizer types is less than 20 pages, but within a single authorizer type, the range can exceed 120 pages. The takeaway here is that all authorizers are prone to including extraneous and inappropriate requirements and should carefully consider ways to streamline their applications.
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