Why do we have charter schools? Albert Shanker, head of the United Federation of Teachers, planted the seeds of charter schooling in a speech to the National Press Club in 1988. His vision was thus: “Imagine six or seven or twelve teachers in a school who say, ‘We’ve got an idea. We’ve got a way of doing something very different. We’ve got a way of reaching the kids that are now not being reached by what the school is doing.’ That group of teachers could set up a school within that school which ultimately, if the procedure works and is accepted, would be a totally autonomous school within that district.”
Nimble. Responsive. Small, if need be. This was the original vision of charter schooling.
We’ve come a long way from 1988. It’s hard to imagine Shanker would have believed that less than three decades later more than 6,400 charter schools would be teaching more than 2.5 million students.
In the intervening years, as the nimble and responsive process of chartering schools has become ever more bureaucratized, the procedural hurdles that prospective school operators have to jump over have gotten higher and more numerous.
On one level, this is certainly a positive development. The raison d’etre of charter school authorizers is to act as independent regulatory bodies to help prevent bad schools from harming students. Schools have to pass authorizers’ muster before they are allow to accept students or receive public funds. Insofar as authorizers have been able to screen out bad schools, they have been an extremely important force in the charter school market.
But in some places, regulatory zeal (either by overeager authorizers or state legislators with a penchant for micromanagement) has overwhelmed the process. In a new report I coauthored with Jenn Hatfield and Elizabeth English, we analyzed the application process of 40 charter authorizers from around the country.
We found that in many cases, applications have been larded up with unnecessary and onerous requirements that create needless barriers for potential school operators. Does an authorizer, for example, really need to see a description of a tough decision that each board member of the school has had to make in the past? Does a potential operator need to detail what it will do if a child forgets his or her lunch in order to get approved to educate kids? Does seeing a copy of the school’s diploma help an authorizer better understand if the school will create a quality learning environment? How much value is added by the 50-page narrative potential operators are required to submit detailing their motivations and justifications for organizational and pedagogical decisions?
In short, many authorizers could trim their applications by up to a third without sacrificing quality control. By focusing applications on the “charter bargain” – that is, the implicit deal that charter schools make when they trade accountability for autonomy – authorizers can focus their efforts on ensuring that schools provide a quality educational environment and leave the rest up to the people actually educating kids.
Mission creep is not a victimless crime. While larger organizations have whole staffs dedicated to filling out these applications, the smaller teacher collectives and community organizations that Shanker thought charter schools would empower find it incredibly hard to find the time to do everything they need to do to get approved. They have no problem, they were clear in telling us, with detailing what they want to do in the school and how they can be held accountable; it’s the paperwork pileup that wrecks them.
This is a solvable problem. By completing a thorough regulatory review, both at the state and authorizer level, many of these extraneous and onerous requirements can be chiseled off. This would represent hundreds of man hours of recovered time that educators could focus on educating kids, and a recalibration on the part of authorizers to focus laser-like on where they can do the most good.
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