On Monday, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released its first annual ratings of charter school authorizers in the state. Two authorizers received an ineffective rating, the second-lowest of the four possible ratings, and consequently cannot authorize additional schools until their ratings improve.
In principle, this is a great development – authorizers, not just operators, are now held accountable for the quality of Ohio’s charter schools. In fact, basic accountability mechanisms for charter authorizers are very much in line with the regulatory review that Michael McShane, Elizabeth English, and I called for in a paper last month, after finding that applications to open a charter school are often stuffed with unnecessary, onerous requirements.
But in practice, this development could easily create needless bureaucracy. In our paper, McShane, English, and I found that authorizers often include more than what is truly necessary to evaluate a charter operator’s ability to be successful. It’s no big leap to think that ODE and other state departments of education might go beyond what’s necessary to evaluate authorizers.
Happily, there is cause for optimism in Ohio. In our paper, we argued that authorizers should primarily focus on governance, organization, finance, academics, and legal requirements—and the Ohio Department of Education’s rating system heavily emphasizes these issues. ODE evaluates authorizers on three main components: “monitoring schools’ compliance with laws and rules,” “the overall academic performance of their community [charter] schools,” and “their adherence to quality practices.” The scoring rubric awards the most points for issues related to authorizers’ commitment and capacity to authorize, application process and decision making, and termination and renewal decision making. All of these issues are at the heart of charter authorizing and clearly merit emphasis.
What’s more, the Ohio Department of Education’s rating system largely steers clear of superfluous or inappropriate requirements. ODE evaluates authorizers based on 52 documents, an online or phone survey of each school the authorizer sponsors, and an in-person interview with the authorizer. The documents are presumed to already exist, and ODE explicitly instructs authorizers not to create any new documents for the review. Equally important, the burden on schools is low—the online survey consists only of 37 predominantly multiple-choice questions. The authorizer interview allows ODE to confirm or clarify information in the documents, a strategy that is a welcome contrast from charter applications that require lengthy rationales to cover every possible angle.
Looking more closely at the scoring rubric, two requirements are particularly worthy of mention. One is terrific, while the other is troublesome.
ODE gets a gold star for including a statement on respecting operator autonomy. An “exemplary” authorizer, which is the highest rating possible, “annually reviews its own compliance requirements and evaluates the potential to increase school autonomy based on flexibility in the law, streamlining requirements or other considerations.” Autonomy was a central premise in the original charter bargain, and many people, including AEI’s Rick Hess and Michael McShane, have voiced fears that overregulation will make charter schools indistinguishable from traditional public schools. Not only does ODE’s statement avoid pushing charter schools to resemble district schools, but it also attempts to dial back instances of overregulation from its authorizers. It will be interesting to see how responsive authorizers are to this sort of nudging.
On the other hand, the Ohio Department of Education’s statement on “application depth” seemed counterproductive to the goal of promoting autonomy. According to ODE, an exemplary authorizer creates “comprehensive, detailed application questions [… that] provide extensive data,” whereas an ineffective authorizer is one whose “application includes few questions.” Of course charter authorizers need sufficient data to evaluate applicants’ ability to be successful—but having few questions does not necessarily mean that the data will be incomplete. Particularly given the Ohio Department of Education’s overall emphasis on autonomy and streamlining requirements, this single statement strikes me as an odd and unfortunate conflation of length and rigor.
As we stated in our paper, “By all means, charter applications should be rigorous and should prompt prospective school leaders to think long and hard about how they are going to operate their schools. But adding 20 to 30 pages to an application does not necessarily make applicants think more deeply about the essential components of a good school, and it does not ensure that the schools that will be authorized will be of good quality.” This logic applies equally to developing charter applications and evaluating authorizers.
Overall, the Ohio Department of Education’s work to hold authorizers accountable is commendable, both in principle and in its execution. Although the statement on application depth clearly merits revision, the Ohio Department of Education’s rating system is a good example of how to create accountability without infringing on the autonomy that is essential to charter schooling. As Ohio (and hopefully other states) continues to evaluate its authorizers in this manner, research should investigate the effects of authorizer accountability on students, schools, and authorizers themselves. For now, it’s a promising step forward.
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