Did you know that charter authorizers in many states are paid a fee for every student who enrolls in a charter they oversee? Did you know this fee removes any incentive to demand accountability?
This article shows how fraught with self-dealing, conflicts, and indifference many of these relationships between authorizers and charters are. It is a wild, wild world out there.
Consider this:
“Nestled in the woods of central Minnesota, near a large lake, is a nature sanctuary called the Audubon Center of the North Woods. The nonprofit rehabilitates birds. It hosts retreats and conferences. It’s home to a North American porcupine named Spike as well as several birds of prey, frogs, and snakes used to educate the center’s visitors.
“It’s also Minnesota’s largest regulator of charter schools, overseeing 32 of them.. ”
“Many of these gatekeepers are woefully inexperienced, under-resourced, confused about their mission or even compromised by conflicts of interest. And while some charter schools are overseen by state education agencies or school districts, others are regulated by entities for which overseeing charters is a side job, such as private colleges and nonprofits like the Audubon wildlife rehabilitation center…..”
“In 2010, an investigation by the Philadelphia Controller’s Office found lavish executive salaries, conflicts of interest and other problems at more than a dozen charter schools, and it faulted the authorizer – the School District of Philadelphia’s charter school office – for “complete and total failure” to monitor schools. In 2013, more than a dozen Ohio charter schools that had gained approval from various authorizers received state funding and then either collapsed in short order or never opened at all. [That hasn’t stopped Philadelphia from opening more charters.]
“Considerable state funds were lost and many lives impacted because of these failures,” the Ohio Department of Education wrote in a scathing letter last year to Ohio’s charter-school regulators. The agency wrote that some authorizers “lacked not only the appropriate processes, but more importantly, the commitment of mission, expertise and resources needed to be effective….
“It’s not just Trine. In the esoteric world of charter authorizing, there’s long been confusion and tension over the basic role of authorizers. Are they charter-school watchdogs, or are they there to provide support?
“In Ohio, many charter authorizers fall on the “support” end of the spectrum. Some go so far that they sell “support services” – back-office services, for instance, or even professional development – to the very schools they regulate. It’s a way for these groups to make additional revenue on top of the fees they’re allowed to charge the schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Almost everything you see come up as charter school problems, if you scratch past the surface, the real problem is bad authorizing,” said John Charlton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education. ”
They can continue to say this, but I disagree. The problem is they pushed regulation up to the state level from the local level so they could bypass local process and public participation and they cannot regulate hundreds of schools all over the state from the state level. They don’t have the statutory tools to do so, but even if they did they don’t have the STAFF to do so. They’d need many more on the ground regulators.
It’s a bad governance model because it wasn’t based on good governance. It was based on political expediency and the objective was to open more charter schools.
Turns out, public schools were regulated locally for a reason. This model they invented doesn’t work. I don’t blame charter school promoters. They promote charter schools. That’s what they do for a living.
I blame lawmakers. This is what happens when they don’t do their jobs. Someone else does it for them. They “relinquished” their duties and obligations to a bunch of think tanks and private operators. Maybe they shouldn’t have let these people “invent” public school governance.
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Vouchers exacerbate the problem. The Columbus Chamber of Commerce stated an advocacy position for portable student funding (and, lower income taxes). OSU’s general counsel and senior vice-president is on the Chamber’s Board.
At least the president of Cuyahoga Community College is a non-voting member on the Greater Cleveland Partnership Board (new name for Cleveland Chamber of Commerce),
whose agenda is the expansion of charter schools and accountability for public schools but, no mention of charter accountability.
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They’re compounding the problem with the federal charter funding laws. They’re just adding layers to “ensure” good authorizers. All of the Democrat’s federal charter funding includes additional attempts at adding a federal level of charter regulation.
If it doesn’t work when they pushed regulation up from local to state, it will work less well when they push it up from state to federal. Congress is going to regulate individual charter schools in all 50 states after they build 500 a year? What a joke. They can’t even regulate the for-profit college “sector” they have now. They failed miserably at that.
The last line of regulatory defense in Ohio charters was the auditor. Everyone else, all along the line, failed. That’s not the job of the auditor. It never should have collapsed so completely.
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Chiara: thank you for your additional information and comments on this thread.
What you are describing is a conscious attempt to create “defused/displaced responsibility” as in the old saying “when everybody is responsible for something, nobody is.”
Lots of movement and hoop-de-rah and fine rhetoric that covers up the calculated ineffectiveness of the actions. For an excellent (if painful) example, think John Deasy and LAUSD. And the colorful pageantry distracts attention from the real harm that is being done.
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
😎
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I urge viewers of this blog to access the link included in the posting. Among other things, there’s some new jargon to learn like “authorizer hopping.”
From near the end of the linked article:
[start]
In extreme cases, lack of expertise or capacity has led to charter-school regulation being further outsourced. One of Ohio’s biggest charter-school regulators is St. Aloysius Orphanage, a Catholic mental-health center in Cincinnati that technically oversees 43 charter schools. Under Ohio law, it’s eligible to regulate charter schools because it’s a nonprofit. Yet the charity contracts out regulatory work to a for-profit vendor, Charter School Specialists.
Charter School Specialists reviews the schools’ finances and conducts school site visits on behalf of St. Aloysius. It writes the required annual report on behalf of St. Aloysius, running through how the charter schools are doing. But Charter School Specialists also sells services to charter schools, such as handling accounting, payroll or even providing schools with treasurers. In other words, it’s a for-profit middleman paid by both the regulator and the regulated.
For the former orphanage, authorizing brought in $2.6 million in fees paid by charter schools, the group’s 2013 tax filing shows. In the same year, St. Aloysius paid Charter School Specialists $1.5 million, leaving the nonprofit an extra $1.1 million. It’s not clear exactly what St. Aloysius has done to earn the difference – though Dave Cash, president of Charter School Specialists, said St. Aloysius “bears ultimate responsibility for all major decisions” and “provides an additional level of expertise and analysis.” St. Aloysius Orphanage did not respond to requests for comment.
There are indications that this unusual oversight arrangement may not be working. In 2013, eight charter schools that were approved by the former orphanage opened, only to quickly fold, with “financial viability” listed as the official reason. The state lost $1.7 million in taxpayer dollars it had already given to the schools, and the state auditor is now scrutinizing St. Aloysius. The funds so far have not been recovered.
Recognizing its problem with weak oversight, Ohio has begun to administer in-depth evaluations and assign ratings to charter school regulators, which officials hope will give them a way to identify and weed out bad ones. For a state with about 65 authorizers, though, evaluating all of them will take years. Officials say they expect to complete about 10 evaluations each year.
[end]
Just this one excerpt speaks strongly to the notion that charter schools (and the privatization of public schools that often accompany them) are a rising tide, all right, but not one that is characterized by friendly competition with “traditional public schools” and leading by innovation and doing more with less. It’s a tsunami of $tudent $ucce$$ that is both harmful and toxic to public education as well as deals deadly blows to elementary notions of morality and fair dealing and responsible behavior.
Getting past the weak expressions of discomfort and feeble attempts to deal with the above —see the last paragraph of the excerpt—it is clear, beyond any doubt, that adult self-interest at the expense of “the kids” is a feature, not a bug, of self-proclaimed “education reform.”
😎
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