Lindsay Wagner is a veteran education reporter in North Carolina, now working as an education specialist for the A.J. Fletcher Foundation.

In this article, she describes the charter landscape in North Carolina. The original idea behind charters were that they would be laboratories of innovation, but like almost everywhere else, they have not met that charge. They have turned into havens for students “escaping” from “failing schools.” But many of the charters fail, and students are left high and dry, sometimes in the middle of the year.

When the Tea Party took control of both the legislature and the governorship in 2012, the charter movement took off. Some of the members of the state’s charter advisory board opened charters themselves, in some cases for-profit charters. Charters are allowed to have as much as their staff composed of non-certified teachers.

One of the charters that recently closed was called StudentFirst.

She writes:

StudentFirst was one of 10 charter schools in North Carolina that have closed since 2012, displacing more than 1,100 students, according to the state Office of Charter Schools. Four of them closed during their first year of operation. Most closed because of financial problems, but some also closed because of academic failings or improper governance—or all three.

The closing of a charter school is a highly disruptive event for students and their families, and costly for taxpayers as well. Charter schools that closed in their first year of operation spent altogether about $3.5 million in taxpayer funds with little to show for that investment.

There is a pattern to the failures. In nearly all the cases, red flags appeared in charter applications well before the schools even opened. And as problems mounted once the schools were up and running, the state was in no position to offer a lifeline, in part because the state’s oversight and support process is disjointed and understaffed.

Politics, of course, plays a part. Charter applications are reviewed and approved by the Charter School Advisory Board, composed of members appointed by the Republicans who now dominate state government. Day-to-day operations, meanwhile, are monitored by the Office of Charter Schools, which until last year was part of the Department of Public Instruction. That department, led by an elected state superintendent, has historically been viewed with suspicion by legislators jealous of its independence, and all the more so now because the current superintendent, June Atkinson, is a Democrat.

A bill enacted in 2015 placed the Office of Charter Schools under the jurisdiction of the State Board of Education (of which the charter school board is a subgroup). But so far, little has changed. Although legislative leaders are pressing for a rapid expansion of the charter school sector, they have not boosted resources for oversight and support. Eleven new charters are scheduled to open in the coming weeks, and evidence is mounting that half or more of them will be starting out on thin ice…

Even as the political appointees on the board allow more shaky charters to open, lawmakers have been slow to allocate additional resources to the Office of Charter Schools. OCS has just seven employees to oversee the 158 existing schools and to provide guidance and coordination to new charters preparing to open. There’s little help available for charters as they struggle to get up and running or run into difficulties later on.

Deanna Townsend-Smith, a lead consultant for the state oversight office, told the Carolina Public Press earlier this year that no longer can a staff member make annual site visits to each charter school, as they once did when the cap was at 100. They now direct their site visits toward schools that have already made the list of those that are at risk of failing.

Not a problem. The choice zealots want more charters, not more oversight.