Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld reviews the damage left behind when charter schools close, often mid-year. The possibility of a sudden closing is an unadvertised disadvantage of charters. If they don’t have enough students, if there’s a financial scandal, if lots of other things, the school abruptly closes, leaving students and parents to find another school. Charter school advocates think it’s commendable when the schools close, as that is the market at work. Not so good for the students.
He writes:
Regardless of what you think about charter schools, it’s bad news when one closes unexpectedly. It’s bad for the staff. It’s bad for the people who were committed to the project. It’s especially bad for the students, who will have to find a new school, learn their way around and make new friends.
And it’s not a rare occurrence here in Indiana. A list provided by the Indiana Department of Education includes 50 charter schools that have closed or merged since Indiana began allowing charters in 2002. An analysis by Chalkbeat Indiana found at least 29 charter schools in Marion County have closed.
The latest to fold was Vanguard Collegiate, an Indianapolis middle school that opened with big plans in 2018 but struggled to enroll students. It had only 71 students in grades 5-8 last year, according to Indiana Department of Education data, and was down to about 40 this fall.
Vanguard announced two weeks ago in a letter to parents that it would close Oct. 1. “Please know that we fought hard for you, our beloved school community,” executive director Robert Marshall wrote.
In January, another Indianapolis charter school, HIM by HER, closed abruptly, sending its 200 students scrambling with three months left in the school year. The school, which launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, was authorized by Ball State University and operated for 2½ years.
One charter-school supporter commented online that Vanguard Collegiate shouldn’t have been allowed to open in the first place, Ball State shouldn’t have extended its charter last year, and it shouldn’t have been allowed to close mid-semester. Certainly, the situation could have been handled better.
The fact that the school, over five years, never managed to enroll 100 students should have been a red flag. It reported good attendance rates for a high-poverty school, but its academic performance wasn’t stellar: Only two of 61 test-takers scored proficient on both the math and English/language arts ILEARN assessments in 2023. It’s not clear what the school’s board was doing about this; board minutes haven’t been posted to the school’s website since June 2022.
Then there was the school’s most recent posted audit, covering the 2020-21 school year and submitted to the State Board of Accounts in March 2022. The audit concluded that “substantial doubt continues to exist about the ability of the school to continue as a going concern.”
Nevertheless, the school’s authorizer, the Indiana Charter School Board, approved a 5-year extension of its charter late last year. If the board had rejected the renewal request, the school could have shut down in May in an orderly fashion and its students would have had the summer to find a new school. On the other hand, it might have gone shopping for a different authorizer. That’s what happened with HIM by HER: the Indiana Charter School Board rejected its initial application, but Ball State approved it.
What happens to students when their schools close unexpectedly? Research is mixed, but there’s strong evidence that switching schools has negative academic and behavioral impacts, especially on students of color and students from low-income families – like those at Vanguard and HIM by HER.
Please open the link and finish the post.
What is mind boggling is the charter and voucher schools are treated like another educational product. There are few attempts to understand their impact on students or public schools. Privatization drains public funds and diverts it into private pockets. The public schools then have to enlarge classes and cut student services in order to continue to operate. When charter schools close, charter school students often return to overcrowded classroom in public schools that have less funding than before the students left.
Charter school closures are disruptive to students. Poor students already live in disruptive settings with financial insecurity and lack of access to healthcare. As someone that taught poor students for more than three decades, I know first hand that they crave stability, and they perform better academically when they are in a stable educational setting. This is another reason why the market is no solution for human services. Corporations number on priority always put profit over people. If we are a nation that values the education of our young people, we should not be subjecting them to unstable market based education.
cx: Corporations always put profit over people.
Shouldn’t the cost of running charter schools include the costs of cleaning up their messes when they close abruptly? When a student’s charter school closes mid-school year, the school has already spent the entire charter and the student typically goes to a public school, which receives no money to assist those students.
Steve, exactly righ.
Yes, but when have businesses been fiscally responsible for all the damages they do, especially to the environment. They walk away already with the monies and the rest of us have to live with and pay for their perfidies.
Largely (but not entirely) off topic: here’s an article about the insane funneling of money into the hands of private corporations by America’s largest city.
https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2023/10/will-nycs-nonprofit-procurement-process-ever-be-functional/390798/
I saw this story and it reminded me of a recent thread here about public education funding flowing to unaccountable private corporations, i.e. charter schools. I mentioned in that thread that if people think that’s bad, they should consider the much more massive amount of public funds that are flowing to private corporations in the rest of city budgets. But I didn’t have a figure to put a sense of scale on it. This article does have a figure: over $35 billion out of NYC’s over-$100 billion annual budget.
That future is surely rising now as the city blasts private companies in the face with billions of additional dollars to manage the migrant crisis.
If Ike were alive today, perhaps he’d warn us of the “nonprofit industrial complex.”
Interesting.
I would certainly see corruption beyond belief if NYC was giving contracts with a set “per person” amount for one favored private vendor to give services to the most able, least needy migrants (with the right to kick out any migrant who the private agency themselves decided was too troublesome – i.e. too expensive) while the city was asking its own agencies to spend that same “per person” amount to take care of the migrants with the most dire, expensive needs. And I would see even more corruption if the city’s own agencies were told that out of that “per person served” budget must come the pension and health care payments to every living retired agency employee in perpetuity because instead of making that an off budget cost, the corrupt city had decided that by including the cost of every retired person’s pension and healthcare in the budget that their own agencies could spend, they could justify giving favored private vendors a higher per person served amount, allow supposed non-profits to pay themselves handsomely and purchase nice real estate and other capital goods, and then crow that they had found a way to serve the exact same migrants but for less money than those wasteful government agencies spend.
I certainly can believe that kind of corruption exists. Maybe NYC even tells the city agencies that they have to make room in their offices to house the private agencies because it would be unfair for them not to get free rent and utilities and all the other goodies that come from having a city agency not just paying their own overhead from their budgets, but also paying for the private agency’s overhead from their budget. I wonder if that happens…
And finally — here is the topper!: Are those “unaccountable” private agencies handling the migrant crisis (or anything else) allowed to say that they are not accountable to the city, because the only people who have the right to question them are a board of cheerleaders whose main agenda is to create more private agencies just like them, so this board oversight believes a full and thorough investigation is them asking the CEO of the agency about any complaints and when the CEO tells them there is nothing to see, their oversight is complete.
If so, you are right, they are just like charters!
By the way, there is a different between goods and services. The city doesn’t build its own desks in their own factories, build its own computer hardware, manufacture its own bricks and cement blocks and flooring and kitchen appliances. I hope this article isn’t throwing apples and oranges in the same budget, because it is impossible not to purchase goods from an “outside vendor”. But contracting for “services” is a different matter. It needs very strong oversight by the city. Although maybe a “charter service provider” can convince the public that giving them contracts with no oversight is a great deal for the public.
“It reported good attendance rates for a high-poverty school,”
Just because it reported good attendance, it doesn’t mean that it was true. Being reported and actually being good attendance are two different things.
The private sector charter and voucher school INDUSTRY doesn’t care about the churn. That also do not care a fart for children.
All these greedy individuals care about is the profits, the money to be made, and for some the ability to control what children learn so they are programmed to grow up controlled by one ideology and/or religion.
These greedy individuals don’t care that many children NEED some stability in their lives.
For many children from dysfunctional homes and/or who live in poverty the only mostly safe and stable place they know is the REAL public schools that do not go out of business because they failed.
Look at the failure rate of private sector businesses.
https://www.luisazhou.com/blog/businesses-that-fail/#:~:text=The%20failure%20rates%20of%20businesses,still%20standing%20after%205%20years.
I should have pointed out that public school teachers have given their lives to protect students when a public school is targeted by an extremist/deranged monster that had easy access to firearms.
I wonder how many CEOs and office managers of charter schools would be willing to stand between their students as a shield to protect them from a shooter.
“In Florida School Shooting, at Least 3 Educators Were Killed Protecting Students”
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/in-florida-school-shooting-at-least-3-educators-were-killed-protecting-students/2018/02
More reasons that charter schools are not public schools. Charter operators are private businesses, whether the financial gains are awarded in the form of profits or just exorbitant executive salaries. If charter schools were public schools, they would not close, but be instead remanded to the custody of public school districts so that the public services rendered remained continuous. If it were a public service being provided, that service would not be able to close itself without the approval of publicly elected officials.
LCT, you are right about that. All points. Public services don’t close. Charter corporations do, and in many states, they own the assets purchased with public dollars.
I recall a declaration by an education group that studied student performance swearing on a mighty stack of papers that the most influential condition that affected student performance was changing buildings.
Fascinating. Anything that relieves the tedium?
Why, it’s almost as if running a school isn’t for amateurs, isn’t it?
Haaaaaaa!!!!