Teachers hated it because of its warped emphasis on standardized test scores. Students hated it because they were cheated of a real education, they lost civics, the arts, and recess, and the tests assumed more importance than they deserved.
But Ultican writes, Chad Aldeman of The 74 is nostalgic for the good old days of NCLB.
Neoliberals joined with libertarians to “reform”public education. Their tools were big money and propaganda distributed by media outlets like The 74, support by The Walton family (EIN 13-3441466) and Bill Gates (EIN 56-2618866). This year, regular columnist for The 74, Chad Aldeman, is trying to claim that lifting No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school accountability sanctions is responsible for the public school testing “data decline”.
In a recent article in The 74, Aldeman complained of widening achievement gaps in Indiana, but Ultican can’t find the source of Aldeman’s data.
Ultican notes that NCLB interrupted a long period of academic improvement.
From 1970 to 1992, America’s schools showed slow but steady improvement in education-testing outcomes but since the era of standards, testing and accountability, improvement basically stopped. Education, run by billionaires and politicians instead of educators, failed to improve testing outcomes.
Alderman stated in his latest article that it is not just an Indiana problem but that “49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP … saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade.”He did not share which tests showed widened achievement gaps nor which cohorts were compared. NAEP reports on reading scores for 4th and 8th grade do not show a significant change in scoring gaps between Black and White students and comparisons in other ethnic groups also were steady.
After asking what has caused this (non-existent) achievement gap increase, Alderman posited several possible reasons: Common Core state standards (CCSS), per-pupil spending, technology and social media. He said the timing for CCSS fit but did not explain why states where CCSS was never adopted had the same problem. For per-pupil spending, he claimed that more money was getting to classrooms, which defies education-spending reports, making his claim a little shady. For technology and social media, he said other countries with similar problems, did not see testing declines … a declaration made with no evidence cited.
If this decline were real, wouldn’t the privatization of public education be the most likely culprit? Charter schools came first followed by vouchers and more charter schools. Data clearly shows that vouchers harm student-testing performance. Furthermore both charter schools and voucher schools leech money from public education budgets.
He finally made his real point, “I argue that the weakening of school accountability pressures after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed is responsible for a large portion of the drop.” Those of us, who were in classrooms and witnessed the test-and-punish philosophy damage to public education, disagree. How many great public schools were labeled “failures and closed” because they existed in low income zip codes?…
Some billionaires see the non-sectarian nature of public education as a threat to their dreams of a Christian theocracy. Others are libertarians that oppose free universal public education, believing everyone should pay one’s own way and not steal people’s private properties using taxation. The Neoliberals are convinced that education should be run like a business and react to market forces.
Responding to the mission of The 74, Chad Aldeman’s series of articles, like those of many of his colleagues, are pure propaganda, shaping data to support his neoliberal ideology instead of honestly reporting facts. Unfortunately this kind of fake “journalism” is flooding email boxes and web pages throughout America every day.
Indiana has plunged headlong into privatization of its-once-beloved public schools.
Fortunately, there is a knowledgeable candidate for Governor who has promised to stop the destruction of public education.
Jennifer McCormick is a career educator who began as a special education teacher, then became a language arts teacher, a principal and a district superintendent.
She was elected Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2016; she ran as a Republican. She served out her four-year term and switched parties in 2021.
McCormick wrote on Twitter:
Indiana GOP’s school privatization efforts have diverted 1.6B of tax dollars away from public schools, and the majority of communities do not have families and/or private schools participating. As governor, I will champion for Indiana to pause funding school privatization.
At the NPE conference in D.C. in 2023, JenniferMcCormick and me.
Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld writes about what happens when charter schools go shopping for an authorizer. He tells the story of a charter school that has been dropped by a series of authorizers, but picked up by a new one each time. Why would a new authorizer step in to take responsibility for a charter school that has been dropped by others? I’m not sure about how it works in Indiana, but in most states the authorizer gets a set percentage—typically 3%— of state tuition for each student. That adds up to a lot of money.
Hinnefeld writes:
Trine University came to the rescue eight years ago when Thea Bowman Leadership Academy was in danger of losing its charter and being shut down.
Now Trine has revoked the Gary, Indiana, school’s charter, citing academic and governance issues. But another private institution, Calumet College of St. Joseph, has stepped up.
“It’s funny how things have come full circle,” said Lindsay Omlor, executive director of Education One, Trine’s charter-school-authorizing office.
Today’s topic is authorizer shopping, what happens when charter schools jump from one authorizer to another to stay open or find a better deal. Thea Bowman looks to be taking the practice to a new level. It now has its third authorizer in less than a decade.
Back in 2016, the school’s original authorizer, Ball State University, declined to renew its charter, citing management and fiscal issues. The school turned first to the Indiana Charter School Board, which said no. But it found a willing partner in Trine University.
Now Trine has decided it’s done with the school. Its Education One board voted in December to revoke Thea Bowman’s charter. But school officials, perhaps expecting trouble, had already approached Calumet College. The board of CCSJ Charter Authority, the Calumet authorizing entity, approved a new charter in January.
Under a 2015 law intended to discourage authorizer-shopping, the new charter had to be approved by the State Board of Education. That happened Wednesday.
Thea Bowman is an established school that once served over 1,200 students in grades K-12. It now enrolls 840: Over 90% are Black and 75% qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Its proficiency rates on ILEARN, Indiana’s math and English/language arts test, are well below state averages. A 2022-23 review by Education One found it met standards for fiscal matters and school climate but not for academic and organizational performance.
The state board vote followed a hearing at which the executive directors of Education One and CCSJ Charter presented their findings. Two young women, both committed to school choice, charter schools and their view of high-quality authorizing, described Thea Bowman Leadership Academy in starkly different terms.
CCSJ’s Carrie Hutton took issue with Trine’s conclusion that the school was deficient in academics. Its test scores are improving, she said, and they are as good as or better than those at nearby charter schools and the Gary Community Schools district. She said the college will work with school staff to improve curriculum and add internships and college credit opportunities for students.
Her strongest point may have been that the charter school and the college are part of the same northwestern Indiana urban community. Calumet is in Hammond, next door to Gary, while Trine is in Angola, a two-hour drive to the east.
“They are our neighbors, and their graduates are our co-workers and students in our college,” Hutton said.
But Education One’s Omlor said the school has failed to meet performance targets, and governance issues have persisted. “I can confidently say that the school board lacks the capacity to govern a high-quality school that meets our standards,” she said.
She said the school has a 40% teacher turnover rate, and half its teachers are not fully licensed. She also took aim at CCSJ Charter, saying the authority “made many missteps” and failed to communicate and share information.
Republicans have grown frustrated by their inability to get their views represented on college campuses, so they have grown more assertive in passing laws to ban ideas they don’t like (such as “critical race theory” or gender studies or diversity/equity/inclusion or “divisive concepts).
Indiana is imposing a different approach. Instead of banning what it does not like, the Legislature is requiring professors to teach different points of view.
A new law in Indiana requires professors in public universities to foster a culture of “intellectual diversity” or face disciplinary actions, including termination for even those with tenure, the latest in an effort by Republicans to assert more control over what is taught in classrooms.
The law connects the job status of faculty members, regardless of whether they are tenured, to whether, in the eyes of a university’s board of trustees, they promote “free inquiry” and “free expression.” State Senator Spencer Deery, who sponsored the bill, made clear in a statement that this would entail the inclusion of more conservative viewpoints on campus.
The backlash to the legislation, which Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed March 13, has been substantial. Hundreds wrote letters or testified at hearings, and faculty senates atmultiple institutions had urged the legislature to reject the bill, condemning it as government overreach and a blow to academic free speech.
“The whole point of tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, who described the law as “thought policing.”
Under the Indiana law, which goes into effect in July, university trustees may not grant tenure or a promotion to faculty members who are deemed “unlikely” to promote “intellectual diversity” or to expose students to works from a range of political views. Trustees also may withhold tenure or promotion from those who are found “likely” to bring unrelated political views into the courses they are teaching.
Faculty members who already have tenure would be subject to regular reviews to determine if they are meeting all of these criteria, and if the board concludes they are not, they could be demoted or fired. The law also requires colleges to set up a procedure for students or other employees to file complaints about faculty members considered to be falling short on these requirements.
Boards are not, under the law, allowed to penalize faculty for criticizing the institution or engaging in political activity outside of their teaching duties. The restrictions do not apply to private university faculty members.
Will professors of science be allowed to teach about climate change or evolution without giving equal time to “the other side?”
Will professors of American history be allowed to teach about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and institutional racism without introducing the Confederate point of view?
Guess what? Another massive scandal involving virtual charter schools. Not ho-hum because the money skimmed off is a lot: $44 million. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana said it was the biggest fraud case he had handled.
If you recall, the biggest virtual charter school fraud case ever happened in California, where the A3 charter chain skimmed off hundreds of millions of dollars. In Pennsylvania, Nick Trombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, was sent to prison in 2018 for 20 months for fraud. Steven Ingersoll, the optometrist who founded four virtual charter schools in Bay City, Michigan, received a prison sentence of 40 months. And who can forget Ohio’s ECOT Man (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow), who collected $1 billion from the state over 20 years, gave lots of campaign donations, but declared bankruptcy when the state auditor asked him to refund millions for phantom students?
We know all this. We know that students in virtual charter schools get low scores, have low graduation rates, collect generous public funding, but the money keeps flowing. Why?
New story: Indiana.
A federal grand jury returned indictments against the operators of two online charter schools in Indiana, the Indiana Virtual School (IVS) and the Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy (IVPA). The operators inflated their enrollments to collect state monies. Each defendant faces 10-20 years in federal prison for each count if convicted. The charges are conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The group received over $44 million from the state. Most of the students either never attended the schools or left but remained on the rolls.
INDIANAPOLIS — Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana released more information about a recent indictment brought forward in a multi-million dollar education-related fraud scheme.
According to the office, three men were officially indicted in relation to the scheme, including:
Tom Stoughton, 74, a Carmel resident who was indicted on 16 counts of wire fraud, 57 counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
Phillip Holden, 62, a Middletown resident who was indicted on 16 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
Percy Clark, 81, a Carmel resident and the former superintendent of Lawrence Township schools, who was indicted on 16 counts of wire fraud, 11 counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
In addition, officials said that 61-year-old Christopher King, a Green Fork resident, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
According to previous reports, officials allege that the individuals named in the indictment received more than $44 million in funding from the Indiana Department of Education to operate two online charter schools: the Indiana Virtual School and the Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy.
Officials said that IVPA was an offshoot of IVS that was created in 2017 so IVS could avoid losing its charter with Daleville Community Schools. This comes after IVS reportedly received an F grade from the Indiana Department of Education.
The individuals listed in the indictment reportedly used fraudulent enrollment reporting methods to receive funding from the state that they were not owed nor supposed to be eligible for.
Between 2016 through 2019, the defendants submitted false numbers for more than 4,500 students they knew were not attending either school in order to receive state tuition reimbursement.
”The members of the conspiracy falsely claimed thousands of students were enrolled even though those students were not attending classes or receiving services,” Zachary Myers, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, said.
The court documents state that the school did not unenroll students even if they were inactive, and reportedly pushed incomplete student applications through the enrollment process, both of which increased the enrollment numbers. This included students who had dropped out or those who never completed their application process, as well as students who never logged in for classes. It also included students who never knew they were reenrolled….
The two schools reportedly paid the state funds to fraudulent for-profit companies, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana claims. The companies were reportedly controlled and/or operated by Stoughton and the money was funneled through the companies to pay millions of dollars to Stoughton, Clark, King and others.
Myers said the defendants used the funds to purchase vehicles and boats, as well as pay for private school tuition.
Herbert Stapleton, a special agent in charge with the FBI in Indianapolis, said that the cooperation with other agencies, including the State Board of Accounts in Indiana, was integral in starting this investigation and uncovering the potential fraud.
Stapleton said that this case was “extremely complex,” including hundreds of thousands of records potentially relevant to the case that were analyzed and categorized. This included hundreds of interviews with fraudulently enrolled students and their parents, including an interview with parents whose student died but was still fraudulently enrolled at the school.
Today, we honor Dr. King by paying attention to the well-being of children and the protection of working people. He strongly believed in unions. When he was murdered in Memphis, he was there to support the Black men who were sanitation workers in their fight for a living wage and their demand for a union.
Since his death, powerful politicians have rolled back collective bargaining in many industries and have sought to eviscerate unions altogether. Now these same red states that ban unions are abandoning their child labor laws. These laws were passed over the last century to protect children, to limit the age at which they are allowed to work, to keep them in school so that they could be educated, to prevent them from working in hazardous industries.
Republicans in many red states are looking at children as a source of low-wage workers. Many industries need workers—especially since some states don’t want migrant workers—and they care whether they are 14 or 15.
Our regular readers Christine Langhoff wrote Cc this comment about Indiana, where employers are eager to hire child labor.
On Monday, the opening day of Indiana’s legislative session, Republican Rep. Joanna King filed a bill that would allow kids as young as 14 to effectively drop out of school following 8th grade and go to work full-time on a farm. If the teenager “has been excused from compulsory school attendance after completing grade 8” and obtains their parents’ permission, they can work up to 40 hours a week all year round, including during school hours.
One of the big under-covered stories of 2023 was the rolling back of child labor laws.
The major restrictions on child labor were part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and from there the states passed their own versions of protections for children. Many of these laws distinguish between agricultural labor and other sorts, in part so that junior could work on the family farm without getting Ma and Pa fined or arrested. But the idea was that maybe putting children in harm’s way or depriving them of the chance to get an education was a Bad Thing and maybe as a nation we should knock it off.
We didn’t get those laws easily. Lots of folks thought that child labor was double plus good. Opponents of the laws denied the existence of a problem, argued that work was good for the young ‘uns. “I am really tired of seeing so many big children ten years old playing in the streets,” was a real thing that a real “prominent lady citizen” said in opposition to child labor laws. And of course the ever-popular complaint– “How can we stay in business and remain profitable if you pass these rules?”
Camella Teoli went to work in a Lawrence, MA mill at the age of 11. Early on in her career, a machine used to twist cotton into thread caught her hair and ripped off part of her scalp. At the age of 14, she was standing in front of Congress in March 1912. The conditions in the mill were famously horrific; low wages and a life expectancy of 39.6 years, with one third of workers dying before age 25. If your workforce is going to die off in their twenties, of course you need to start them young.
Teoli was in front of Congress in March because in January, a new law had reduced the legal hours for women and children from 56 to 54 per week. The pissed off mill owners responded by speeding up the machines; so harder work, less pay. That kicked off the Great Lawrence Textile Strike, in which adults and children walked off the job.
The strike got ugly. Workers sent their children out of town, both for safety and as a publicity move, and the city officials decided to counter the bad publicity by deploying police and soldiers at the railroad station to keep children from getting in trains out of town, ultimately physically attacking the group of children. And Congress called a hearing, and Camella Teori, a 14 year old Italian immigrant testifying before First Lady Helen Taft, who invited Camella and other child laborers to lunch at the White House and contributed to the strike fund. Teoli became a national sensation, the face of our labor problem.
Massachusetts passed some child labor laws that were aimed not so much at the inhumane conditions of the work, but at the fact that child workers were being deprived of any chance for education. But the states (particularly the southern ones) dragged their feet hard, because for a huge part of US history, lots of people have been okay–even more than okay–with child labor, as long as it’s Those People’s Children.
Teoli went back to work in the mill. She was never promoted. She never told her own children about her role in labor history, even as her daughter had learned to help her arrange her hair to cover a large bald spot.
So here we are again
My point? The desire to use young bodies as part of the industrial machinery of our country is not particularly new, nor has it always been obvious that children should not be required to work in dangerous conditions or to the detriment of their own education.
In 2023, around a dozen states rolled their child labor protections back.
Some, like Arkansas, teamed up the gutting of child labor protections with laws set to kneecap public schools. Iowa removed protections that kept young workers out of more physically dangerous jobs while expanding the hours they could be asked to work. Missouri similarly shotfor increasing working hours for teens. Minnesota said yes to teens working in heavy construction.
Many off these rollbacks have especially troubling features. Arkansas removed the requirement for age verification. Many of the states have eliminated the requirement for a work permit. The work permit is dismissed as a piece of troublesome paperwork, but it is also the checkpoint at which the school or some other responsible adult can say, “I’m not sure this is such a great idea for this particular teen.”
In some cases like Arkansas, the permits had a requirement for parents to sign off, but now Arkansas doesn’t care to give parents a voice in this particular decision. Ohio’s Senator Bill Reineke expressed a similar concern over child labor, arguing that kids who really want to work shouldn’t be hampered because “they can’t get their parents to cooperate with them.” Parents–they only matter sometimes.
Please open the link and finish the rest of this excellent article.
Federal law bars anyone under 18 from roofing because it’s so dangerous. But across the U.S., migrant children do this work anyway.
They call themselves “ruferitos” on social media. In videos like these, they talk about being underage and pose on rooftops and ladders, often without the required safety gear.
One slip could be fatal.
The New York Times spoke with more than 100 child roofers in nearly two dozen states, including some who began at elementary-school age. They wake before dawn to be driven to distant job sites, sometimes crossing state lines. They carry heavy bundles of shingles that leave their arms shaking. They work through heat waves on black-tar rooftops that scorch their hands.
The rise of child roofers comes as young people are crossing the southern border alone in record numbers. Nearly 400,000 children have come to the United States since 2021 without their parents, and a majority have ended up working, The New York Times has reported in a series of articles this year.
The most common job for these children is under-the-table work in roofing and construction, according to teachers, social workers, labor organizers and federal investigators. Roofing is plentiful and pays better than many of the other jobs these children can get.
In New Orleans, Juan Nasario said he had been replacing roofs during 12-hour shifts nearly every day since he arrived from Guatemala four years ago, when he was 10. He would like to go to school or at least join a soccer team, but he needs to pay rent to his older cousin.
In Dallas, Diego Osbaldo Hernández started roofing at 15, after coming to the United States from Mexico last year to live with an older friend…
Children working on construction sites are six times as likely to be killed as minors doing other work, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Roofing is particularly risky; it is the most dangerous job for minors other than agricultural work, studies show.
Labor organizers and social workers say they are seeing more migrant children suffer serious injuries on roofing crews in recent years.
A 16-year-old fell off a roof in Arkansas and shattered his back. A 15-year-old in Florida was burned all over after he slipped from a roof and onto a vat of hot tar. A child in Illinois stepped through a skylight and fractured his spine….
Juan Ortiz, 15, was installing metal roofing at a plant in Alabama in 2019 when this patch of insulation gave way and he fell onto a concrete floor.
After his death, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that the employer had “nine laborers on the crew, but only six harnesses.”
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.
Indiana’s Republican-controlled General Assembly decreed this year in House Enrolled Act 1447 that every public school board and charter school governing body must establish a procedure for the parent of any student, or any person residing in the school district, to request the removal of library materials deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors.”
The procedure may provide for an intermediate response by school personnel to a request to remove a library book, but it must include the school board reviewing, and possibly implementing, each removal request at its next public meeting.
The new law followed claims by Hoosier Republicans that Indiana school libraries are secretly loaded with books containing pornography and other content inappropriate for children.
Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville received a 5-year extension to its operating charter recently. Well, not that recently. It happened in December 2022. Ellettsville and Monroe County residents may have missed it, though, because the extension was approved nearly 200 miles away.
It was approved by the three-member board of Grace Charters LLC, a nonprofit formed by Grace College and Theological Seminary to authorize charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated. The board met on the Grace College campus in Winona Lake, Indiana.
To meet legal requirements for public meetings, a notice was published in the local newspaper: the Warsaw Times-Union, which probably no one in Monroe County reads. One member of the public attended, according to minutes of the meeting: Seven Oaks headmaster Stephen Shipp.
The situation highlights the tension between public and private in Indiana charter schools. The Seven Oaks website says charter schools are “tuition-free, open-enrollment public schools.” But the school’s authorizer, which sets the terms of its operation and is supposed to hold it accountable, is a private, Christian college with no connection to the community where the school operates.
Seven Oaks is part of a network of charter schools aligned with Hillsdale College, a conservative and politically active private college in Michigan. The Hillsdale charter initiative once cast itself as part of a “war” to reclaim America from “100 years of progressivism” in education. Its president, Larry Arnn, led Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission and its promotion of “patriotic history.”
Grace College has also granted a charter to Valor Classical Academy, a Hillsdale-affiliated school that has stalled in its attempts to open in Hamilton or Marion County.
Along with the Hillsdale affiliation, there are other factors that distinguish Seven Oaks from public schools: for example, its demographic profile. Out of more than 500 students, one is Black and nine are Hispanic, according to state data. Fewer than 20% of students would qualify for free or reduced-price meals if they were provided. (The school doesn’t provide transportation or school lunches).
This chart shows the percentage of students who are Black, Hispanic and eligible for free or reduced-price meals in Monroe County public school districts (Monroe County and Richland-Bean Blossom community school corporations) and charter schools (Bloomington Project School and Seven Oaks Classical School).
The 24-page Seven Oaks charter extension reads like a standard agreement, with boilerplate language from state law and recommended practices for authorizing. It spells out the duties of each party, the expectations for the school, and the legal remedies if something goes wrong. An attached accountability plan includes out-of-date references to state assessments and, I’m told, is being revised.
The agreement says Grace College gets to keep 2.5% of the school’s state funding as an authorizer fee. That’s less than the 3% maximum that Indiana allows. In 2023-24, the college will net about $93,000.
Grace initially approved a charter for Seven Oaks in 2016 in one of Indiana’s first examples of what’s called authorizer shopping. The school’s founders applied to the Indiana Charter School Board, but it rejected their application. They reapplied but withdrew after a negative recommendation from the board’s staff. Then they took their plan to Grace College, which said yes to a 7-year charter.
At that time, private colleges could authorize charter schools in closed-door meetings with no public notice. Since 2017, they’ve had to use nonprofit authorizing agencies, such as Grace College’s Grace Charters LLC, that are subject to open-meetings and public-records laws. Even so, it can be hard to keep up. I started asking by email about the Seven Oaks charter extension in March; it took until late May to get copies of the December 2022 board minutes and the school’s extended charter agreement.
Transparency is one issue of having distant authorizers for charter schools, but there are others. The National Association Charter School Authorizers cautions against throwing the door wide open for higher education institutions, or HEIs, to authorize schools, as Indiana has done since 2011.
Diane Ravitch's blog 