Baker A. Mitchell

The early 1990’s saw the beginning of charter schools that were intended to innovate and address unique local needs in the K-12 schools.  Charter schools were allowed to operate without the many stifling regulations  imposed on traditional schools by the bureaucratic hierarchy.  Charter schools are contracted to initially operate for 3 to 5 years by “authorizers” which may be state education boards, universities, or local agencies. They are then subject to being renewed for 5-to 10-year periods or to being shut down for non-performance as may be dictated by the terms of the contract (charter).

The basic idea was to have lean, efficient schools free of much of the burdensome regulatory bureaucracy that may have been hampering success in traditional school.

By the late 1990’s, the National Association of Charter Authorizers (NACSA) was organized to promulgate uniform standards and procedures across all charter authorizers nationwide. Promoting the idea of “quality charter schools through quality authorizers,” many state and local authorizers felt obliged to join NACSA – after all, who can be opposed to “quality.”

As declared by NACSA on their web site, “The work of authorizing – creating new schools, allowing them to innovate, and holding them accountable – is considered some of the smartest school improvement work being done in the country today.” Note that the focus is on the authorizer, not on the schools, themselves.

BY 2008 there were 825 authorizing organizations: state boards, county school districts, counties, cities, universities, and non-profits that were authorized to authorize. Nearly seven-hundred had four or fewer schools, but nearly a hundred had ten or more schools that they had authorized and for which they were responsible for overseeing.

By setting the gate-keeping standards for which applications would be accepted and which would be rejected, NACSA had begun to wield substantial clout over the structure of charter schools nationwide. An authorizer who is a member of NACSA subscribes to the following standard for being a Quality Authorizer: “Grants charters only to applicants that have met the established criteria.”

NACSA evolved “quality” standards that “suggest” to authorizers how a charter board should relate to the school’s leader and what powers the school’s board should or should not delegate to the school leader. A quality application should thus be judged by the authorizer on how tightly the board will control the school leader and upon how much data they would review in overseeing the leader’s operation of the school. Other standards dictated how frequently the board would report voluminous financial and academic data up to the school’s authorizer.

For example in 2009, the application for  Louisiana charter schools were judged by NACSA (to whom the Louisiana Board of Education subcontracted the selection and evaluation process) on how well the applicant “Meets the Standard,” “Approaches the Standard,” or “Does not Meet the Standard” on 64 separate criteria covering areas such as “Education, Philosophy, Curriculum, Instruction, Governance, Leadership, Management, Financial Plan, Facilities, and Contract Compliance” to name a few. (Notably absent is attention to the past national accomplishments of the applicant’s educational service provider.)

In order to get a charter in Louisiana as in numerous other places, the applicant must fit within the narrow mold of NACSA criteria.
The alert parent may well ask this question of NACSA: “Upon what data do you base your assertion that applicants meeting your criteria will establish better schools than other applicants who may not meet your particular ideal “Standards” for “Education, … , Compliance?”

As if in response to this question, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University reported that only 17% of all charter schools show significantly better test scores than traditional schools. Fully 37% were worse than traditional schools, while 46% were approximately the same as discussed in their June, 2009 report.

Concurrently with the public release of the CREDO (2) findings at the National Charter School Conference in Washington, NACSA along with the Minnesota Department of Education proposed (3) another layer of control with a new national group to actually oversee authorizers who oversee the charter boards who oversee the school leaders. This new group, charged with overseeing the authorizers, is to compile outcomes that are desired by the schools’ stakeholders and thus be subject to oversight by this national group.

And in NACSA’s view, who were the stakeholders listed during their presentation (4) in Washington? The authorizers, of course; the state boards of education; the state and county governments; community groups and non-profits, federal, state, and local taxpayers; the teachers; and the school leaders. Noticeably absent from the NACSA list of charter school stakeholders were the students and parents!

The environment for lean, efficient charter schools trying a diversity of ideas has now evolved into a structure that is even more top-heavy than the traditional schools.

Perhaps we should hit the RESET button and consider the original purpose for introducing charter schools – through a diversity of methods and ideas, free of regulatory burden, many varied local groups could start schools to address local problems – the one-size-fits-all model was to be circumvented.

After nearly 20 years we now have 4,600 charter schools in 40 states serving over 1.4 million students. The majority of these schools may have been authorized as meeting national criteria set by NACSA. Many of these schools had to squeeze through the 64-standard keyhole of NACSA’s criteria. The application and selection process has weeded out groups which do not fit the NACSA mold. The CREDO report says that only 17% are better academically than their traditional counterparts. While not all of the faltering 83% were blessed by a NACSA-authorized process, we must conclude that many if not most made it through their screening.

In conclusion, perhaps we should look at the relative success or failure of other exhaustive selection processes when compared with the natural selection process of the free market. For example, consider the selection processes in professional sports. To determine NFL draft picks, years of data on past performances are studied for months by experts. And how many first round draft picks eventually turn out to be franchise-level players? Very, very few.

And the huge investments made by experienced money fund managers in evaluating and picking stocks results in no better portfolio performance on average than those using simple index averages.

Even an experienced venture capitalist investing in start-up companies does not expect to hit on more than 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 of his best picks out of the hundreds of voluminous proposals he will review.  Predicting the success of innovations is a huge crap-shoot even for experts.

No fund manager, pro scout, venture investor, or charter authorizer has a crystal ball and can predict the performance of a stock, a player, start-up, or a school board unless there exists a track record of success in the endeavor of interest.

The question is, “Does a parent have the liberty of making a real choice for their charter school or is their choice only an illusion?” Charter schools popped out from a NACSA mold are not choices at all nor are their successes in any way assured.

In the 1920’s Henry Ford said that his customers could have any color car they wanted, so long as it was black! Now NACSA is effectively saying to parents they can have any type of charter school they want so long as it matches the NACSA brand.

And when caution trumps courage, kids lose.
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1. 9th Annual Charter School Conference, Washington, DC, June, 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Keynote Address.
2. http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
3. IBID, Session 206 “Who’s Overseeing the Overseers? New Demands for Authorizer Accountability”
4. IBID, Session 140B “How to Speak Authorizer: Communicating Evidence of Success”