Proposal to revoke Decile 1 charter schools
At its bimonthly meeting today and tomorrow, the State Board of Education will consider new regulations enabling it to shut down poorly performing charter schools.
Under pressure to weed out bad charters, the board has been looking various proposals for months. The latest proposal would be the simplest and clearest: Charter schools whose state API scores the previous year ranked in the bottom 10 percent and that fell in the bottom 20 percent in the similar schools ranking would automatically have their charter at least reviewed, if not yanked, by the State Board.
The board would have the option of revoking the charter or demanding strong corrective actions. Affected charters could make the case at a hearing why they shouldn’t be shut down. The superintendent of public instruction could also recommend closing charters that don’t fall in the lowest decile but are poor performers.
The superintendent and the State Board have had the authority to revoke charters under state statute but haven’t. However, the State Board has regularly voted not to extend charters that were up for a 5-year renewal.
There may be a few extenuating circumstances, such as alternative schools dealing with truants and dropouts, but otherwise it’s hard to justify keeping open a Decile 1 charter – even when surrounded by other Decile 1 district schools. The California Charter School Association acknowledges as much. However, the association argues that revocation shouldn’t be based on a single year’s test scores. It also argues that the year-long wait for API similar schools rankings is too long a lag time.
At the same time, Ben Austin, a State Board member and long-time charter advocate, said he considers the proposed regulations as not strong enough. “I view it as a first step,” he told me.
Estimates are that between a dozen and three dozen charter schools – less than 5 percent of the 700-plus charer schools in the state – would be affected by the proposed regulation. The regulation would apply only to charter schools that have been open five years.
Now, if we can just get the State Board to force dramatic improvement in the traditional schools that fall in the bottom 10% of API scores and the bottom 20% of similar schools rankings. While I’m all for more charter school accountability, I don’t think it is fair to allow traditional public schools a free ride.
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How do you force dramatic improvement in a school? The charter school way would be to kick out the challenged students who are the lowest performers (or, really, never to serve them), and that will indeed force dramatic improvement. But unless we don’t allow those students to attend school at all, a school where they make up a critical mass of students will be in the bottom decile. Claiming that public schools serving the most challenged students are getting a “free ride” is unclear on the concept, to put it kindly. If we knew how to force dramatic improvement in a school, this entire discussion — and the entire set of misguided, destructive, tragically mistaken policies incorporated in Race to the Top — wouldn’t be happening.
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I would be happy to see any accountability come to publicly-funded schools in the lowest decile — or in the bottom half for that matter. There is much fearful talk of accountability among educators and policy-makers, but there is very little evidence of it. Incompetent administrators, ineffective teachers, unproven pedagogy — it just continues, regardless of the outcomes, regardless of the funding. It is so comical to read about pressure on charters for “accountability”. Most people in the regular public education system literally have no idea what the word means. I see this even in our “high performing” schools. Why should we expect accountability from a virtual monopoly? Without choice there is no accountability. Generally speaking, monopoly and accountability cannot co-exist.
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