Florida charter school advocates: Focus on quality, stop bad schools

Florida’s charter school movement needs to turn its attention to quality, and its prognosis could turn grim if bad schools aren’t stopped.

That was the case laid out by some of the state’s leading charter school advocates at the start of a three-day conference in Orlando.

Some of the strongest warnings came from Jim Horne, a former state Senator and education commissioner who now lobbies for several charter school organizations.

“I would challenge you that we will have to double down on quality, or else we will start to decline,” he said.

He was joined in a panel discussion by other leaders of the state’s charter movement. Several said they agreed with his diagnosis, and some called for stronger steps to stop unqualified schools from opening in the first place.

With charters in Florida approaching 650 schools and poised to surpass 10 percent of public school enrollment, Horne said the onus is on charters to figure out how to police their own. A handful of closures in one district can explode into a larger controversy, prompting charter school opponents to call for more regulation, threatening to roll back the original bargain behind the charter school concept.

“We weren’t supposed to look like, act like, and behave like district-managed schools,” Horne said, drawing some of the loudest applause from the audience of charter school educators and supporters. “We were supposed to have freedom … but in return for that freedom, we had to perform at a higher level.”

For nearly a decade after Florida first allowed charter schools in 1996, students were moving to the state faster than new schools could be built. Charters helped absorb the rampant growth. But the economics have shifted since the real estate bubble burst and growth leveled, and so have the politics. Some districts are seeing their enrollment flatten while students flock to charters, bringing state funding with them, and threatening the potential for peaceful coexistence.

“Charter schools have fast moved beyond this pilot, experimental stage,” Horne said. “We’re in what I would call that teenage, acne stage, where there’s high drama and there’s even some level of awkwardness. We have got to begin to grow out of that.”

He’s not the only one making similar observations about charters, and school choice more broadly. Some of Florida’s top lawmakers have also noted that the state’s charter sector is becoming more mature. Charters may outperform district schools by some measures, or get more bang for the buck, but Horne said that in the era of maturity, that’s “not enough.”

“We must focus on quality over growth,” he said. “This past legislative and election year have taught us one thing — that people care about choice, and choice inherently is a very, very, good and powerful thing. But just to grow, for the sake of growing, I think we’re missing the boat.”

Another member of the panel, Jeffrey Wood, a charter school attorney from Fort Lauderdale, said he’s seen a series of negative local headlines about shuttered charter schools.

“A lot of that has to do with picking the right schools that are allowed to open,” he said. “A lot of that has to do with the handcuffs, I believe, that are on the authorizers and their ability to deal with applications.”

Tim Kitts, the leader of Bay Haven Charter Academy who moderated the discussion, said he supports giving districts more authority police potential charters by, for example, requiring them to find a facility well before the start of the school year.

“We should not be tossing our children to the wind,” he said. “They should know where they’re going, and they’re going to a stable, well-organized, well-oiled situation before we put them into a charter school, or any school. We should know that it’s got a track record toward success, and not a track record toward failure.”

Horne said districts could stave off some of the worst problems – like South Florida schools that shut down a month after the school year begins – by “simply doing their job,” and scrutinizing would-be charter operators during the application phase. There are signs that’s starting to happen.

Adam Miller, who oversees school choice for the state Department of Education, said his office is working to help school districts improve their oversight, but district charter school offices are often starved for resources — something the state should look for ways to address.

“If you don’t have good authorizing, you’re not going to have a good charter movement,” he said.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.

One Comment

Parent and Teacher

Just wait until the results from the first round of Common Core tests come out. Most charters will crash and burn. That’s also why the low SES voucher schools don’t want common core. They won’t be able to handle the disastrous results. That’s one of the dirty little secrets about testing you people don’t want out.

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