Lowering the paperwork barrier for charter schools

A recent report by the American Enterprise Institute, which we highlighted here, argued burdensome charter school applications were creating needless barriers for new schools.

Critics, including some charter school authorizers, pushed back, saying the report went too far, and that its recommendations would weaken charter school oversight.

Since then, Mike McShane, one of the lead authors of the report, has answered his critics.

Districts and other charter school authorizers might want to know about proposed charter schools’ marketing plans, to get a sense of whether it will attract enough students to become financially viable, he writes. But will a charter school’s answer to that question really help regulators predict its success?

Much better resourced organizations can’t get market analysis right. Don’t believe me? Well head to your local 7-11 and try to pick up a Crystal Pepsi, a Pepsi Blue, a Sprite Remix, a Dr. Pepper Red Fusion, a Citra, a Vault, a Surge, a 7-Up Gold, or a Coca-Cola Blak. And that is just the market for carbonated soda. If you think a charter board can do better with something as complicated as demand for schooling options, I’ve got some oceanfront land in Missouri to sell you.

In other words, he is arguing for regulatory humility. If a line of questioning on a charter application has little chance of predicting a school’s success, but a great chance of stopping potentially great schools from opening, that should give regulators pause.

It’s worth reading his whole post, as well as the response from Greg Richmond of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

The issue that lurks in the background of this debate is whether regulations aimed at stopping bad schools are constraining the supply of good ones. There are very few places where the supply of new charter schools has grown enough to meet the demand of parents who fill waiting lists all over the country.

What’s more, there is likely another waiting list that’s harder to track: The list of educators yearning to start their own school, and realize their visions for how education should work, who are stymied from doing so by unnecessary red tape.


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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.