Rejected ‘high-performing’ charter schools take cases to Florida state board

A network of schools affiliated with one of Florida’s largest charter school management companies is set to square off with two Treasure Coast school districts in a series of appeals before the state Board of Education.

The cases, set to be heard during the board’s Thursday meeting in Tallahassee, center on an issue that has already landed in two state appellate courts and underscored one of the core tensions between Florida’s school boards and its largest charter school networks.

What power do local school boards put the kibosh on high-performing schools that want to expand into new territory?

If charters with good track records and high academic ratings want to “substantially” replicate their operations in other places, Florida law helps clear the path. School districts that reject high-performing charter replications have the burden of proving the charters don’t meet requirements in state law.

But what, exactly, it means to “substantially” replicate a high-performing charter school has been the subject of multiple legal battles, and is the crux of three cases involving proposed Somerset Academy charter schools.

The Somerset network is affiliated with the charter school giant Academica. This fall, despite pleas from parents and some high-profile backing, school boards in Indian River and St. Lucie Counties rebuffed its attempts to replicate some of its existing schools.

When the Broward County-based Somerset Academy Chapel Trail Middle School applied this fall to replicate its middle school program, the St. Lucie School Board rejected it unanimously.

In legal documents, the school district cites a passage from the proposed school’s application: “The one central thread is that each and every Somerset school is unique and different. Each school serves a different population and demographic, and has students with different needs.” If that’s true, the district contends, Somerset can’t be applying to “substantially” replicate its Broward-based program.

The district goes on to argue there is little overlap between the existing school in Broward and the proposed one in St. Lucie. The proposed school would have different administrators and adapt its curriculum and student progression plan on the local district’s programs. While the new school may share the same management company and governing nonprofit, the district notes a state appeals court has already ruled those factors on their own are not sufficient. The Indian River County School Board makes similar arguments for two Somerset schools it rejected.

Somerset argues that it plans a “direct replication” of its existing model — which already spans more than 40 schools, most of them in Florida, where collectively they would form an A-rated school district. The network says it wants to tailor its schools to the communities where they’ll be based, while keeping “school design and management practices” consistent throughout its network.

“There is no ‘on size fits all’ prescription of replication as [the school district] suggests,” the schools argue in one of their Indian River appeals. They add: “All Somerset schools share a common philosophy of student expectations, code of excellence, an expectation of parental commitment, and collaborative management infrastructure derived from its first school, Somerset Neighborhood.”

Because the school boards have to show, by “clear and convincing” evidence, that the high-performing charters don’t meet the law’s requirements, the schools may have an upper hand in tomorrow’s hearing. But in 2013 and 2014, two state appellate court rulings sided with school boards that rejected high-performing charters, and concluded there were “deficiencies” in the state’s appeals process.

The cases will be worth watching. Details on the state board’s meeting can be found here.


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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.